“Loving v. Virginia (1976)”

To celebrate Valentine’s Day, here is an article reminding us of the landmark Loving v. Virginia (1967) case that legalized interracial marriage. 

Taken from: http://www.facinghistory.org/eugenics-race-marriage

In challenging students to choose a mate carefully, the author of The New Civic Biology (Reading 1) implied that it was an individual choice. And for some individuals like the young men from Michigan described in the reading, it was. In other parts of the United States, the government had a voice in that decision, as Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter would discover.

Loving and Jeter grew up in Virginia’s rural Caroline County in the 1950s. They met at a dance and dated for a few years before deciding to marry. After a wedding in Washington, D.C., they returned to Virginia to start a family. Historians Peter Irons and Stephanie Guitton write:

Six weeks later, the Lovings had a terrible shock. Sheriff Garnet Brooks arrived with a warrant directing him to bring “the body of said Richard Loving” before a judge. He dragged the Lovings out of bed. And what was their crime? Rich was white and Mildred had mixed black and Indian ancestry. Their marriage violated a Virginia law providing that “if any white person intermarry with a colored person”— or vice versa—each party “shall be guilty of a felony” and face prison terms of five years.

The Lovings pleaded guilty to avoid prison. Judge Leon Bazile suspended a one-year sentence if they agreed to leave Virginia for twenty-five years. The Lovings moved to Washington, but they were country people and couldn’t adjust to city life. They came back to Caroline County and lived a fugitive life for nine years, sheltered by family and friends and raising three small kids. “I never expected . . . such a beating,” Rich said later. “It was right rough.”

Rich appealed for help to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1963. Kennedy sent his letter to the American Civil Liberties Union, which recruited two Virginia lawyers, Philip Hirschkop and Bernard Cohen. They [argued] that the Lovings’ conviction [violated] the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” to Americans of all races. Civil rights and church groups [supported] the appeal.

In 1967, the case now known as Loving v. Virginia reached the Supreme Court. Ten days after the couple’s ninth wedding anniversary, the justices issued a unanimous opinion: Virginia’s law was unconstitutional. This ruling also overturned anti-miscegenation laws—laws that banned marriages between whites and individuals of other “races”—in fifteen other states. Chief Justice Earl Warren stated the court’s opinion:

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. . . . To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes . . . is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry may not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the state.

Anti-miscegenation laws date back to colonial times. The first such statute was passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 1691. Other colonies followed suit. These laws were an American invention.There was no ban on interracial marriage in England at the time. By the late 1800s, 38 states had anti-miscegenation statutes. As late as 1924 these laws were on the books in 29 states. Anti-miscegenation laws varied greatly in the way they defined whom one could and could not marry. In a legal brief filed in Loving v. Virginia, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP) commented on the inconsistencies in these laws:

In Mississippi, Mongolian-White marriages are illegal and void, while in North Carolina they are permitted. . . . In Arkansas, a Negro is defined as any person who has in his or her veins “any Negro blood whatever”; in Florida, one ceases to be a Negro when he has less than “one-eighth of African or Negro blood,” and in Oklahoma, anyone not of the “African descent” is miraculously transmuted into a member of the white race.

A number of states updated their anti-miscegenation laws in the 1920s. The Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which the Lovings violated, is a good example. Its sponsors used eugenic arguments to justify restrictions. They argued that interracial relationships are “dysgenic unions” in which “the superior group (whites) risks polluting their germ plasm with inferior hereditary traits.” Lothrop Stoddard, a lawyer and self-proclaimed eugenics expert, supported the proposed law. He told Virginia lawmakers:

White race purity is the cornerstone of our civilization. Its mongrelization with non-white blood, particularly with Negro blood, would spell the downfall of our civilization. This is a matter of both national and racial life and death, and no efforts would be spared to guard against the greatest of all perils—the perils of miscegenation.

