Monroe Gallery of Photography specializes in 20th- and 21st-century photojournalism and humanist imagery—images that are embedded in our collective consciousness and which form a shared visual heritage for human society. They set social and political changes in motion, transforming the way we live and think—in a shared medium that is a singular intersectionality of art and journalism.
— Sidney and Michelle Monroe
Monroe Gallery of Photography is pleased to present a free screening of the acclaimed documentary film "The Loving Story", a simple, profound love story between one man and one woman who in and of themselves were unlikely crusaders in the fight for equity.
Saturday, February 15. Film begins promptly at 4:30. Seating is limited, RSVP essential.
Richard and Mildred Loving laughing and watching television
in their living room, King and Queen County, Virginia, 1965
Exhibit
of Photographs Coincides with Feature Film “Loving” Premiere
Santa Fe--Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is
pleased to exhibitLIFE magazine
photographer Grey Villet's intimate images of an interracial couple, Richardand Mildred Loving, who married and then spent the next nine years fighting for
the right to live as a family in their hometown. Their civil rights case,
Loving v. Virginia, went all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1967
reaffirmed the very foundation of the right to marry. Grey Villet’s photographs
are on exhibit November 1 – December 21, 2016.
On November 4, the feature film “Loving” opens, from acclaimed
writer/director Jeff Nichols and starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga in the
roles of Richard and Mildred Loving.
The families of Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Delores
Jeter had lived in Caroline County, Virginia for generations. Richard first met
Mildred while listening to her brothers play music at the Jeters’ home. They
dated for a few years before deciding to marry. Interracial marriage was
illegal in Virginia and in twenty-five other states. For this reason, on June
2, 1958, Richard brought to his bride-to-be to Washington, D.C., where there
were no racial bans on marriage.
Based on an anonymous tip that the Lovings were illegally
living as a married, sheriff Garnett Brooks and two deputies burst into the
Lovings’ bedroom on July 11, 1958 at 2 a.m. When Richard explained that the
woman in bed with him was his wife, Brooks replied, “Not here she’s not.” They
were arrested for unlawful cohabitation and both pled not guilty. Richard only
spent one night in jail while Mildred had to spend four; Richard was told that
he would be put back in jail if he tried to bail out his wife.
In October 1958, the grand jury of the Circuit Court of
Caroline County charged the Lovings with violating two sections of Virginia’s
1924 Racial Integrity Act. Because Richard was white and Mildred was African
American and Native American, their marriage was illegal and a felony offence
in Virginia.
On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the felony
charge of miscegenation and Judge Leon M. Bazile sentenced them to one year in
prison. The sentence was suspended if the Lovings agreed to be banished from
Virginia for twenty-five years. On appeal, Bazile refused to set aside his
original verdict, thereby propelling the Lovings’ case toward the U.S. Supreme
Court, stating, “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.”
Banished from Virginia, the Lovings’ moved to Washington,
D.C. In June 1963, Mildred wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, asking if
the new Civil Rights legislation would help her family return to Virginia.
Kennedy responded that Mildred contact the American Civil Liberties Union, who
had been actively pursuing anti-miscegenation test cases since the late 1950s.
ACLU attorneys Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop took the Lovings’ case,
filing a brief in November 1964. The Loving v. Virginia decision delivered on
June 12, 1967, found all miscegenation laws unconstitutional.
From Chief Justice Earl Warren’s 1967 unanimous opinion: "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."
In an era before any digital tinkering with results was
possible, Grey Villet’s technique was one that required intense
concentration, patience and understanding of his subjects joined with a
technical mastery that allowed rapid use of differing cameras and lenses to
capture and compose the "right stuff" on film as it
happened. “RIGHTS, RACE & REVOLUTIONS:A Portrait of LIFE in 1960s America
by Grey Villet” was exhibited at the Museum at Bethel Woods April 2 – December
31, 2016. Grey Villet died in 2000.
Gallery hours are 10 to 5 Daily, admission is free. Visit www.monroegallery.com for more information.
“Richard and Mildred Loving” (1965), by Grey Villet.
Courtesy of the estate of Grey Villet.
Via The New Yorker: a selection of eight writers on photographs that they are thankful for.
