glamour.com 141

LOVINGS: GREY VILLET PHOTOGRAPHY

The Loving Legacy

Jailed for the crime of getting married, Richard and Mildred Loving fought

back—and, in 1967, won interracial couples the right to wed. Fifty years later, as their

story hits theaters, reporter Abby Haglage asks women about life then and now.

Ta l k

Edited by Emily Mahaney

Brave Hearts

Richard and

Mildred Loving put

an end to hateful

miscegenation laws.

On July 13, 1958, in the middle of the night, police raided the bed-

room of newlyweds Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man

and a black woman, and arrested them for violating the Vir-

ginia law that said two people of different races couldn’t marry.

(Twenty-three other states had similar bans.) The Lovings were

jailed brief ly, then banished from Virginia for 25 years. The new

drama Loving captures their crusade to return home, a fight that

triggered the landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision legalizing

interracial marriage nationwide.

Much has changed for black-white couples: 87 percent of

Americans now approve of their unions—up from only 4 percent

in 1958. But hate still exists: This summer a white supremacist

stabbed a black man and a white woman in Washington State

after he saw them kissing. So what’s the real state of love and race?

Glamour spoke with eight women whose marriages mirror the

Lovings about life over the last half-century. Spoiler: #lovewins.

THE 1960S

“My parents said the only way they would give me

my daughter back was if I left my husband.”

In the early sixties, roughly half of all states legally classified

marriage between whites and blacks as a felony. Interracial

couples who married were arrested, insulted, and harassed.

GAIL TILLMON, 80, is white; she married her ex-husband, Smiley,

wh o i s bl a c k , in 1960: Interracial marriage was illegal in Florida,

so Smiley and I had to go to the Bahamas to marry. I entrusted

my two-year-old daughter from a previous marriage with a ➻