Loving by Selected Accolades:
| 2017 Producers Guild of America Award | Stanley Kramer Award |
| 2017 African American Film Critics Association | Best Actress (Ruth Negga) |
This landmark volume chronicles the history of laws banning interracial marriage in the United States with particular emphasis on the case of Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and a black woman who were convicted by the state of Virginia for the crime of marrying across racial lines in the late 1950s.
On p. S957 of the February 8, 2017 Congressional Record (PDF), Senator Tim Kaine indicates Mildred Loving wrote this letter to Bernie Cohen, a Washington, D.C. attorney, at the urging of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy Sr. It is not known whether Mildred's initial letter to Kennedy or his response to Ms. Loving have survived.
In this fascinating cultural history of interracial marriage and its legal regulation in the United States, Fay Botham argues that religion--specifically, Protestant and Catholic beliefs about marriage and race--had a significant effect on legal decisions concerning miscegenation and marriage in the century following the Civil War.
Gilliam focuses on the early-twentieth century movement toward eugenics, improving the human race through selective breeding, most especially the sterilization of persons with so-called genetic defects and an effort to eliminate miscegenation. It was the effort to stop racial amalgamation by Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker, director of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics, that led to the 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Act.
Romano has written a thorough and fascinating study of the US's legendary obsession with interracial marriage and sex. In 1940, 31 states had laws banning interracial marriage. Not until 1967, in the case of Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, did the Supreme Court invalidate the laws against interracial marriage that still remained in 16 states.
