>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
[silence]
>> ROSWELL ENCINA: Yep, it's a library.
Shh. Good morning, everyone.
We're so honored to have everyone here today.
I'm Roswell Encina, the Chief Communications Officer
for the Library of Congress, and on behalf of the Librarian of Congress,
Dr. Carla Hayden, she welcomes everyone here this morning.
We're excited to see everyone here today.
Now today's program is in remembrance of Jonah Eskin.
His parents Marcia and Barney keep his memory alive
by supporting the Young Readers Center here at the library
and by supporting programs like this this morning.
We would like to spotlight Marcia and Barney
who are here this morning.
We would love them to stand and be acknowledged by this amazing crowd.
Once again, their generosity has allowed us to do programs like this
and do all the wonderful programs that we do
at the Young Readers Center.
Also, by the way, this week is Children's Book Week.
That's one thing we could probably agree on,
that books brighten the day, it's like the light of the room.
When I was a kid, all those Dr. Seuss books were my favorites,
then when I became a teenager, it's going to show my age,
but I loved those Hardy Boys books.
Nowadays, there's a lot of books to choose from,
especially for young adults.
There's the John Green books, the Neil Gaiman books, I could go on
and on, but you're very lucky with the selection
of books that you have nowadays.
We're very also lucky to have a wonderful group of students here
from the district, and when I call out your school,
you have to show some love for your school and make a major cheer, okay?
It's up to you.
First, the Thurgood Marshall School.
[applause] There was a slight pause there.
I thought they weren't here.
All right, all right.
The School Without Walls at Francis Stevens.
[applause] I think I created something there.
I know we're going to try to one-up each other.
The Langley School.
[applause] The Lowell School.
All right.
The SEED School.
[applause] All right, and the last one, the Washington Global PCS.
[applause] We're all so happy to have all of you here today,
so just one big round of applause for all of you!
Now you're not the only teenagers watching, by the way.
Today's event is being streamed on the Library of Congress's Facebook
and YouTube channels, so for everybody watching online, hello.
[applause] A lot of love from Washington, and we just want
to say hi to all the kids who are watching coast to coast.
Okay, we've got to simmer it down now.
All right.
Now we're here today to talk
about a major moment in civil rights history.
Several months ago, about a year ago, the movie Loving came out,
and it was based on this very important Supreme Court decision.
How many of you have heard of the Lovings?
The adults say yes, so we're hoping before this morning is over,
we would have educated the students here today.
Believe it or not, there was a time in American history
that white Americans and African Americans could not get married.
I know it's very hard to wrap your head around that nowadays,
but that was a dark time in this history,
and you could've been thrown in jail if a couple got married.
That's what happened with the Lovings.
Mildred Jeter, who was black, and Richard Loving, who was white,
lived in not-so-far Virginia.
They got married here in Washington, and when they went home
to Central Point, they were arrested and sentenced to a year
in prison just because they were married.
Yes, really hard to imagine that now.
Their case went all the way to the Supreme Court,
and 50 years ago this year, they won.
Their case changed the law across the country
so that one's race does not determine who one can marry.
The story has just been published
in a new book called Loving vs. Virginia.
We have the author here today, Patricia Hruby Powell,
and the book's illustrator Shadra Strickland who's joined us here
on the stage.
We're also joined by an expert lawyer and educator,
Georgetown law professor Elizabeth Hayes Patterson.
She's been teaching law for almost 40 years,
and one of her specialties is race and the law.
To lead our discussion this morning, I'm very lucky to introduce her.
She's been a friend of mine for almost a decade now.
We go a long way.
She's the Coordinator of School and Student Services
for Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library where she spent more
than 40 years as a mentor, teacher, and advocate for librarians
and young adults just like you.
I used to work at the Pratt Library with Deb, and we've come a long way
from the Today Show to this morning.
Please, Deb Taylor will be leading today's discussion.
Once again, thank you for joining us, and I'll pass it on to Deb.
[applause]
>> DEB TAYLOR: Well, good morning, and it's good to be with you
to discuss this incredible book that treats its subject and the people
who lived this piece of our history
with such artistry, eloquence, and care.
Because this story is so important to who we are as a nation,
we're also going to place it in its social and historical context.
