D.J. and Angela Ross were not supposed to end up together, according to their families.
“Actually my grandma on both sides used to tell me, ‘Boy, you better leave those white girls alone or else we’re going to come find you hanging from a tree,’ ” says D.J., 35, who is black and grew up in southern Virginia.
Angela, 40, who is white and was also raised in Virginia, remembers being warned: “You can have friends with black people, and that’s fine. But don’t ever marry a black man.”
But on Valentine’s Day 2008, Angela tied the knot with D.J. in their home state. More than 50 years ago, their marriage would have broken a Virginia law. Designed to “preserve racial integrity,” it allowed a white person to only marry people who had “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian” or who fell under what was known as the “Pocahontas Exception” for having “one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian” and “no other non-Caucasic blood.”
In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving were thrown in jail and later banished from Virginia for breaking that law. He was white, and she once described herself as “part negro and part indian.”
After receiving a marriage license in Washington, D.C., the Lovings returned home to Central Point, Va., where weeks later, police burst into their bedroom late one night to arrest them. That ultimately led to a legal battle against Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court almost a decade later.
Photos: Hansi Lo Wang/NPR and Bettman Archive/Getty Images