On March 20, 1924, state lawmakers passed the Virginia Racial Integrity Act by a wide margin, and the governor signed it into law. The Virginia law remained on the books until 1967 when the Supreme Court overturned it in Loving v. Virginia. The law stated in part:

Section 1-14 of the Virginia Code: Colored persons and Indians defined—Every person in whom there is ascertainable any Negro blood shall be deemed and taken to be a colored person, and every person not a colored person having one fourth or more of American Indian blood shall be deemed an American Indian. . . .

Section 20-54 of the Virginia Code:Intermarriage prohibited; meaning of term ‘white persons.’—It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. For the purpose of this chapter, the term ‘white person’ shall apply only to such person as has no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons. . . .

Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code: Leaving State to evade law —If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they shall be punished as provided in §20-59, and the marriage shall be governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage.

Section 20-59 of the Virginia Code: Punishment for marriage.—If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.

Walter Plecker, a physician and the director of the Virginia Board of Vital Statistics, was responsible for the enforcement of the law in the early 1900s. He and his staff relied on birth certificates, marriage licenses, tax records, and gossip to decide who was white and who was not. Plecker “corrected” birth certificates if he thought a person was trying to “pass” as white. He targeted Native Americans in the belief that they were really blacks trying to pass as something else. The pride Plecker took in his work is evident in a letter he wrote in 1943, during World War II: “Our own indexed birth and marriage records, showing race, reach back to 1853. Such a study has probably never been made before. . . . Hitler’s genealogical study of the Jews is not more complete.”

“Long-lost identities of slaves uncovered in old Virginia papers”

Taken from: http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/05/us/virginia-slaves/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

February 5, 2012

A historical society in Virginia, where slavery began in the American colonies in 1619, has discovered the identities of 3,200 slaves from unpublished private documents, providing new information for today’s descendants in a first-of-its-kind online database, society officials say.

Many of the slaves had been forgotten to the world until the Virginia Historical Society received a $100,000 grant to pore over some of its 8 million unpublished manuscripts — letters, diaries, ledgers, books and farm documents from Virginians dating to the 1600s — and began discovering the long-lost identities of the slaves, said society president and CEO Paul Levengood.

The private, nonprofit historical society, the fourth-oldest in the nation, is assembling a growing roster of slaves’ names and other information, such as the slaves’ occupations, locations and plantation owners’ names, said Levengood.

The free, public website also provides a high-resolution copy of the antique documents that identify the slave.

The database, which went online last September with 1,500 names, sets itself apart from the few other existing slave databases — which limit themselves to specific plantations or to ship manifests that list the captives by their native African names, society officials said.

The “Unknown No Longer: A Database of Virginia Slave Names” website is the first online resource listing slaves’ names across all of slaveholding Virginia, the nation’s oldest state which had the largest enslaved population, numbering a half million people, at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, society officials said. ”Most slaves were by their owners’ design and eventually by law forbidden to learn how to read and write, so they didn’t leave us material that so many figures in the past did,” Levengood said. “That’s when you have to be creative.”

So using a $100,000 corporate grant from Dominion, one of the nation’s largest producers and transporters of energy, society researchers began examining some of its 8 million manuscripts that Virginia residents have been giving to the historical society since its founding in 1831.

Those Virginia families found the old, handwritten papers in attics, basements or desk drawers, Levengood said. The society stores the documents in an archive spanning thousands of square feet, he said. The antique papers turned out to mention slaves. ”Often they appeared in the records of the owners who owned slaves as human property, which to us sounds so obscene and alien,” said Levengood, who’s also a historian. “But these people were writing down their inventory as if you would for insurance purposes. That’s the kind of things that owners did with slaves. This was the most valuable property they owned, and they wanted to make sure it was recorded. ”Often there was a human connection, and they grew up with these people, and they recorded their birth dates and deaths. It’s an incredibly complicated and tragic institution that we’re just beginning to understand the dimensions of,” Levengood said.

