By David Crary, Associated Press40 years ago — on June 12, 1967 — the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down a Virginia statute barring whites from marrying non-whites.
The Court ruled that Virginia could not criminalize the marriage that Richard Loving, a white, and his black wife, Mildred, entered into nine years earlier in D.C.
The decision overturned similar bans in 15 other states when this decision was handed down.
Since Loving v. Virginia, the number of interracial marriages has soared; for example, black-white marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 422,000 in 2005, according to Census Bureau figures. And it's been calculated that more than 7% of America's 59 million married couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to less than 2% in 1970.
Bob Jones University in South Carolina didn't drop its ban on interracial dating til 2000. In 2001 - 40% of voters objected when Alabama became the last state to remove a no-longer-enforceable ban on interracial marriages from its constitution.
The National Center for Health Statistics says their chances of a breakup within 10 years are 41%, compared to 31% for a couple of the same race. In some categories of interracial marriage, more than twice as many black men marry white women as vice versa.
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