As Roswell told you, I'm joined by an esteemed panel,
and following their introductions,
they will each give us brief thoughts about the work
and the times that it depicts.
We're going to begin with a brief video about the landmark decision
that we commemorate today.
[video starts]
>> MILDRED LOVING: I'd say I think that marrying who you want
to is a right that no man should have anything to do with.
It's a God-given right, I think.
>> HOPE RYDEN: Mildred loving married the boy next door,
Richard Loving.
Richard Loving is a construction worker,
Mildred Loving the daughter of a share cropper.
They were born and raised in Caroline County,
Virginia where white and colored people seem unaware
of the racial prejudice that exists in much of the country.
The Lovings didn't know that it was a crime for a white person
to marry a negro in Virginia.
They found out the hard way.
>> MILDRED LOVING: I didn't realize how bad it was until we got married.
>> HOPE RYDEN: Full of love themselves,
they didn't expect to find hate in others.
Their home swarms with children, their own three,
as well as neighborhood friends who enjoy the warmth here.
Mrs. Loving recalls how the ordeal began one night in 1958.
>> MILDRED LOVING: The night we were arrested.
I guess it was about 2:00 a.m. and I saw this light you know and I woke
up and it was the policeman standing beside the bed.
He told us to get up, and we was under arrest.
>> RICHARD LOVING: You go ahead and play.
>> MILDRED LOVING: Then, anyway, they carried us
to Bowling Green and they locked us up.
In January, they had the trial, and they told us
to leave the state for 25 years.
But the way I understood it, the lawyer said that we could come back
to visit when we wanted to.
So, that Easter, we came back and they got us again.
>> RICHARD LOVING: We had been there a few times before that,
but at Easter we came down, they found out we was down,
and they arrested us again.
>> HOPE RYDEN: The Lovings spent five years in a negro ghetto
in Washington, DC where they suffered the indignities
of unemployment, loneliness, and uncertainty.
When one of the children, unused to city streets, was hit by a car,
Mrs. Loving decided to act.
She wrote a letter to the then Attorney General
of the United States, Robert Kennedy,
who in turn passed the letter on to a Virginia lawyer, Bernard Cohen,
a member of the Civil Liberties Union.
>> BERNARD COHEN: "We have three children
and cannot afford an attorney.
We wrote to the Attorney General and he suggested that we get
in touch with you for advice.
Please help us if you can.
Hope to hear from you real soon.
Yours truly, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Loving."
It was that simple letter that got us into this not-so-simple case.
>> HOPE RYDEN: Bernard Cohen could and did help the Lovings.
He teamed up with another attorney, Phil Hirschkop, and at no fee,
they reopened the Loving case in the Virginia courts,
appealing each losing decision
until at last the United States Supreme Court heard these arguments.
>> PHILL HIRSCHKOP: Arguing for protection,
we advanced the arguments that these statutes are slavery statutes.
They're meant to keep the negro people
in the badges and bonds of slavery.
>> BERNARD COHEN: The outrageous civil effects
of these statutes are not always apparent right away.
For example, if Richard Loving were to die,
then Mildred Loving would not be able
to collect social security benefits as his widow.
>> PHILL HIRSCHKOP: What is fundamentally important, though,
is we asked the court to decide that a state may not pass a law
which proscribes marriage between two consenting,
competent adults based on race alone.
>> HOPE RYDEN: The attorneys for the state
of Virginia refused to talk with ABC.
Bernard Cohen describes their arguments.
>> BERNARD COHEN: They seemed to say
that there was a present day justification for these laws.
That is that they're interested in the welfare
of the children of such marriages.
>> HOPE RYDEN: Today, the United States Supreme Court handed
down a decision.
The Lovings' ordeal is at last over.
Richard and Mildred Loving have won the right to be man and wife,
father and mother, in the state of Virginia.
Anti-miscegenation laws have been declared illegal not only
in Virginia but in all 16 states that have held such statutes.
This is Hope Ryden, ABC News, reporting.
[applause]
>> DEB TAYLOR: Before we begin, we'd also like to remind the adults
in our audience that the last 20 minutes of the program are
for questions and answers between the students
and the participants on the stage.
If time allows and there are no students at the microphones set
up in the aisles, we'll take some questions from adults.
Patricia Hruby Powell danced throughout the Americas and Europe
with her dance company One Plus One before becoming a storyteller
and writer of children's books.
