5. Loving v. Virginia overturned centuries of legislation prohibiting interracial marriage
A common feature of United States history, anti-miscegenation laws were abundant until the mid-twentieth century and, although declining, in 1967 sixteen states still retained legislation prohibiting interracial marriage. Seeking to evade Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, Mildred and Richard Loving crossed into the District of Columbia to be wed in June 1958. Nevertheless, upon being raided by the police the following month, who were hoping to find them engaging in intercourse – an act which would have been illegal under Virginian law also – the pair were arrested under the Virginia Code which outlawed interracial couples from being married out of state and subsequently returning.
Failing to win appeals at the state level, who consistently upheld the anti-miscegenation laws and the pair’s resultant convictions, the couple desperately filed with the United States Supreme Court. Overturning the Lovings’ convictions in a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court also overruled the precedent previously set in Pace v. Alabama dating from 1883. Ordering the end of all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States, the court ruled the freedom to marry was a constitutionally protected liberty and any arbitrary deprivation of it violated the Due Process Clause. The historic case was recently cited once more as part of the legalization of gay marriage in 2013 in Obergefell v. Hodges.