Yankee Acata & Oyimbo Documentary on HBO





http://www.hbo.com/#/documentaries/the-loving-story




Richard and Mildred Loving Grey Villet / courtesy of HBO




ACLU lawyers Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop speaking with the Lovings. Grey Villet / courtesy of HBO






HBO's 'The Loving Story' victory on interracial marriage ban

BY AUDRA D.S. BURCH

They had known each other since she was 11 and he was 17, a friendship homegrown in a rural corner of Virginia that simply gave way to love. So they wed, hopeful that the intolerance and politics of the times — he was white, she was African American and Native American — wouldn’t forbid them a life together.
Five weeks later on a warm July night in 1958, as the couple slept in their bedroom, the framed marriage certificate hanging on the wall above, they were roused by deputies and dogs and the blinding glare of flashlights.

Their love was not illegal. Their marriage was, a violation of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act banning interracial marriage.

Richard and Mildred Loving were both sent to jail, charged criminally, convicted of felonies and banished from Virginia, the harsh beginning of a nine-year journey in which the mixed-race couple would fight all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to love and be loved without boundaries, for the right to go home as husband and wife.

By 1967, the courts would strike down the laws banning interracial marriage.

Now, more than four decades later, on the holiday dedicated to love, the story of the Lovings comes to life in The Loving Story, an HBO documentary film debuting Tuesday.

“Ultimately, this is a film about love and race and tolerance,” says Nancy Buirski, who directed the documentary. “It is a reminder to the public that we need to experience each other’s humanity, that we need to get to know each other and respect each other.”

The Loving victory was bittersweet. They returned to Caroline County, Va., to live in the cinder-block house Richard had built and raise their three children. Eight years later in 1975, Richard died in a car accident at 41.

Mildred, never a public figure after the case, lived a quiet life until her death in 2008. She had never remarried.

In some ways, her obituary revived the story that had helped to shape the course and conversation of the civil rights movement.

“I read the obit and was struck by how important a story this was and I knew so little about it,” Buirski says. “They were at the heart of this case, and their story deserved to be told to give people the human side. It’s one thing to have the law change, but we needed to know more about the people behind it, about the suffering.’’

Buirski searched for the tiniest, and often heartbreaking, details to offer a compelling, realistic portrait of the Lovings and life in 1950s Virginia.

The film’s greatest gift may be the collection of 70 rare photographs by Life photographer Grey Villet and archival footage by filmmaker Hope Ryden — stored in a closet nearly 40 years — which offer an intimate, fully-realized family, the vast gap in color lost in their ordinariness.

The opening shot shows Mildred and Richard holding hands, their stride unbroken. In another, she is seen putting on her daughter’s socks and patent leather shoes. In another, Richard is loading a fireplace with wood.

Woven together, the vintage moments allows the Lovings to show and tell their own story, a remarkably calm, contemplative narrative set against the fire of the civil right struggle.

Mildred, lovely and willowy with a sweet, soft voice, talks about that night when Sheriff Brooks busted down their door. It was 2 a.m.

“They asked Richard who was the woman he was sleeping with and I said, ‘I am his wife,’ ” she says in a voice that belies what happens next. “The sheriff said, ‘not here you are not. Come on, let’s go.’ ”

The couple was essentially exiled to Washington, D.C., where they had been married.

They frequently slipped back, in separate cars, to visit but always had to return to where they could live legally as man and wife.

In 1963, Mildred wrote Attorney General Robert Kennedy for help, and he directed her to the American Civil Liberties Union to pursue their case. Four years later, in Loving v Virginia, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that marriage was a basic civil right, striking down the Virginia statute and other states’ anti-miscegenation laws.

“The documentary is so amazing because it really tells the truth about my parents’ life,” says the couple’s youngest daughter, Peggy Loving Fortune, 52, who lives a half-mile from the family home in Virginia. “The reality is that they fell in love, got married and came home believing they could raise their family like everybody else. Because of all they went through, people can now marry anybody, any race.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia

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