MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN delivered the opinion of the Court.
This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this
Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to
prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial
classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of
the Fourteenth Amendment. For reasons which seem to us to reflect the
central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these
statutes cannot stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment.
In June 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a Negro
woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of
Columbia pursuant to its laws. Shortly after their marriage, the Lovings
returned to Virginia and established their marital abode in Caroline
County. At the October Term, 1958, of the Circuit Court of Caroline
County, a grand jury issued an indictment charging the Lovings with
violating Virginia's ban on interracial marriages. On January 6, 1959,
the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge and were sentenced to one year
in jail; however, the trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of
25 years on the condition that the Lovings leave the State and not
return to Virginia together for 25 years. He stated in an opinion that:
"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and
red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the
interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such
marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not
intend for the races to mix."
After their convictions, the Lovings took up residence in the
District of Columbia. On November 6, 1963, they filed a motion in the
state trial court to vacate the judgment and set aside the sentence on
the ground that the statutes which they had violated were repugnant to
the Fourteenth Amendment....
The two statutes under which appellants were convicted and sentenced
are part of a comprehensive statutory scheme aimed at prohibiting and
punishing interracial marriages. The Lovings were convicted of violating § 20-58 of the Virginia Code:
"Leaving State to evade law. -- If any white person and
colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being
married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it,
and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife,
they shall be punished as provided in § 20-59, and the marriage shall be
governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The
fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of
their marriage."
Section 20-59, which defines the penalty for miscegenation, provides:
"Punishment for marriage. -- If any white person intermarry
with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white
person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by
confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five
years."
Other central provisions in the Virginia statutory scheme are §
20-57, which automatically voids all marriages between "a white person
and a colored person" without any judicial proceeding, and §§ 20-54 and
1-14 which, respectively, define "white persons" and "colored persons
and Indians" for purposes of the statutory prohibitions. The Lovings
have never disputed in the course of this litigation that Mrs. Loving is
a "colored person" or that Mr. Loving is a "white person" within the
meanings given those terms by the Virginia statutes.
Virginia is now one of 16 States which prohibit and punish marriages
on the basis of racial classifications. The present statutory scheme
dates from the adoption of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, passed
during the period of extreme nativism which followed the end of the
First World War. The central features of this Act, and current Virginia
law, are the absolute prohibition of a "white person" marrying other
than another "white person," a prohibition against issuing marriage
licenses until the issuing official is satisfied that the applicants'
statements as to their race are correct, certificates of "racial
composition" to be kept by both local and state registrars, and the
carrying forward of earlier prohibitions against racial intermarriage.
I.
In upholding the constitutionality of these provisions in the
decision below, the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia referred to its
1955 decision in Naim v. Naim as stating the reasons
supporting the validity of these laws. In Naim, the state court
concluded that the State's legitimate purposes were "to preserve the
racial integrity of its citizens," and to prevent "the corruption of
blood," "a mongrel breed of citizens," and "the obliteration of racial
pride," obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy. The court also reasoned that marriage has traditionally been subject to
state regulation without federal intervention, and, consequently, the
regulation of marriage should be left to exclusive state control by the
Tenth Amendment.
The State does not contend in its argument before this Court that its
powers to regulate marriage are unlimited notwithstanding the commands
of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nor could it do so. Instead, the State
argues that the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause, as illuminated
by the statements of the Framers, is only that state penal laws
containing an interracial element as part of the definition of the
offense must apply equally to whites and Negroes in the sense that
members of each race are punished to the same degree. Thus, the State
contends that, because its miscegenation statutes punish equally both
the white and the Negro participants in an interracial marriage, these
statutes, despite their reliance on racial classifications, do not
constitute an invidious discrimination based upon race. The second
argument advanced by the State assumes the validity of its equal
application theory. The argument is that, if the Equal Protection Clause
does not outlaw miscegenation statutes because of their reliance on
racial classifications, the question of constitutionality would thus
become whether there was any rational basis for a State to treat
interracial marriages differently from other marriages. On this
question, the State argues, the scientific evidence is substantially in
doubt and, consequently, this Court should defer to the wisdom of the
state legislature in adopting its policy of discouraging interracial
marriages.
