Loving (2016)

The Loving family, 1967.

I have a friend in Russia who wrote to me when Obama was elected. She was completely baffled why people were so excited about it. And she was right---he was just another right-wing Democrat a la Clinton or Biden. I wrote back that I agreed with her, but, among other things, that when Obama was born, his parents could not legally marry or live in 16 states where inter-racial marriage was a crime and that his election was seen as a triumph over racism.

Loving is about the couple in Loving vs. Virginia, the case which ended anti-misegenation laws in the U.S.

Virginia cops came bursting into their home in the middle of the night. They wanted to catch them having sex because interracial sex was an even more serious crime than interracial marriage. They had gone to the District of Columbia to get married and returned to Virginia. This was a crime.

They pled guilty and were ordered to immediately leave Virginia and not come back together for 25 years. They could come back one at a time.

It's still amazing how backward the south was.

Some years later, the ACLU took their case. They had to return to Virginia and face re-arrest and years in prison to appeal their conviction. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned their conviction unanimously.

According to Wikipedia, Alabama continued to enforce its anti-misegenation laws until 1970.

The movie was probably more true-to-life and thus a bit unstructured. The characters didn't have a single-minded goal like they have in most movie.

There's often a portrayal of Civil Rights actions as spontaneous, not the result of careful planning and strategizing. Rosa Parks is often presented as having just been especially tired the day she refused to give up her seat on the bus. There are people who see deliberate challenges to racist laws as somehow insincere. I've seen ostensibly liberal whites outraged over acts of political symbolism. But here it was a case where a couple got married with no thought of it as a political act.

Available on Netflix