Documents citing slaves go back to the 1690s: “That’s when slavery starts to grow fast in Virginia and other English colonies,” Levengood said. ”Sometimes it’s a real detective work. You have to read between the lines: Oh, they mention Amy in a letter, and then you have to read another letter in the collection to realize that Amy is a slave and not a family member,” Levengood said.

The society Saturday held the first of four community workshops on how to use the online database at the organization’s headquarters in Richmond, Virginia. While the online website is intuitive on how to use, the workshops are being held for users who need more guidance, Levengood said. Some 80 people came to Saturday’s workshop, including Gale Carter, a high school history teacher who flew in from East Chicago, Indiana for the event. Carter said the original documents digitized on the site will help her uncover more of her own family’s history in Virginia, as well as help her students learn about the era. ”I’m going to use this not only personally, but professionally,” she said. “This is terrific. It’s a model and I hope the rest of the states catch up real quickly.”

Amateur genealogist Crasty Johnson of Richmond said she hopes the sites will help her trace her roots back to the 1800s. ”I need to know my history,” she said, adding the site may help her prove or disprove many of the things she’s heard about her family’s past. “I wanted to really know. I wanted to be able to see and connect the dots.”

When the United States banned the importation of slaves after 1807, Virginia became the largest provider in the nation’s internal slave trade, Levengood said. Slavery was eventually abolished at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865.

That means many American families with slave ancestors could have roots in Virginia, Levengood said. ”Slavery in Virginia is not just a Virginia story. It reaches across all of the slave South,” Levengood said. “So you may not know you have Virginia ancestors, but you could.”

The database features a public message board, filled with notes posted by users searching for ancestors who may have been slaves. The advanced search fields include the slave’s first name or last name; gender; occupation; owner’s last name; date range; and record type.

One user named “Treebranch02″ wrote last September: “Well, I think I found the slave owner that owned my great, great, great grandfather but that is as far as I got. Nothing on my great grandfather and great grandmother who lived in Manquin, VA. This was good for me, however. Got me excited. Wonderful site.”

Elsewhere in the database is a stark description of the sale of slaves and goods in a February 11, 1858, typed letter from slaveholder William Daniel Cabell of “Benvenue” in Nelson County, Virginia, to his wife, Elizabeth Nicholas Cabell. ”The corn we sold yesterday brought 3.15$ per barrel. We sold all the negros 43 in number at astonishingly large prices — the whole amounting to $32016. Nearly every one of the negros were satisfied as they were bought by people in the country mostly, going ahead of the prices given by the traders,” Cabell wrote his wife. The letter continued: “Jane and three children brought $2795. and Mimy and three children $2505. My father gave $25. to Mr. Agee and then allowed Mr. Turner to take Mimy as he owned her husband. Old Mr. S. Turner bought Jane and children. Jane’s husband exclaimed just as she was knocked out to his master “Glory to God on high, peace and good will to men on earth” and it seemed to pop from his very soul. Betsy brought $1400. and was bought for Miss Perking of Buckingham.”

Robert Payne, who attended Saturday’s workshop, said he’s been researching his family for the past 15 years, but finding information about his ancestors wasn’t easy. He’s hoping his 12 grandchildren can benefit from his work. ”Researching black folk is difficult, so anytime you can find a new resource it’s always good to investigate,” he said. “It’s a database for the ones that are coming up. They’ll be able to take it and grow from that.”

“Calif. Investigates Skin-Lighteners for Dangerous Mercury”

What saddens me the most is the common idea that the whiter one’s skin, the more beautiful/handsome one is. In cultures all across the world, people with lighter skin are deemed more refined, have more access to resources and opportunities, able to more easily find a husband/mate, are considered more superior to everyone else. This obsession with looking “whiter” or “more pale” or “lighter” has created a market for creams, many of which can possess incredibly harmful ingredients that have been known to cause cancer, skin lesions, discoloration, health risks, and the like, especially the cheaper ones. 

