Whites for Racial Equity is hosting a local screening of Jeff Nichols’ 2016 film Loving, based on the couple at the heart of the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia, which abolished state laws against interracial marriage.
After the screening, Middlebury Institute of International Studies Professor Pushpa Iyer will interview Ann and Fred Jealous on stage. Ann is black, Fred is white, and they were married in Washington, D.C. one year before the decision.
“There were emotional experiences that were similar,” Ann says. “[Mildred] Loving’s father and my father could have been the same person. They lived in Virginia, we were in Maryland; racism was similar, but they grew up in a small community where blacks and whites were not divided. I grew up in total segregation. [Husband] Richard acted as though racism wasn’t going to affect them, and Fred had a similar attitude.”
Marina Fang writes in the Huffington Post that the film focuses on the private lives of the couple at the center of the historic Supreme Court case, responsible for toppling a “major pillar of Jim Crow segregation, and, more recently, serving as precedent in the fight to legalize same-sex marriage.”
“I can identify with the way the LGBTQ community responded to marriage becoming legal in this country, because we felt similarly,” Ann says. “It was a huge relief.”
She says there is so much to the film that she could teach a whole semester on it. At the very least, Ann and her husband will fill the remainder of an evening with their reflections on their fight for the right to love who they love.