Constitutionality check.

• Position: PAIRING PRIMARY & SECONDARY SOURCES - Interracial marriage

An important role of the U.S. Supreme Court is to determine whether laws are constitutional. In the 1967 case Lovinq v. Virginia, the Lovinqs had been arrested under a 1924 Virginia law prohibiting interracial marriage. Their lawyers argued to the Court that Virginia's law violated the 14th Amendment, which safeguards the rights of individual citizens. Below are excerpts from three Key documents in that case--the 14th Amendment, the Virginia law against interracial marriage, and the Court's decision, penned by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Read these documents along with the Upfront article, then answer the questions at the bottom of the page.

14th Amendment, Section 1:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

From Virginia's Racial Integrity Act:

It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other [mixture] of blood than white and American Indian. For the purpose of this act, the term "white person" shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons.

From the Supreme Court Ruling:

This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a [law] adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment....

[The State of Virginia] contends that, because its [interracial marriage] statutes punish equally both the white and the Negro * participants in an interracial marriage, these statutes, despite their racial classifications, do not [discriminate] based...