Loving: The Real Story

Posted on November 9, 2016 at 8:00 am

“Loving,” opening across the country this week, is about the couple whose marriage became the Supreme Court case “Loving v. Virginia.” It is shocking today to think that it was not until 1967 that laws prohibiting marriage between people of different races were found unconstitutional. Today, there is a Supreme Court justice who is himself married to a woman of a different race.

Richard and Mildred Loving lived in a small Virginia community where the races mixed freely. Richard Loving was white and his father worked for a black man. Mildred herself was of mixed race, part black, part Native American, and probably part white as well. Virginia, which shut down the state’s school system for two years rather than follow the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and integrate the schools, was one of sixteen states to prohibit interracial marriage. The Virginia judge who upheld the law wrote:

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.

The judge relied on an earlier court decision upholding miscegenation laws “to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens,” and to prevent “the corruption of blood,” “a mongrel breed of citizens,” and “the obliteration of racial pride.”

The Lovings were married in the District of Columbia, which permitted interracial marriage, and then they returned to their home. Police broke in while they were asleep and arrested them.

They were banned from the state. The judge told them that if they returned, they would be arrested. So, they moved to Washington D.C. and raised their three children. But they wanted very much to return to their rural community.

Mildred Loving wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy to ask for help, and his office referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union. Two young lawyers took the case. Ten years after they were arrested, their marriage made it possible for interracial couples — including President Obama’s parents — to be legally married.

The unanimous decision was stated in the strongest terms:

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.

Later the Loving v. Virginia decision would be a significant precedent for the Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015, making it possible for same-sex couples to be legally married.

The “Loving” movie, written and directed by Jeff Nichols, stars Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga. It is very much their story, with most of the legal issues and court appearances taking place off screen.

There is a superb documentary called The Loving Story. And TIME Magazine has a portfolio of the LIFE Magazine photos of the couple taken by the photographer played by Michael Shannon in the film.

When the lawyer asked Richard Loving what his message was for the Supreme Court, he said one sentence that was more powerful and eloquent than all the legal arguments: “Tell the judge I love my wife.”

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Race and Diversity The Real Story

My Dad on the Real Story of the Obamas’ First Date

Posted on September 9, 2016 at 10:51 pm

My parents, Newton and Josephine Minow, saw Southside With You, and so my dad wrote an article for the Huffington Post about the real story behind the scene in the film where Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson run into a senior lawyer and his wife, characters based on my parents. Barack Obama was working as a summer intern in my dad’s office at Sidley Austin in Chicago, recommended by my sister Martha, his professor. The firm assigned Michelle Robinson to be his supervisor.

My wife Jo and I went to the theater at Water Tower Place in Chicago to see the Spike Lee movie, “Do the Right Thing.” We walked into the theater and saw Barack and Michelle buying popcorn at the concession stand. It was their first date.

They were startled and embarrassed, because she did not want anyone in the office to know they were seeing each other outside of work. They thought a supervisor should not be dating a summer associate. Jo and I reassured them that there was no problem, and we went in together to watch the film.

They became friends and Dad goes on to talk about an important conversation he had with then-Senator Obama in 2006.

In 2006, I wrote an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune urging him to run for president. I said he combined a first-class temperament with a first-class intellect. Later that year, he asked to meet with me and with my lifelong friend, the late Abner Mikva, because he was deciding whether he was ready — and he country was ready — for him to run. His most important question was whether Ab and I, each the father of three spectacular daughters, thought he could be a good father if he campaigned and was elected president. We told him he would see more of his daughters as President than he did as a senator, and I thought of that conversation many times as I read about the Obamas’ nightly family dinners in the White House.

My best memories of my childhood include the family dinners at our house and I am very touched that Barack Obama understood that my dad could guide him on parenting as well as politics.

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Trailer: Lion, the True Story of a Lost Boy Googling His Way Back Home

Posted on September 4, 2016 at 4:40 pm

At age 5, Saroo Brierley was separated from his mother and brother in India and ended up in Australia, adopted but always longing to find his family again. That true story is brought to the screen in “Lion,” starring Dev Patel as a man who searched the earth — via Google, to find his way back home.