Her picture book, Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker,
has garnered various honors,
including the Robert F. Sibert Honor, Coretta Scott King Honor
for Illustration, Boston Globe Horn Book for Nonfiction,
Bologna Ragazzi Nonfiction, and Parent's Choice Gold for Poetry.
Her documentary novel that we're here to talk about today,
Loving vs. Virginia, for young adults is a Junior Literary Guild
selection for 2017, and her middle-grade nonfiction,
Struttin' With Some Barbecue, is forthcoming in 2018.
Shadra Strickland studied design, writing, and illustration
at Syracuse University, and later went on to complete her MFA
at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
She won the Ezra Jack Keats Award
and Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent in 2009
for her work in her first picture book, Bird,
written by Zetta Elliott.
Strickland co-illustrated Our Children Can Soar,
winner of a 2010 NAACP Image Award.
Shadra travels the country conducting workshops,
sharing her work with children, teachers, and librarians.
She currently works and teaches illustration
at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.
She's an incredible asset to Baltimore arts
and the literary community, leading the effort
to bring the Ezra Jack Keats Bookmaking Competition
to Baltimore City's public schools,
thus encouraging the next generation of artists and writers.
Elizabeth Hayes Patterson is currently the Associate Director
of the Association of American Law Schools headquartered here
in Washington, DC.
She's also an emerita associate professor of law
of the Georgetown University Law Center.
Before joining the Law Center faculty, she served as Chair
of the DC Public Service Utilities Commission and was a commissioner
of the DC Public Service Commission.
At Georgetown, she taught conflict of law, contracts,
race and American law, commercial law, sales transaction,
and the Civil Rights Movement.
She's also served as Associate Dean for the JD and graduate programs
at the Law Center with the responsibility
for the supervision of academic programs.
She received the Law Center's Faculty Member of the Year Award,
and in 2001, she received the Law Center's Frank F. Flegal
Teaching Award.
Elizabeth will lead us off with her comments.
>> ELIZABETH HAYES: Thank you.
Good morning, everyone.
>> AUDIENCE: Good morning.
>> ELIZABETH HAYES: Well, first,
I have to give a shout-out to two schools.
I welcome all the students, but I have to recognize those
from the Thurgood Marshall School.
Thurgood Marshall was started
by two Georgetown University Law Center graduates,
so a special welcome to you, and a special welcome to those
from SEED public charter school
where our son Malcolm was a resident instructor.
So, I want to pick up on something you heard in the tape, and that is,
one of the lawyers, Phil Hirschkop, referred to the fact
that what they wanted to do was to address a law
that was a vestige of slavery.
So, let's begin the legal discussion by going back
to the post-Civil War period.
There were three important amendments that were adopted
at that time, and the goal was
to fundamentally change the status of the former slaves.
So, the 13th amendment abolished slavery.
We'll go back to the 14th amendment in a minute.
The 15th amendment gave the right to vote, denied the ability of a state
to withhold the vote from people on the basis of race.
Of course, you have to realize
that that only affected African American men.
African American women had to wait another 50 years,
along with all women in this country, to get the right to vote.
The 14th amendment, which is the one that was most involved in this case,
is the amendment that guaranteed two things, that an individual
in a state could not be deprived of life, liberty,
or property without what's called due process of law,
and the second was to guarantee the equal protection
of the laws in the states.
So, what did equal protection of the laws mean for the former slaves?
The Supreme Court answered that in 1896
in a case titled Plessy vs. Ferguson.
Plessy vs. Ferguson came out of the state of Louisiana.
Louisiana had a law that said that black people and white people have
to be separated in railroad cars.
They cannot sit together in the same car, let alone the same seat.
Homer Plessy challenged that law, and he, as you might imagine,
assumed that with the passage of the 14th amendment and the guarantee
of equal treatment under the law that that law would be struck down.
That didn't happen.
The Supreme Court determined that the states could separate people
by race as long as things were equal.
This doctrine of "separate but equal" was a doctrine that lasted
for a long time and allowed states to pass laws, which they did,
that either required or allowed the separation of people by race
in movie theaters, in restaurants, in libraries, in restrooms.
During that period of time also was
when Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act, which is described.
If you look at the slide, it's in the bottom middle.
