Hello and thank you for downloading witness with me Simon Watts.

Until the late 1960s it was illegal for people of different races to marry in many southern states in America.

That changed after a long legal battle fought by one couple, the Lovings.

Number three ninety five, Richard Perry Loving

versus Virginia. It's June 1967 and a mixed-race couple from Virginia are about to win a historic court ruling.

Today the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision.

Richard and Mildred Loving have won the right to be man and wife, father and mother in the state of Virginia.

Anti-missemination laws have been declared illegal not only in Virginia, but in all 16 states

that have held such statutes. Mildred Loving of black and American Indian heritage

met her white husband Richard in the 1950s.

Because mixed unions were then illegal in Virginia,

the couple moved to Washington, D.C. to get married.

But when they went home to visit in 1958, the police arrested them as they slept.

The night we were arrested, I guess it was about 2 a.m.

And I saw this light, you know, and I woke up and it was the policeman standing beside the bed and he told us to get up when he was under arrest.

And anyway, they carried us the bowling green and locked us up.

And in January, they had the trial and they told us to leave the state

for 25 years. In his ruling banishing the Lovings from Virginia the judge

referred not just to local law, but to what many

southerners regarded as the will of God.

Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow,

melee, and red, and he placed them on separate continents, and but for the

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