After returning to their home state of Virginia, the Lovings were arrested for breaking the state’s anti-miscegenation laws but were told the one-year prison sentence given to them would be dropped if they left Virginia and did not return as a couple for 25 years.
Always an obedient girl, Ramona rebels for the first time when she chooses to marry Alessandro.
She tells Señora Moreno that forbidding her to marry him is useless. While it’s certainly not wise to allow narrow-minded family members to dictate your love life, ask yourself if you’re willing to be disowned, disinherited or otherwise mistreated to pursue an interracial relationship.
When slavery of blacks became institutionalized in the U.
S., however, anti-miscegenation laws surfaced in various states that barred such unions, thereby stigmatizing them.
“In 1967, when my parents break all the rules and marry against laws that say they can’t, they say that an individual should not be bound to the wishes of their family, race, state, or country.
They say that love is the tie that binds, and not blood.” When civil rights activists married, they not only challenged laws but sometimes their own families.for white people were part of another world, distant strangers who ruled our lives and were better left alone,” Cassie thinks.“When they entered our lives, they were to be treated courteously, but with aloofness, and sent away as quickly as possible.In addition to calling marriage a basic civil right, the Court stated, “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.” During the height of the civil rights movement, not only did laws change regarding interracial marriage but public views did as well.That the public was slowly embracing interracial unions is evidenced by the theatrical release of a 1967 film based entirely on an imminent interracial marriage, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?Besides, for a black man to even look at a white woman was dangerous.” This was no understatement, as the case of Emmett Till proves.