The Virginia Bulletin explains this act.
It basically said that white and non-white people cannot marry,
and if they do, it's a crime.
So, this was what we had as law, "separate but equal,"
laws like the State of Virginia's that prohibited marriage
between people of different races until 1954.
And in 1954, the Supreme Court decided the case of Brown vs. Board
of Education, and I'm sure you've all heard about that.
That was the case where the court looked at this whole "separate
but equal" doctrine and determined, and if you look at the same slide,
to the left, bottom left, Brown vs. Board of Education,
there's the important language where the Court said when it comes
to education, separate is inherently unequal,
meaning there's no way there's equality
when the state says black children have to go to school here,
white children have to go to school there.
Totally unacceptable.
That ushered in what we call the period
of a new Civil Rights Movement, if you will.
And two important events happened the next year, in 1955.
In August of 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was
in Mississippi and he was murdered.
He was murdered why?
Because it's alleged that he insulted a white woman.
How did he insult her?
He either whistled or he said something to her.
That's it.
And then in December of 1955, I know you remember, Rosa Parks,
Mrs. Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery,
Alabama, and the Montgomery bus boycott started.
After that, in 1955, one other important thing,
the state of Virginia announced that it would engage
in massive resistance to the Supreme Court decision
in Brown vs. Board of Education.
And on the slide, lower right, you see a reference
to Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia who talked about that fact.
Virginia resisted so much that they closed the public schools rather
than integrate them.
And there was one county in Virginia, Prince Edward County,
about 90 miles from here, where the schools stayed closed
for five years, from 1959 to 1964.
So, that is the atmosphere within which Mildred Jeter
and Richard Loving had their relationship begin.
>> DEB TAYLOR: So, you can see that we have a very dramatic time,
but we're talking about people who are living their lives
and who are not necessarily caught
up in the drama, as we saw on the slide.
Now we come to that story,
and I'd want to start by asking Patricia, why?
Why this story for this time when so many
of our young people don't know this history
or may not feel it applies to them?
Why did this story compel you to write about it?
>> PATRICIA POWELL: It's a story of love.
The name of the couple, Loving, their name was Loving,
and they were very much in love, and I got to tell a love story in
and amongst the Civil Rights Movement.
All those slides that you were seeing
on Ginger Elizabeth's page were pages of the book,
as are these in front of you.
I came from a very socially conscious family and we saw
by example that when somebody needed help, you helped,
so it was a very compelling story for this reason.
Do you want me to go into the research?
>> DEB TAYLOR: Sure.
>> PATRICIA POWELL: Okay.
Before the story even begins,
we have the health bulletin called the Racial Integrity Act
that Walter Plecker in 1924 put into place in Virginia,
and it was the law in Virginia until 1967 when the US Supreme Court ruled
in favor of interracial marriage.
And what it says, I'm not sure if you can read it up there,
but about two-thirds down, it says there are people in Virginia
who are posing for white, but they're not really white.
If you are one-16th Native American, then you can call yourself white
if everything else in your family is white,
but if you are one-16th African American
and everything else is white, you are not white.
That means if you have one great, great grandparent
who is African American, then you are not a white person.
So, what it's saying is we know that there are people in there pretending
to be white who are intermarrying, but you may not do that,
and if we catch you, it's against the law.
So, on the right there, we have the photograph of the classrooms,
the white classroom and the black classroom, and this is under the
"separate but equal" law that Ginger was mentioning,
the Plessy vs. Ferguson.
Does that look equal to you, those two classrooms?
>> AUDIENCE: No.
>> PATRICIA POWELL: I don't think so.
Could I have the slide changed, please?
I did my research in Virginia, Caroline County
where the family lived in a very integrated neighborhood
in a very segregated state.
This is Otha Jeter, Mildred Jeter's older brother.
Both Mildred and Richard are deceased,
but I talked to family members and friends of the family.
The place is very important here because my story starts,
our story starts, in 1952.
The movie starts when they get married in '58, but our story starts
in '52 when Mildred is 11 years old and Richard is
about 16 or 17 years old.
And they grew up in this neighborhood together,
and I got stories from the family members
of what happened in their lives.
Doing my research, I used primary sources which are artifacts
from the time, and I just thought it was interesting
to see how messy they are.
