Genealogy is like a jigsaw puzzle, but you don't have the box top, so you don't know what the picture is supposed to look like. As you start putting the puzzle together, you realize some pieces are missing, and eventually you figure out that some of the pieces you started with don't actually belong to this puzzle. I'll help you discover the right pieces for your puzzle and assemble them into a picture of your family.
Yesterday, June 12, was Loving Day, when we commemorate and celebrate the 1967 United States Supreme Court decision that struck down the antimiscegenation laws in the United States, at that time still clung to in sixteen states in the South, which held that just because one person was black and another white that it was not legal for them to marry, no matter how much they loved each other. And I am thrilled to add another happy couple's marriage to my family tree.
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| Ally and Adrien, May 25, 2024 |
June 12 is called Loving Day in commemoration of the day in 1967 that the United States Supreme Court struck down the heinous laws against miscegenation that were in effect in yet sixteen of the states of this country, preventing people who loved each other from marrying strictly on the basis of the color of their skin not being the same.
The judge who ruled against the Lovings when they were living as a married couple in Virginia in 1958, causing them to take their case all the way to the Supreme Court, stated, "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."
Today for Loving Day I want to honor Yang Xianyi and Gladys Margaret Taylor, who married in 1941 in China but who might not have been able to marry in some of those sixteen U.S. states. They remained married until Gladys died in 1999.
Today, June 12, is Loving Day, the anniversary of the 1967 Supreme Court decision that struck down antimiscegenation laws that sixteen Southern states still proudly carried on their lawbooks. While the blacks they were preventing from marrying whites were those they perceived as having roots in Africa, others with dark skin were looked at in the same way.
I have a friend whose father was from India and whose mother was French. She told me about a trip they took through the American South in the 1950's. Her siblings favored their mother's complexion, while she more resembled her father. When they went to restaurants, she and her father were required to sit in the back, while her mother and siblings were permitted to eat in front, with the other "white" folks. It's probably a good thing that her parents weren't also arrested for miscegenation at the same time.
