Matters of the heart — Loving case — are part of Black History Month too

We keep Black History Month on one shelf and Valentine’s Day on another. One is supposed to be about pain and struggle. The other about flowers and pastel sugary hearts. Public remembrance of the most important Supreme Court decision about love in American history—Loving v. Virginia — waits for June, as if love itself were a summer excursion.

My life has taught me that matters of the heart belong in Black History Month too. Indeed such a short and bitterly cold month needs the memories of courageous love perhaps more than any other.

When I was a child in the 1970s, barely a decade after the Court decided Loving, I watched my parents hold hands in public and draw the kind of looks a child never forgets. The law had changed. The reflex had not. We honor Mildred and Richard Loving for their courage, and we should. Yet their victory was not a gift delivered from above. It was the law finally meeting the life people had already been living.

My maternal grandmother, Mamie Bland, taught me that long before I could name it. Her face was very English. Yet by Virginia law she was unquestionably Black. She carried the stories of our family quietly, without ornament, the way some people carry a Bible. She knew the South lived two lives at once — one written in statutes and another written at kitchen tables. Mamie believed the second life would outlast the first. She was right.

Virginia’s history shows that interracial unions were never an exception. They were part of the everyday rhythm of the Commonwealth. After Bacon’s Rebellion — hardly the only time Virginians of different races had made common cause — the ruling class answered with laws meant to keep Black and white people from finding one another again.

Those walls were rebuilt after Reconstruction and perfected in the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, the eugenic scheme that forced Virginians into two boxes: white or colored.

The hypocrisy was written into the fine print. The same statute that criminalized Black-white marriage carved out a special door so white Virginians could continue boasting of descent from Pocahontas and John Rolfe. By law you were 100% white even with one-sixteenth Native ancestry. And by the same law yet one-thirty-second African ancestry made you 100% Black.

My own family sits inside that ledger. DNA confirmed what Mamie already knew. I descend from the Bland line of Virginia, a family that proudly traced its roots to the Pocahontas-Rolfe union. Yet my great-great-grandfather Edward David Bland was born enslaved because his father Frederick was the son of a Bland planter and an enslaved woman — and Frederick was legally owned by his own half-brother, Richard Yates Bland. That is not a metaphor. It is a document. It is a life passed from one column of a will to another.

Virginia celebrated a legend while punishing a reality. The colony preferred a story about John Smith rescuing an Indian princess to the recorded marriage between Pocahontas and Rolfe that produced living descendants. Myth was easy to salute. Intimacy was harder to face.

By the time Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving married in Washington in 1958, generations had already voted with their hearts. Couples crossed county lines, raised children in common-law homes or kept their vows in quiet rooms. The state called those unions unnatural, yet they were as Virginia as the river and the red clay. In 1967 the Supreme Court did not create a new country when it banned laws against interracial marriage in the United States. It recognized the one that had been breathing all along.

Judge Leon Bazile, who sentenced the Lovings to exile, said God had placed the races on separate continents and never meant them to mix. But the very families who wrote Virginia’s laws had been mixing since the first ships anchored at Jamestown, perhaps even before. There is the truth defined by legislating otherness. And then there is the truth defined by loving one another despite it all

That is why the story of Loving should be celebrated in February, too. Black history is not only the history of pain and protest. It is also the history of love surviving under threat.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.