On the very top one, it reads, "Richard Loving,
a white man, and 'Whoosh' Jeter."
They don't even dignify her to give her name.
He is white and she is black, and her name is not even on it.
Here is her arrest warrant, this mess of a page below it.
She was arrested in bed in 1958
after they were married, and then another.
And then they were exiled.
We know a lot of the story that says they were sentenced to a year
in jail or 25 years exile, and they were exiled.
They lived in a slum in Washington, DC.
That was '58, and in 1963, they tried to get the case,
the ACLU lawyers, Bernie Cohen and Phil Hirschkop, back into the courts
by bringing it to Leon Bazile who was the judge for the case.
And he wrote this very racist statement,
which was actually very helpful to the ACLU lawyers
because it was so racist.
And what he said was, "Almighty God ..."
>> DEB TAYLOR: Here it is.
>> PATRICIA POWELL: Thank you.
"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, melee,
and red, and he placed them on separate continents,
but for the interference with His arrangement,
there would be no cause for such marriages.
The fact that He separated the races shows
that He did not intend for the races to mix."
And Mildred thinks about that and said, "Hmm.
This was a nation of red people that was stolen by white people,
and the black people were stolen from the African people."
I don't know if she really said that.
That is speculation.
This is a documentary novel.
It means it's an informational book,
but I told it in the voices of Richard and Mildred.
>> DEB TAYLOR: You talked about some of the documents that are a part
of the book, and I think
that creates a particular context for students.
Shadra, I have to ask you, because it's unusual to have a book
that is written for teenagers, primarily, to have illustrations.
What do you think your illustrations brought to the text
and brought to the story?
>> SHADRA STRICKLAND: Well, I teach at Maryland Institute College
of Art, and I teach a class called visual journalism
where we take students out into the world and draw on location.
And I had wanted to use these drawings in some real context,
but they wouldn't necessarily be appropriate
for a picture book for very young readers.
But my agent was like, "Let's just put them
on the website and see what happens."
Chronicle Books, our publisher, saw these images and they contacted me
about contributing to this book, so I got really lucky, basically.
I think the illustrations add more of the love story.
You can see the slide behind us is one of my favorite illustrations
of Richard and Mildred stealing away to run through the woods
and spend time with each other.
When I talked to the art director and the editor at Chronicle,
we really wanted to focus on their lives as just individual people
as opposed to the law and the other interference with that life.
So, I think that the illustrations add that level of softness
and hopefully a bit of magic between the two of them,
and showing their chemistry and their love for one another,
and illustrations are nice.
It's nice to look at beautiful drawings in the middle of a lot
of intense, legal documents, and then story itself.
>> DEB TAYLOR: Elizabeth, I remember that news clip.
I'm old enough that that's not something new to me,
to see that news clip when the decision came down,
yet I also remember that there were states as late as 2000
that were just removing the laws from the books.
What did that mean, if anything?
Why were they holding on to those laws if it had been struck
down through the Loving case?
>> ELIZABETH HAYES: Well, unfortunately,
even though the law may be one way,
legislatures are sometimes very slow to act to change.
I can't say, I can't read into the mind of the legislators,
and that was in Alabama that finally, in the year 2000 ...
>> DEB TAYLOR: Mm-hmm.
That finally did it, yes.
>> ELIZABETH HAYES: That's right.
I can't say that it was an act of defiance.
I suspect that it was maybe a little of that and a little
of just not wanting to do it,
not thinking that it was an important thing to do.
The important thing is that despite the fact
that Alabama did not remove the law from the books
until 2000, the law was changed.
Once the Supreme Court made the decision, that was it.
>> DEB TAYLOR: One of the things that stood out for me
from reading the book was even though there were all
of these social restrictions on Richard and Mildred when they were
in Virginia, Virginia was home.
And one of the things that comes across both in the illustrations
and in the poetry is the fact that that was,
even with all of its problems, it was home.
How were you able to get that across, that this whole idea
of the distinction between being exiled, so to speak,
and then wanting so desperately to come home?
>> PATRICIA POWELL: May I talk?
>> DEB TAYLOR: Yeah, please.
>> PATRICIA POWELL: It starts in 1952 when Mildred is 11 years old,
and Richard is the background
because he is friends with her big brothers.
