HAPA IDENTITY, one of the issues to be explored at the National Japanese American Museum's national conference over the July 4th weekend in Denver, indeed focuses on changes stirring in the Nikkei world.
Census 2000, the first to permit two or more racial/ethnic categories, revealed 2.1 million Asians of mixed heritage - 352,232 being of Japanese ancestry or Hapa. Most of them live in California and Hawaii.
And the U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating Virginia's anti-miscegenation law in Loving v. Virginia case [388 U.S. 1] comes to mind. Virginia was one of 16 southern states that had laws that prohibited and punished racial intermarriages.
And the 1967 Pacific Citizen Holiday Issue explains JACL's position supporting the plaintiffs (the Lovings) that was written by Chicago JACLer Harold Gordon.
Last month, Mrs. Mildred Loving, 68, passed away. Several obituaries mentioned the counsels for the principals but not Bill Marutani of Philadelphia, representing the JACL, who was invited to address as a "friend of the court," arguing against the law. The court ruled unanimously (9-0) that states cannot outlaw marriages between whites and nonwhites, noted here in italics as one of the JACL highlights in Bill Hosokawa's "Nisei, the Quiet American," 1982 revised edition.
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The Lovings knew each other since they were young, Richard, 17, and Mildred, 11. Referring to the obituary published in The Economist (May 19), "she passed as her father was Cherokee and her mother Rappahannock as well as black. Her hair could easily set straight or wavy. If Mrs. Loving considered herself, it was [American] Indian like Princess Pocahontas and Pocahontas married a white man."
Richard was a gangly white lad who took her out for years in Northern Virginia, used different counters from the whites when they ate lunch in Bowling Green in the middle of the Caroline County of scattered farm houses drying tobacco leaves.
When the Caroline County sheriff, his deputy and jailer broke into their bedroom in Central Point, Va., that warm July night in 1958, Richard and Mildred were asleep. The sheriff asked her husband: "What are you doing in bed with this lady?" He didn't answer.
"She thought he might have known that their marriage was illegal - a strange marriage, driving 80 miles to Washington, D.C., to be married almost secretly by a pastor who wasn't theirs, just picked out of the telephone book, and driving back again. But they hadn't talked about legalities. She felt lucky to have him.
"She told the sheriff, 'I'm his wife' ... pointing to a framed marriage certificate above the bed. 'That's no good here,' Sheriff Garnett Brooks said."
She had said the wrong thing. Had they just been going together, no one would have cared much. But the certificate meant that under Virginia law they were cohabiting "against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth"- a felony for blacks and whites to do so. The Lovings got up to go to jail.
Faced with a year in jail or exile, they chose to live in Washington, D.C., for 25 years, though she hated it. Mrs. Loving returned for good when the Civil Rights Act was being debated in 1963 and she wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy asking whether the prospective law would make it easier for her to go home. He told her it wouldn't but that she should ask the ACLU to take on the case.
Within two years, the two ACLU lawyers in New York working pro bono obtained a unanimous ruling from Earl Warren's court in 1967 that "under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State." The Lovings were free to live together in their new cinder block house Richard had built himself.
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The day the court issued its ruling on June 12, 1967, was proclaimed "Loving Day" by interracial couples. The P.C. added the Warren court was impressed by JACL's amicus curiae and Bill Marutani's plea before the court. Marutani [1923-2004] was then national JACL legal counsel, 1962-1970.
For the record: The 1967 Holiday Issue features a review of the case written by Gordon, a Chicago attorney and the first non-Nikkei (he was Jewish) elected to the National JACL Board as 1000 Club chair (1952-54). He often sang Shina no Yoru at 1000 Club wing dings, a tune he learned in occupied Japan. Every time I hear that song, Harold comes to mind.
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