Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2018
Abstract
The Loving Story (Augusta Films 2011), directed by Nancy Buirski, tells the backstory of the groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, that overturned state laws barring interracial marriage. The article looks to the documentary to explain why the Lovings should be considered icons of racial and ethnic civil rights, however much they might be associated with marriage equality today. The film shows the Lovings to be ordinary people who took their nearly decade long struggle against white supremacy to the nation’s highest court out of a genuine commitment to each other and a determination to live in the place they considered home; to be members of a multiracial community that both supported and undermined them; and to be citizens of a state that went to extraordinary lengths, because of their races, to keep them from living in Virginia and raising their children there.
Keywords
Constitutional law, equal protection clause, discrimination, legal history, interracial marriage, intermarriage, miscegenation, fourteenth amendment, privileges and immunities, racial endogamy, racism, state and local government law, sexuality and the law, law and society, Loving v. Virginia
Publication Title
Fordham Law Review
Repository Citation
Austin, Regina, "The Loving Story: Using a Documentary to Reconsider the Status of an Iconic Interracial Married Couple" (2018). All Faculty Scholarship. 2013.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/2013
Included in
African American Studies Commons, Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, Family Law Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Law and Race Commons, Law and Society Commons, Legal History Commons, Policy History, Theory, and Methods Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons, Social History Commons, Social Policy Commons, United States History Commons, Visual Studies Commons
Publication Citation
86 Fordham L. Rev. 2635 (2018).