ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 22, 1996 TAG: 9603220068
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BOWLING GREEN (AP)
SOURCE: KIM DOUGLASS THE (FREDERICKSBURG) FREE LANCE-STAR
IN 1958, A WHITE MAN and his black wife were exiled from the commonwealth of Virginia, until the Supreme Court overturned the 263-year-old law that forbade their union.
Caroline County has been both kind and cruel to Mildred Loving.
Her story is familiar to her neighbors: How she fell in love with her childhood friend and then married him, despite the fact that he was white and she is black. How they settled into a quiet life in the pine-covered hills of Central Point, just west of the Essex County line, where for the most part the race question was handled with easygoing tolerance. And then, how they were thrust into the national spotlight when a law that made their marriage a felony caught the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court and led to a historic ruling in 1967.
Reporters from around the country called to interview and snap photographs of the couple and their three children; Life magazine featured them in a four-page spread in 1966.
But that was 30 years ago. Lately, things have been quiet for the family; Richard Loving, a construction worker who loved racing cars, was killed in a car accident in 1975, and Mildred Loving, 56, who lives next door to the house where her husband grew up, doesn't grant interviews anymore. She's tired of talking about it, she said.
Enter Hollywood. Producers from Showtime, the cable movie channel, caught wind of the Lovings' story and decided to produce a movie about it, which airs March 31. The Lovings' attorney, Bernard S. Cohen, helped persuade Loving to agree to the project.
Actor Timothy Hutton helped produce the film. He also stars in it, playing Richard Loving. Lela Rochon of ``Waiting to Exhale'' fame plays Mildred Loving. The film's screenwriter and director is Richard Friedenberg, who also wrote the screenplay for the film ``A River Runs Through It.'' He pieced the plot together from interviews - including many from a weeklong stay in Caroline County - and court transcripts.
``I was attracted to the story of the two people,'' Friedenberg said. ``While the legal part is fascinating, the story that appealed to me was of these innocent, protected people who simply fell in love.'' Friedenberg calls it ``an important film about the best in America and the worst in America.''
Just six weeks after the Lovings' wedding in the summer of 1958, Sheriff Garnett Brooks and his deputies, whose faces were shadowed behind the blinding glare of their flashlights, dragged the Lovings from their bed at 2 a.m. ``Who's that woman you're sleeping with, son?'' the character playing Brooks in the movie asks.
``I'm his wife,'' Mildred Loving's character answers. ``Not here you ain't,'' the sheriff says. The couple had violated Virginia's 263-year-old anti-miscegenation law, which prohibited marriages between people of different races.
Caroline Circuit Judge Leon Bazile sentenced the Lovings to one year in jail, but suspended the sentence for 25 years provided they leave the state and not return together during that time.
``Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,'' Bazile told them from the bench. ``And but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.''
The Lovings fled to Washington, D.C., where they had their three children and tried to make ends meet in the city's slums.
Encouraged by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Mildred Loving wrote Attorney General Robert Kennedy, asking if the bill would help them return to Caroline. Kennedy responded that it would not, but referred them to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Virginia lawyers Cohen and Philip Hirschkop agreed to take the case, which made its way to the Supreme Court and led to the abolishment of similar laws in states across the country.
Despite the hardships they had faced there, the Lovings came back to Caroline. The same county that turned the Lovings away is the county where they had felt comfortable enough to fall in love. Their friends and family were there. They belonged there.
Showtime interviewed Mildred Loving on camera after she was given a chance to see the film. When asked whether she liked it, she paused for more than a dozen seconds, then said, ``It was a nice movie.''
She told her interviewer that she is sure her husband would have approved of the movie. She was most touched by the scene where Cohen makes his case before the Supreme Court. ``It really stirred my emotions, because it was true,'' she said.
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP/File. In this 1992 photo, Mildred Loving smilesby CNBfondly as she shows off a picture of herself and her late husband,
Richard.