Loving Day, a proposed holiday celebrating interracial marriage

[kwassa]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/12/AR2006061201716_pf.html

Loving Day Recalls a Time When the Union of a Man And a Woman Was Banned

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 13, 2006; C01


excerpt:

Monday was, by city proclamation, Loving Day in the nation's capital, recognizing the 39th anniversary of L oving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court decision that overturned miscegenation laws in Virginia and 15 other states, all in the South. It was the end of the last piece of state-sanctioned segregation.

That decision has, in the ensuing years, changed the way the nation looks -- the percentage of interracial marriages has increased fivefold from 1970 to 2000, according the U.S. Census, from 1 percent of all marriages to more than 5 percent. The number of children living in interracial families has quadrupled in that time period, going from 900,000 to more than 3 million, and the Census Bureau predicts that such interracial unions will continue to increase.

District-born Ken Tanabe, a 28-year-old product of that interracial boom, is laboring mightily to turn June 12 into a national Loving Day -- a grass-roots observation of the court case and the nation's growing mixed-race heritage. Starting from scratch three years ago, he's built a history-filled Web site ( http://www.lovingday.org/ ) and networked with multiracial advocacy groups to create parties and celebrations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and other cities. Lydia and Peter Mosher attended a small backyard barbecue in the Takoma neighborhood of Northwest Washington to mark the occasion in the city where so much of the Loving v. Virginia case took place.