In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving, a black woman and a white man were arrested in their home — in their bedroom — in Caroline County, Virginia. Both had been sentenced to a year in prison because their marriage violated the state’s anti-miscegenation statute and the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriage between people classified as “white” and people classified as “colored“.
The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision determined that this prohibition was unconstitutional, reversing Pace v. Alabama (1883) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.
The decision was followed by an increase in interracial marriages in the U.S., and is remembered annually on Loving Day, June 12. It is the subject of an upcoming movie to hit theatres in November 2016.
Already meeting Oscar buzz at the Cannes film festival, It’s absurdly early for Oscar to be sure, but it’s also not hard to see why. The movie’s writer-director Jeff Nichols dramatizes one of America’s most seminal civil rights Supreme Court cases, Loving v. Virginia, but he does so by focusing on the quiet, heartbreaking love story at its center: the marriage of Mildred and Richard Loving.
Does love indeed conquer all? And how do you feel about interracial marriages and relationships?
We all want to experience real love, but how would you define it? How do you know when what you are experiencing is real love? 
