Gimme Some Loving

Sanford Owens and wife Artie Marie Goins
I’ve never run a survey or metrics check for figuring-out the average age of my readership.
I do not know the average age of my podcast listeners.
So just in case a large segment of BWWW‘s audience is too young to be aware of it, when I was a child it was still illegal in some states for “white people” to marry “black people”.
Today this state of affairs might seem almost too extraordinary to believe.
But it took a court case in 1967 – Loving versus State of Virginia – to finally declare laws against “miscegenation” unconstitutional.
The very word “miscegenation” is originally derived from a hoax pamphlet published by Southern Democrats during the Civil War.
Over 160 years ago, in an eery foreshadowing of today’s “Great Replacement Theory” nonsense, white supremacist Southerners used “fake news” to try and convince Americans that the Republican Party of Lincoln was involved in a master plan to encourage and support mass “interracial marriage” until the “white race” had been supplanted by a nation of “brown people”.
Wealthy slaveholding southern elites and plantation owners lived a world away from the subsistence farming communities of Southern Appalachia.
If they had torn themselves away from their horse races and mint juleps long enough to have a look for themselves, they would have been horrified to discover that vast regions of the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia had already been merrily producing brown babies for nearly a century.
Love is love, as they say. This photo of a happy and affectionate couple named Sanford Owens and Artie Goins never fails to make me smile – a couple who clearly didn’t give a damn about stupid laws.
#lovingversusvirginia #beforewewerewhite #brownisbeautiful
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