Recently, I’ve been travelling in the Deep South, pausing at civil-rights sites along my reporting route—Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s’s bomb-pocked parsonage in Montgomery, Alabama, for starters, and Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Most of the landmarks that I’ve visited display iconic photographs of the movement’s labors, largely rooted in the politics and aesthetics of struggle: black youth and integrated Freedom Riders standing, disobediently civil, before snarling police dogs and sneering lunch-counter crowds. Here, though, I’ve plucked a photograph from the movement that draws its strength less from struggle than from domestic affection, which seems well-suited to file under “Thanksgiving”: an image from Grey Villet’s 1965 series, for Life magazine, on Richard and Mildred Loving, the interracial couple in Central Point, Virginia, who helped to end the interminable era of anti-miscegenation statutes. The power of the series lies in the quiet intimacies that it captures. Mostly, the photos depict everyday life: eating, idling, kissing, conferring. In this particular shot, the Lovings watch TV and laugh—a reminder that to lounge about in simple communion can sometimes be beautifully subversive, too.
Well-timed and well crafted in equal measures, The Loving Story is a thoughtful, terrifically intimate account of the case that dismantled this country's anti-miscegenation laws 100 years after the abolition of slavery. The story of Virginia couple Mildred and Richard Loving's efforts to live and love each other freely captures a critical moment in a civil rights movement whose most recent strides—for same-sex marriage—are just a few weeks old. First-time director Nancy Buirski's focus on the constitutional tangles that brought Loving v. Virginia before the Supreme Court in 1967 also complement Lincoln's warm, wonky embrace of the democratic procedural. A wealth of archival footage gives The Loving Story an oddly modern quality. We watch the supremely humble couple (Richard was white; Mildred part black and part Native American) interacting at home, tolerating journalists, conferring with attorneys, and recounting their path to the courtroom: Having been arrested in their home state, the Lovings moved to Washington, D.C. Mildred's distressed letter to Bobby Kennedy set things rolling. Equally compelling is footage of the dauntless young lawyers, Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, who saw much to be gained in one couple's belief in their rights and even more to be cut away.
Details
The Loving Story
Directed by Nancy Buirski
Icarus Films
Opens December 10, Maysles Cinema
An exclusive screening for Museum of Tolerance members only
Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 7:00pm
A racially-charged criminal trial and a heart-rending love story converge in this documentary about Mildred and Richard Loving, a part-black, part-Indian woman married to a white man in Jim Crow era Virginia. Thrown into rat-infested jails and exiled from their hometown for 25 years, the Lovings fought back and changed history. They were paired with two young and ambitious lawyers who were driven to pave the way for social justice and equal rights through a historic Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia. THE LOVING STORY takes us on a journey into the heart of race relations in America. But, in the end, it is a poignant love story of two people who simply wanted to live in the place they called home.
This film, with its contemporary parallels, will live on as record of monumental change, not just in civil rights then, but in the human right to pursue happiness regardless of color, gender or creed.
Q & A with Director Nancy Buirski and Producer Elisabeth Haviland James.
Dessert reception to follow.
There is no charge for the screening but pre-registration is required. THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT
In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving were arrested in a nighttime raid in their bedroom by the sheriff of Caroline County, Va. Their crime: being married to each other. The Lovings — Mildred, who was of African-American and Native American descent, and Richard, a bricklayer with a blond buzz cut — were ordered by a judge to leave Virginia for 25 years. In January, the International Center of Photography is mounting a show of Grey Villet’s photographs of the couple in 1965. That exhibit is complemented by an HBO documentary, ‘‘The Loving Story,’’ directed by Nancy Buirski, which will be shown on HBO on Feb. 14. The film tells of the Lovings’ struggle to return home after living in exile in Washington, where Mildred, gentle in person but persistent on paper, wrote pleading letters to Robert F. Kennedy and the A.C.L.U. Two lawyers took their case to the Supreme Court, which struck down miscegenation laws in more than a dozen states. The Lovings’ belief in the simple rightness of their plea never wavered. Asked by one of his lawyers if he had a message for the Supreme Court, Richard said he did: ‘‘Tell the court I love my wife.’’
Grey Villet's photographs are available from Monroe Gallery of Photography. View selected photographs of the Lovings during photo la at Monroe Gallery of Photography, Booth B-500.
