Maryland is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It borders Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C. to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean to its east. With a total land area of 12,407 square miles (32,130 km2), Maryland is the 8th-smallest state by land area, but its population of 6,177,224 ranks it the 18th-most populous state and the 5th-most densely populated. Baltimore is the largest city in the state, and the capital is Annapolis. The western portion of the state contains numerous stretches of the Appalachian Mountains, while the central portion is primarily composed of the Piedmont. The eastern side of the state makes up the Chesapeake Bay, sharing the border with Delaware, and the southeastern side borders the Atlantic Ocean. Among its occasional nicknames are Old Line State, the Free State, and the Chesapeake Bay State. It is named after Henrietta Maria, the French-born queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, who was known then in England as Mary.
Caroline County is a United States county located in the eastern part of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The northern boundary of the county borders on the Rappahannock River, notably at the historic town of Port Royal. The Caroline county seat is Bowling Green.
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". Notably the court ruled the existence of laws based upon race was not inherently racial discrimination. The decision legitimized the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction era (1865–1877).
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law, according to which racial segregation did not necessarily violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which nominally guaranteed "equal protection" under the law to all people. Under the doctrine, as long as the facilities provided to each "race" were equal, state and local governments could require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be segregated by "race", which was already the case throughout the states of the former Confederacy. The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890, although the law actually used the phrase "equal but separate".
Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The case involved Mildred Loving, a woman of color, and her white husband Richard Loving, who in 1958 were sentenced to a year in prison for marrying each other. Their marriage violated Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored". The Lovings appealed their conviction to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which upheld it. They then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear their case.
The one-drop rule was a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry is considered black. It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.
Voting rights in the United States, specifically the enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of different groups, has been a moral and political issue throughout United States history.
The Enforcement Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, Third Enforcement Act, Third Ku Klux Klan Act, Civil Rights Act of 1871, or Force Act of 1871, is an Act of the United States Congress which empowered the President to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to combat the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other terrorist organizations. The act was passed by the 42nd United States Congress and signed into law by United States President Ulysses S. Grant on April 20, 1871. The act was the last of three Enforcement Acts passed by the United States Congress from 1870 to 1871 during the Reconstruction Era to combat attacks upon the suffrage rights of African Americans. The statute has been subject to only minor changes since then, but has been the subject of voluminous interpretation by courts.
A status offense is an action that is prohibited only to a certain class of people, and most often applied only to offenses committed by minors.
Perez v. Sharp, also known as Perez v. Lippold or Perez v. Moroney, is a 1948 case decided by the Supreme Court of California in which the court held by a 4–3 majority that the state's ban on interracial marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Loving Day is an annual national celebration held on June 12, the anniversary of the 1967 United States Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia which struck down all anti-miscegenation laws remaining in sixteen U.S. states. In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws were U.S. state laws banning interracial marriage, mainly forbidding marriage between two different races, until the Warren Court ruled unanimously in 1967 that these state laws were unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the court majority opinion that "the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State."
Harry Lee Carrico was a member, Chief Justice, and Senior Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia. His tenure as an active Justice of the Court, at more than 42 years, was the longest of any justice excluding William Fleming, who served nearly 44 years, from 1780-1824. Because current law requires active judges and Justices in Virginia to retire or take senior status on or shortly after their seventieth birthdays, Justice Carrico's longevity record likely will not be challenged.
Mildred Delores Loving and her husband Richard Perry Loving were an American married couple who were the plaintiffs in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia (1967). Their marriage has been the subject of three movies, including the 2016 drama Loving, and several songs. The Lovings were criminally charged with interracial marriage under a Virginia statute banning such marriages, and were forced to leave the state to avoid being jailed. They moved to Washington, D.C., but wanted to return to their home town. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), they filed suit to overturn the law. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, striking down the Virginia statute and all state anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional, for violating due process and equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment. On June 29, 1975, a drunk driver struck the Lovings' car in Caroline County, Virginia. Richard was killed in the crash, at the age of 41. Mildred lost her right eye.
Linmark Associates, Inc. v. Township of Willingboro, 431 U.S. 85 (1977), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States found that an ordinance prohibiting the posting of "for sale" and "sold" signs on real estate within the town violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protections for commercial speech.
In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its sovereignty with the federal government. Due to this shared sovereignty, Americans are citizens both of the federal republic and of the state in which they reside. State citizenship and residency are flexible, and no government approval is required to move between states, except for persons restricted by certain types of court orders.
Bernard S. Cohen was a civil liberties attorney and Democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates. On April 10, 1967, appearing with co-counsel Philip Hirschkop on behalf of the ACLU, Cohen presented oral argument for the petitioners in Loving v. Virginia before the U. S. Supreme Court. On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Cohen's clients, declaring bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional, thus invalidating the anti-miscegenation laws of 15 states.
Freedom suits were lawsuits in the Thirteen Colonies and the United States filed by slaves against slaveholders to assert claims to freedom, often based on descent from a free maternal ancestor, or time held as a resident in a free state or territory.
In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws were passed by most states to prohibit interracial marriage, and in some cases also prohibit interracial sexual relations. Some such laws predate the establishment of the United States, some dating to the later 17th or early 18th century, a century or more after the complete racialization of slavery. Nine states never enacted such laws; 25 states had repealed their laws by 1967, when the United States Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that such laws were unconstitutional in the remaining 16 states. The term miscegenation was first used in 1863, during the American Civil War, by journalists to discredit the abolitionist movement by stirring up debate over the prospect of interracial marriage after the abolition of slavery.
The Patrick Henry Building is a historic building located in Richmond, Virginia. Formerly designated simply as the Old State Library or the Virginia State Library and Archives and Virginia Supreme Court, it was renovated, then rededicated and renamed for the Founding Father and former Virginia Governor Patrick Henry on June 13, 2005.
Philip Jay Hirschkop is an American civil rights lawyer. With fellow American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) volunteer cooperating attorney Bernard S. Cohen, the two represented Mildred and Richard Loving in several court cases to overturn the Lovings' conviction for interracial marriage in the state of Virginia. The case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court, and on April 10, 1967, Hirschkop and Cohen were permitted to share the oral argument for the Lovings. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the Lovings in Loving v. Virginia, overturning their conviction and ending the enforcement of state bans on interracial marriage.
Virginia 
