‘Loving’: The Most Relevant Movie This Election Season
Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton star in the true-life story of Richard and Mildred Loving, a Virginia couple arrested in 1958 for marrying. “It did strike me how 50 years is really not that long ago,” says Edgerton. “Not for this shit to be going down.”
In the early hours of July 11, 1958, a sheriff and two of his deputies burst into the rural Virginia home of a young married couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, and went straight to their bedroom. Shining flashlights in their eyes, the lawmen demanded to know what the Lovings were doing together.
“They asked Richard who was that woman he was sleeping with,” Mildred said later. “I said, ‘I’m his wife,’ and the sheriff said, ‘Not here you’re not.’ “
The couple was charged with defying the state’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and thrown into jail, where Richard remained overnight, while Mildred was kept several days longer before being released to her father. Their crime? One was black, the other white, in an era when miscegenation was illegal in 24 states.
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