Because we reject the notion that the mere "equal application" of a
statute containing racial classifications is enough to remove the
classifications from the Fourteenth Amendment's proscription of all
invidious racial discriminations, we do not accept the State's
contention that these statutes should be upheld if there is any possible
basis for concluding that they serve a rational purpose. The mere fact
of equal application does not mean that our analysis of these statutes
should follow the approach we have taken in cases involving no racial
discrimination where the Equal Protection Clause has been arrayed
against a statute discriminating between the kinds of advertising which
may be displayed on trucks in New York City or an exemption in Ohio's ad
valorem tax for merchandise owned by a nonresident in a storage
warehouse. In these cases, involving distinctions not drawn according to
race, the Court has merely asked whether there is any rational
foundation for the discriminations, and has deferred to the wisdom of
the state legislatures. In the case at bar, however, we deal with
statutes containing racial classifications, and the fact of equal
application does not immunize the statute from the very heavy burden of
justification which the Fourteenth Amendment has traditionally required
of state statutes drawn according to race.
The State argues that statements in the Thirty-ninth Congress about
the time of the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment indicate that the
Framers did not intend the Amendment to make unconstitutional state
miscegenation laws. Many of the statements alluded to by the State
concern the debates over the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, which President
Johnson vetoed, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, enacted over his veto.
While these statements have some relevance to the intention of Congress
in submitting the Fourteenth Amendment, it must be understood that they
pertained to the passage of specific statutes and not to the broader,
organic purpose of a constitutional amendment. As for the various
statements directly concerning the Fourteenth Amendment, we have said in
connection with a related problem, that although these historical
sources "cast some light" they are not sufficient to resolve the
problem; "[at] best, they are inconclusive. The most avid proponents of
the post-War Amendments undoubtedly intended them to remove all legal
distinctions among 'all persons born or naturalized in the United
States.' Their opponents, just as certainly, were antagonistic to both
the letter and the spirit of the Amendments and wished them to have the
most limited effect." We have rejected the proposition that the debates
in the Thirty-ninth Congress or in the state legislatures which ratified
the Fourteenth Amendment supported the theory advanced by the State,
that the requirement of equal protection of the laws is satisfied by
penal laws defining offenses based on racial classifications so long as
white and Negro participants in the offense were similarly punished....
The Equal Protection Clause requires the consideration of whether the
classifications drawn by any statute constitute an arbitrary and
invidious discrimination. The clear and central purpose of the
Fourteenth Amendment was to eliminate all official state sources of
invidious racial discrimination in the States.
There can be no question but that Virginia's miscegenation statutes
rest solely upon distinctions drawn according to race. The statutes
proscribe generally accepted conduct if engaged in by members of
different races. Over the years, this Court has consistently repudiated "distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry" as
being "odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the
doctrine of equality." At the very least, the Equal Protection Clause
demands that racial classifications, especially suspect in criminal
statutes, be subjected to the "most rigid scrutiny," Korematsu v.
United States (1944), and, if they are ever to be upheld, they
must be shown to be necessary to the accomplishment of some permissible
state objective, independent of the racial discrimination which it was
the object of the Fourteenth Amendment to eliminate. Indeed, two members
of this Court have already stated that they "cannot conceive of a valid
legislative purpose . . . which makes the color of a person's skin the
test of whether his conduct is a criminal offense."
There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of
invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The
fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white
persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their
own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. We
have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which
restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. There can be no
doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial
classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection
Clause.
II.
These statutes also deprive the Lovings of liberty without due
process of law in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment. The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the
vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by
free men.
Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to
our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so
unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these
statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of
equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive
all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The
Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be
restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution,
the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides
with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
These convictions must be reversed.
MR. JUSTICE STEWART, concurring.
I have previously expressed the belief that "it is simply not
possible for a state law to be valid under our Constitution which makes
the criminality of an act depend upon the race of the actor." Because I
adhere to that belief, I concur in the judgment of the Court.