Overview

On the night of July 11, 1958, two sheriff's deputies entered a bedroom in Caroline County, Virginia, and shone their flashlights on a man and woman sleeping together. The man was white. The woman was Black. They were married. In the state of Virginia, that marriage was a crime. Richard and Mildred Loving had grown up together in the same rural community. They had fallen in love in the ordinary way. They had driven to Washington, D.C., to marry because Virginia's law prohibited them from doing so at home. And they had been arrested in their own bed for the crime of being married to each other. Their sentence: leave Virginia and don't come back together for twenty-five years. In Against the Law, Reid Harlow tells the full story of the couple who refused to accept that verdict - and of the Supreme Court decision that ultimately vindicated them. From the arrest in Caroline County to the unanimous ruling that struck down the anti-miscegenation laws of sixteen states, from the lawyers who built the constitutional case to the principle that would reshape American law for generations, this is the story of one of the most intimate and most consequential cases in the history of the Supreme Court. Loving v. Virginia didn't just protect interracial couples. It established that the right to marry the person you love is a fundamental constitutional liberty - a principle that would travel further than Richard and Mildred Loving could ever have imagined. They wanted to go home to Virginia. The Constitution gave them that. The principle their case produced gave America something larger.

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