The Raid at 2 A.M.

On July 11, 1958, Caroline County Sheriff R. Garnett Brooks entered the Loving home in Central Point, Virginia, at two o'clock in the morning. He shone a flashlight on Richard and Mildred Loving asleep in their bed. When Richard, a white bricklayer, pointed to the marriage certificate on the bedroom wall, the sheriff replied that it was no good in Virginia. Mildred, of Black and Rappahannock Native descent, had married Richard five weeks earlier in Washington, D.C., because their home state forbade it. Both were arrested and charged under the Racial Integrity Act of 1924.

Judge Leon Bazile sentenced them to a year in prison, suspended only if they agreed to leave Virginia for twenty-five years. For nearly a decade, the Lovings lived in exile from the land where they had grown up, separated from family and home. When the ACLU finally brought their case before the Supreme Court, Mildred sent a single message to her attorneys: "Tell the court I love my husband."

On June 12, 1967, a unanimous Court struck down every law in America that forbade marriage across racial lines.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians that in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free" — that every wall humanity erects between God's children stands condemned by the gospel itself. When the law of the land told the Lovings they were too different to belong to each other, the highest court in the nation finally echoed what scripture had declared all along: no human category can separate those whom God has made one.