Fourteen years of marriage and a felony conviction on their record, Richard and Mildred Loving had been banished from their home state of Virginia simply for being husband and wife. On June 12, 1967, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled in *Loving v. Virginia* that every state law prohibiting interracial marriage violated the Constitution. Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for all nine justices, declared that marriage is "one of the basic civil rights of man" and that restricting it by race contravened both the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. At the time, sixteen states still enforced anti-miscegenation statutes. The decision dismantled every one of them in a single stroke. Couples across the South who had lived under threat of arrest could, for the first time, marry freely. The ruling became a cornerstone of American civil rights jurisprudence, later cited in landmark decisions expanding marriage equality, and June 12 is now observed nationwide as Loving Day.