Taken from: http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=7ab8e2c53bb231f2faf1d1d35b79148f

January 27, 2012

There could be a dark side to skin-lightening creams often found in stores that cater to ethnic communities.

Starting next week, California health officials will collect and test a sampling of skin-lightening products in the Bay Area for possible mercury contamination. Health officials launched the investigation in response to a spate of mercury poisoning cases linked to the tainted face creams that are made outside the United States.

A handful of cases emerged in the mid ‘90s, but it was a 2010 case involving a 39-year-old Latina and her family in Alameda County that spurred the state to action.  Coordinators of a health study found the East Bay resident with dangerously-high mercury levels, and notified state health officials. An investigation traced the source of her mercury poisoning to an unlabeled jar of face cream, which relatives from Virginia had brought back from Mexico and given to her.

State health officials, working with their Virginia counterparts, identified in total 22 people who were exposed to mercury through similar face creams, including extended family and friends. The case was highlighted last week in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). “This is one of the first investigations of the problem within California,” said Dr. Rapali Das, chief of the Environmental Health Investigations Branch of the state Department of Public Health and co-author of the MMWR report. “Why [we’re focusing] attention on the issue now — these cases have come to our attention here, we think it’s enough of a problem to address it.”

Last year, the state documented a dozen cases of mercury poisoning from tainted skin lighteners, Das says, and have anecdotal reports of at least another four cases.

Health problems from mercury exposure include “mental and neurological” symptoms, according to Dr. Mark Miller, director of the Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit at UCSF and co-author of the MMWR report, which noted that some of those who were exposed to mercury experienced “numbness, tingling, dizziness, forgetfulness, headaches, and depression.” Encountering high enough levels or chronic exposure can also harm the kidneys, Miller says.

The people profiled in the MMWR report said they used the face cream for “skin-lightening, fading freckles, and treating acne.” Mercury, a metal, is a highly effective skin lightener, because it blocks melanin, which gives hair and skin pigmentation.  “It’s effective. It’s just dangerous for you,” said Miller, adding that the FDA does not allow any mercury in products sold in the United States. He said all the products with dangerous mercury levels are here “illegally.”

Nationwide, state health departments are coming across scores of cases of mercury poisoning through skin-lightening products brought into the country from someplace else. Health officials in Texas, New York, and Minnesota have recently carried out investigations of skin-lighteners, and alerted the public about possible mercury contamination.

In 2010, the Chicago Tribune carried out an investigation of skin-lighteners sold in local stores and on the Internet, and found that out of 50 face creams, six contained “mercury levels banned by federal law.” The six products were made in “Lebanon, China, India, Pakistan and Taiwan.”

California health officials will begin to collect and test a sampling of skin-lightening products from store shelves in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, said Lori Copan with the state health department. She says they will target ethnic stories and swap meets, catering to three “priority groups,” including Chinese, Filipino, and Latino.

In the cases documented last year by California health officials, most involved products that were brought into the state through people’s “personal luggage,” Copan said. The extended family profiled in the MMWR report brought the skin-lightening cream back from Mexico, while two other households bought them in local stores. The products were also made in Mexico.

Copan says the state health department issued alerts about mercury-laced skin-lighteners in 2010, and will be working with a statewide network of “promotoras” — peer health educators — to get information into hard-to-reach communities. “It is very important. Ladies using the cream not only put it in her face, but using in [sic] her whole body,” said Vicky Avila, health educator with Vision y Compromiso in Redwood City, Calif. “They put the cream on babies…it’s a big problem for them.”

The case that prompted California health officials to issue a health alert in 2010 involved unlabeled products in white jars. Other state health departments have issued alerts about products made in Mexico with dangerous levels of mercury, including Crema de Belleza–Manning and Crema AguaMary.

