Exasperation balanced by perspective

Occassionally I become exasperated by some commentator, activist, or politician harping on about some age-old issue of discrimination or unfairness or slight. Usually it is an issue that used to be valid but statistically is no longer extant and yet these old policy warriors wage on like some Don Quixote tilting at their imagined windmills. Noble, but no longer relevant. But then I come across something like this obituary from the Economist a couple of years ago, (Mildred Loving, The Economist, May 17th, 2008 unfortunately inaccessible except to subscribers or as premium content). While this is in some ways ancient history, it is disconcerting how recent that ancient history is.

They loved each other. That must have been why they decided to get their marriage certificate framed and to hang it up in the bedroom of their house. There was little else in the bedroom, save the bed. Certainly nothing worth locking the front door for on a warm July night in 1958 in Central Point, Virginia. No one came this way, ten miles off the Richmond Turnpike into the dipping hills and the small, poor, scattered farmhouses, unless they had to. But Mildred Loving was suddenly woken to the crash of a door and a torch levelled in her eyes.

It was the law.

Mrs Loving had said the wrong thing. Had they just been going together, black and white, no one would have cared much. But they had formalised their love, and had the paperwork. This meant that under Virginia law they were cohabiting "against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth". It was a felony for blacks and whites to marry, and another felony to leave Virginia to do so. Fifteen other states had similar laws. The Lovings had to get up and go to jail. "The Lord made sparrows and robins, not to mix with one another," as Sheriff Brooks said later.

Reluctantly, they moved to Washington, D.C., and later initiated a court case with the assistance of the ACLU.

By 1967 they had obtained a unanimous ruling from Earl Warren's Supreme Court that marriage was "one of the basic civil rights of man", which "cannot be infringed by the state". The Lovings were free to go home and live together, in a new cinder-block house Richard built himself.

The constitutional arguments had meant nothing to them. Their chief lawyer, Bernard Cohen, had based his case in the end on the equal-rights clause of the 14th amendment, and was keen that the Lovings should listen to him speak. But they did not attend the hearings or read the decision. Richard merely urged Mr Cohen, "Tell the court I love my wife." For Mildred, all that mattered was being able to walk down the street, in view of everyone, with her husband's arm around her. It was very simple. If she had helped many others do the same, so much the better.

And should anyone think this is just a further example of the benighted status of the US and an unending shadow of history, every country does have its unique journeys down the wrong path. Two examples come to mind from countries in which I have lived and hold in high regard. They are offered not as condemnation of those particular countries but as examples that it happens everywhere and in the least expected places.

The practice of eugenics continued in Sweden of all places until 1975.
Australia did not extend the vote to aborigines until the 1960's. Not protection in voting but being able to vote at all.

We have travelled a long distance in a short time but there are clear memories of how it used to be just such a short time ago. It is good to move on and confront the new problems we reliably create for ourselves in our journeys: at least for me though, I find myself and my impatience reproached by stories like Mildred Loving's when I come across them.