The Fine Print

​First off:

Not when the Trump administration tells the National Park Service to re-write history throughout the country, which includes striking anti-war, anti-slavery, and pro-immigrant statements from the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown.

Not when a man reportedly burned Juneteenth celebration materials outside the Museum of African American History on Beacon Hill—the site of the oldest Black church in the country—in yet another instance in a painfully long history of violence threatened or perpetrated against Black spaces.

These public spaces converse with one another, serving as unambiguous reminders that history can be a tool for radical inclusiveness, love, and truth-telling. To attack them is beyond vandalism or simple political and philosophical differences. It says you want to destroy them and what they stand for.

That’s why we must continue publicly monumentalizing our complete history, as Everyone250 has done with its Monument Marker Series, and to protect the ones we already have. 

Because history, as with our words and actions, is not neutral. Nothing is.

Visit and support the Museum of African American History. Go to the Bunker Hill Monument before it’s altered. And decide now where you want to stand when the history of these days is told. You know where we’ll be.

The legacy of Loving
By Khari Thompson

Mildred Loving never wanted to be famous. She never asked to be remembered forever as half of the couple that struck down bans on interracial marriage. And after her husband Richard’s untimely death, she avoided the limelight. But in 2007, on the 40th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case that bears her name (Loving v. Virginia), she had one more thing she needed to say.

"I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry,” she wrote in a moving statement. “Government has no business imposing some people's religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people's civil rights.

“I am still not a political person. But I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people—Black or white, young or old, gay or straight—seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about."

Mildred died less than a year later.

The importance of these words, among the last she shared publicly, cannot be overstated. Neither can the fact that she made those comments not just on the anniversary of hers and her husband’s legal victory but during Pride Month. She knew what it meant to be persecuted for who she loved.

The Commonwealth of Virginia had strict laws against interracial relationships under the so-called Racial Integrity Act of 1924, meaning that the Lovings, who were wed in Washington, D.C., could not live in Virginia as a married couple. When they returned home, authorities arrested them for “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth”—a sin of the highest order in a land that openly extolled the “purity” of white blood. After being jailed and banished from the state, the Lovings fought for their legal right to marriage during the age of Brown v. Board and the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. They won.

Like Coretta Scott King before her, Mildred Loving saw the commonality between her case and the struggle for same-sex marriage rights. If she deserved to love and marry whomever she wished, why didn’t everyone?

Such simple, but powerful empathy is at a premium in today’s world. Because the more we see ourselves in others, the more difficult we become to divide and conquer.

When the judge sentenced the Lovings to prison time in 1959, he explained his reasoning this way: "Almighty God created the races … and placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with this 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." Decades later, the Supreme Court used similar reasoning to uphold laws that criminalized homosexuality. 

Whether they used religion or the long-standing pseudoscience of racial hierarchy to justify their actions, the premise of these arguments remains the same: we are worth more than you, and that’s how it’s meant to be.

Mildred and Richard Loving in 1967. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

This is the oldest mechanism of social control in American law: define which families count, and you define which people count. 

Under slavery, enslaved people could not legally marry, robbing relationships of the standing and protection a legal union carries—thereby stripping them of their humanity.

Anti-miscegenation laws and the criminalization of same-sex intimacy operated the same logic. So do bans on same-sex marriage. 

If love can cross the lines power draws, the whole structure begins to dissolve. Power has always understood this. That is why it has always moved to control who you are, how you move in the world, and who you’re allowed to love.

That is why, during his concurrence in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas named Obergefell v. Hodges—the decision that made same-sex marriage the law of the land—and Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down laws criminalizing same-sex intimacy, as decisions worth revisiting. He notably did not name Loving, which would criminalize his own marriage. But the legal foundation they share—that government has no business regulating who you love—is the same. Dismantle it for one person or group, and you endanger it for all.

The Voting Rights Act was gutted not in one dramatic ruling. It was weakened repeatedly by a decade of incremental decisions, each slowly chipping away at voting rights legislation before our eyes until, at last, it’s effectively dead. Over 500 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the country over the last three years, with conservative lawmakers hoping they can use those wins to attack the rest of the system.

But we’ve already proven we have the tools to fight back. From the Lovings’ legal fights to the Stonewall uprising in 1969 and the decades of organizing that finally produced Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, every inch of legal recognition was demanded, marched for, and fought for by people who refused to accept a system that delegitimized them.

Mildred Loving understood that intimately. And, after earning justice for herself, she made sure to proclaim that everyone deserved the same. To tell LGBTQIA+ people that their fight was her fight.

That's what Loving, and loving, are all about.