June 12th is celebrated as Loving day after this class-action case from 1967 when the U.S Supreme Court made this landmark Decision. 

Mildred and Richard Loving had been sentenced to a year in prison in Virginia because they were married. You would think this to be outrageous with a few exceptions. The year was 1958, The state was Virginia, Richard was white and Mildred was black. At the time, According to Wikipedia, inter-racial marriages were illegal. The couple took their case to the Supreme court.

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Lovings' convictions in a unanimous decision dated June 12, 1967, dismissing the Commonwealth of Virginia's argument that a law forbidding both white and black persons from marrying persons of another race and providing identical penalties to white and black violators could not be construed as racially discriminatory. The court ruled that Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute violated both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Today this is also used as a foundation for the argument on same-sex marriage across the country and was even mentioned during Kalamazoo Pride 2017 which  took place on Friday, June 9 and Saturday, June 10, 2017 at the Arcadia Creek Festival Site in downtown Kalamazoo.

BONUS VIDEO: A Look at the Abandoned Slide Away near Kalamazoo

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