Here’s the real story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW2JFfsisHA

Florence Foster Jenkins: The Real Story

Posted on August 9, 2016 at 3:36 pm

This week the second movie of the year based on the life of Florence Foster Jenkins opens in theaters with Meryl Streep as the woman whose love for music was almost as monumental as her lack of talent.

Florence Foster Jenkins was born in 1868, the daughter of a wealthy family who was a child prodigy on the piano and performed for President Rutherford B. Hayes. She wanted to study music but her father refused, and so she eloped with a man who gave her syphilis. This disease and the primitive treatments of the time may have been the reason for her inability to hear herself accurately. She also injured her hand so she could no longer play the piano.

Jenkins left her husband and later entered into a relationship with a British actor named St. Clair Bayfield (played in the film by Hugh Grant). The great pleasure of her life was putting on elaborate concerts and tableaux, performing for her friends, who helped sustain the fiction that she was talented, despite her warped, off-key, singing. One description: “Her singing at its finest suggests the untrammeled swoop of some great bird.” As in the film, she finally did a concert at Carnegie Hall. In real life, it was attended by celebrities including Cole Porter, dancer and actress Marge Champion, composer Gian Carlo Menotti, actress Kitty Carlisle and opera star Lily Pons with her husband, conductor Andre Kostelanetz, who composed a song for Jenkins to sing that night. For the first time, critics were able to attend and their reviews were devastating. Two days later, she had a heart attack and a month later she died.

“Florence Foster Jenkins: A World of Her Own” is a documentary.

Earlier this year, “Marguerite,”a French film inspired by Jenkins was released in the US.

There have been at least five plays based on her life, including “Glorious.”

There is something endearingly captivating about the idea of someone so passionately devoted to her art, wealthy enough to make her dreams come true, and so fearless in performing. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect in its most benign form. She’s gone, so we have the pleasure of laughing at her (perhaps a little smugly) without hurting her feelings. And now she’s being played by Meryl Streep! Somewhere in heaven, she is smiling and also singing just as beautifully as she always dreamed.

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The Real Story: Free State of Jones

Posted on June 23, 2016 at 3:34 pm

The new film about group who refused to fight for the Confederacy and established a free community in Civil War-era Mississippi is based on a true story. Matthew McConaughey stars as Newton Knight, a nurse in the Confederate Army who deserted because he did not want to fight for slavery or for wealthy plantation owners. In “Free State of Jones,” co-written and directed by Gary Ross (“The Hunger Games”), Knight is a Robin Hood-like figure, with a swamp taking the place of Sherwood Forest.

There was a Newton Knight and he did lead a rebellion, one of several groups who seceded from the Confederacy as the Confederacy seceded from the United States. The story was filmed in 1948 as “Tap Roots,”with Van Heflin, Susan Hayward, and Boris Karloff (as an Indian).

“Free State of Jones” is based on more recent research that indicates that Knight was opposed to secession and considered his “Jones” state a part of the union. The film’s website has detailed information with citations explaining the historical basis for characters like the real-life Newton Knight and Rachel and characters like Moses who are based on several real-life former slaves. The Smithsonian has a comprehensive article with the history of the story and the film.

Incidents described in a book by Sally Jenkins, including Knight’s rescue of an “apprenticed” black child captured by a plantation owner during the post-Civil War period and his decision to live in an all-black community, are in the film. The film also depicts the 1948 miscegenation trial of one of Knight’s descendents, who, allegedly one-eighth black, had violated the law by marrying a white woman. The real story is not as romantic as the one portrayed in the film, but the film is correct in stating that the ruling against the couple was overturned on appeal on a technicality because the Mississippi court did not want a Constitutional challenge to its laws prohibiting marriage between people of different races. Those laws would remain in place for almost 20 more years, and a film based on that case, Loving v. Virginia, will be released later this year.

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