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- Title
Friends of the Court: U.S. Bishops on Behalf of Richard and Mildred Loving and the Freedom to Marry.
- Authors
Smith, S. Douglas
- Abstract
In 1966--eighty years after the Fourteenth Amendment's adoption--civil rights activists targeted for repeal anti-miscegenation laws in seventeen states. Jim Crow laws had disdained and diluted the Fourteenth Amendment's intended purpose. The general upheaval in churches and U.S. society in the 1960s and 1970s included dramatic events that affected interracial relations. A few Catholic associations, notably the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice (NCCIJ), actively opposed racism. Thus, the NCCIJ took an interest in an anti-miscegenation conviction in Virginia. The interracial couple Richard and Delores Jeter Loving appealed their conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court. The NCCIJ proposed to influence the outcome using an amici curiae (friends of the court) brief in its name and the names of willing Southern Catholic bishops. This essay explores the creation of the brief While the court decided in the Lovings' favor, the justices unsurprisingly did not cite the brief in the opinion. Nevertheless, the bishops' support for the Lovings demonstrated an increasing Catholic commitment to civil and human rights.
- Subjects
VIRGINIA; RICHMOND (Va.); AMICI curiae; INTERRACIAL couples; RACE relations; JIM Crow laws; UNITED States. Supreme Court; BISHOPS; CATHOLIC bishops
- Publication
U.S. Catholic Historian, 2023, Vol 41, Issue 4, p99
- ISSN
0735-8318
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/cht.2023.a914866