Last year, researchers from UC Berkeley and UCSF, conducting a health study, found a Latina in San Francisco with high mercury levels, the source of which was eventually traced to her face cream. In that case, the cream was a U.S. brand name product that was purchased and likely adulterated in Mexico.

Copan with the state health department emphasized that any skin-lightening product purchased abroad could be tainted, including U.S. brand name products. “If it was purchased outside of the United States, it could have mercury in it,” she said.
California’s health department advised consumers to avoid buying products that list “mercury,” “mercurio,” or “calomel” (mercurous chloride) on the label as well as unlabeled beauty products.

Health worker Avila says many of the women she sees prefer to buy products they are familiar with from their home countries, especially new immigrants who want to feel connected to their “roots” and culture. Avila says the women load up on products when they travel to Tijuana or they may shop for them at local Latino stores in California. Often times, the products may not be displayed on shelves, but carried in a backroom, so they must ask for them specifically.  “Women don’t like to talk about it,” Avila said. “They don’t like to say where they bought it.”

“Virginia Republicans condemn graphic of a zombie Obama shot in the head”

Taken from: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/virginia-republicans-condemn-graphic-zombie-obama-shot-head-140351979.html

November 1, 2011

Top Republicans in Virginia are strongly condemning a Halloween-themed graphic circulated by a local GOP committee Monday that depicted President Obama as a zombie with a gunshot wound to his head.

The graphic was featured in a mass email sent to supporters by the Loudoun County Republican Committee inviting them to a Halloween party. The image, featured on the email header, included photos of a disfigured House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and a throng of flesh-hungry zombie Obama supporters.

The image of Obama, which features a large bloody gunshot wound above his right eye, was first reported Monday by Too Conservative, a right-leading Virginia political blog that accused Loudoun County Republicans of going “WAY too far.”

Other top Republicans in the state quickly agreed. ”The disgusting image used today on a mass email has no place in our politics,” Pat Mullins, chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, said in a statement to reporters, per the Washington Post’s Anita Kumar. The party, he said, “condemns the image and its use in the strongest possible terms.”

Meanwhile, Virginia Gov. Bob O’Donnell, through a spokesman, called the graphic ”shameful and offensive” and called on the committee to apologize. ”The governor has long stressed the need for more civility and respect in our politics,” McConnell spokesman Tucker Martin said. “An e-mail like this one undermines those goals, offends all Virginians and discredits our entire political process. It will not be tolerated.”

Loudoun County GOP chairman Mark Sell said in an email to the Associated Press’s Bob Lewis that the graphic was a “light-hearted attempt to inject satire humor into the Halloween holiday. ”Apparently, some individuals have interpreted an image of Barack Obama that appeared within the email as intending to portray the President as a victim of a violent crime,” Sell wrote. “Nothing could be further from the truth, and we deeply and sincerely apologize to the President and anyone who viewed the image if that was the impression that was left.”

“Cooper Kweme Sentenced For Sex Trafficking 16-Year-Old Girl”

Taken from: http://www.wusa9.com/news/article/171678/158/Man-Sentenced-To-11-Years-For-Pimping-Teen-Girl?hpt=ju_bn4

October 21, 2011

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (WUSA) — A Silver Spring, Md. man was sentenced to 11 years in prison for forcing a 16-year-old girl into prostitution, federal authorities said in an news release.

Cooper Kweme, 31, a former Wheaton Mall Security guard, met the girl on a social networking site and developed a relationship with her. He then took explicit pictures of her and posted them to his website, advertising her as a prostitute.

“From March to May 2011, Kweme prostituted the victim in northern Virginia and Maryland. When clients paid the teenage girl for sexual acts she performed, she turned over the money to Kweme, who would give her a percentage of the fee charged to the client,” officials said.

Kweme was arrested by the Arlington County Police Department on June 1, 2011. After serving his prison sentence, Kweme will serve a term of five years on supervised release and be required to register as a sex offender, officials said.