It shows how they grow up together in this interracial,
intergenerational, sort of idyllic setting
where they had parties after the families.
They were self-sufficient farmers
and there would be hog-slaughtering times.
So, after hog-slaughtering and all the neighbors came to help,
there would be a big party.
Mildred's older brothers and father played in a string band,
and they were the entertainment for the neighborhood.
There was this beautiful community of whites and blacks
and Indians together who just had this wonderful life.
To be exiled in Washington was so very different.
They lived in a very small apartment, and it was dirty,
and there were lights on all the time.
It was opposed to nature, the natural world around them.
It just did not feel like Earth to Mildred to be in Washington, DC.
She wanted the pastoral scene of her childhood and her family,
a very close-knit family, and the neighbors were all friends.
>> DEB TAYLOR: Shadra, could you speak to the book design?
>> SHADRA STRICKLAND: Sure.
Can I talk a little bit about the other, the family?
>> DEB TAYLOR: Absolutely.
>> SHADRA STRICKLAND: I grew up in Georgia, in Atlanta,
and the Civil Rights Movement was the topic of conversation
at the dinner table all the time with my family.
So, in making the illustrations,
even though I didn't have a time machine where I could go back
in time and just sit there and draw the Lovings as they grew up,
things felt very familiar in the writing with my own mother
and siblings, and the way that we sort of managed community,
and my grandmother growing collard greens and tomatoes.
It was helpful to have grown up with that experience to be able
to make it real in the illustrations.
The book design, Chronicle makes really beautiful books.
You'll see the book.
It's gorgeous.
I really love this Dayglo orange cover, hardcover that we have,
but I felt like we worked closely together in sort of talking
about the mood that we wanted to portray in the story.
I'll show you some.
Can we get to the next slide, please?
The next one.
The next one.
The next one.
The next one.
Okay, one more.
That one. So, the first thing that we understood going in was
that we wanted the book to be printed in two colors to give a nod
to two-color printing back during the day
when printing was more expensive.
You could only afford to print with a limited number of colors.
You can see here in these slides, this is some of the conversation
that I was having with the designer, which is great.
Most times, I don't get to work that closely with the designer of a book,
but because I have design background,
we were able to have intelligent conversations.
So, these are the two ...
I sent maybe, I don't know, four or five different color choices.
I was really in love with the green and rusty red color combination,
but that felt a little too heavy, and then we finally got
to this purple and gold which when they overlapped,
they made a really nice rich brown which makes sense
for illustrating Mildred.
It worked out and it was just great fun
to be able to work with Chronicle.
A big part of visual journalism is back in the '50s,
Leo Lionni was an art director for Fortune magazine,
and he really brought visual journalism to the forefront
and hired illustrators to do what they wanted to do,
basically go out on location and draw, but there was a lot of trust
that had to go into that relationship, and I really felt
that Chronicle gave me that when we were working on this book together.
>> DEB TAYLOR: I think we have time
for one more little bit of discussion here.
I'd like to talk about the 14th amendment just for a moment
since so much of the case hinged on that, and you made reference
to it in your opening remarks.
How were they able to zero in on the 14th amendment
and to make their case when they had not been successful
at all of the lower courts?
Was it just because they were with a more sympathetic court
or were they able to craft a story or craft a way
of understanding the 14th amendment that won their case?
>> ELIZABETH HAYES: I think that the lawyers assumed
that they would not prevail in Virginia at any level,
and based upon the history of the state, that was accurate.
We've referred to the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, but Virginia
and Maryland were the first two colonies,
even before this was a country,
that had passed laws prohibiting interracial marriage,
so this is a very long, entrenched history in the State of Virginia.
So, I think it isn't that they crafted different arguments.
They made the same arguments with respect to the equal protection
and due process rights of the Lovings,
but they knew that they weren't going to prevail in Virginia
with that very entrenched history.
With the Supreme Court, they made basically two arguments.
One is that marriage is a fundamental right for everybody.
Everybody ought to be able to make a decision
if you've got consenting adults, and this is one of the things
that Phil Hirschkop said.
When you have two consenting adults who want to marry,
to deny that right on the basis of race is unconstitutional.
It interferes with the fundamental right
and it makes a classification based on race which is not allowed
under the 14th amendment.
So, that's why they were successful in making those arguments,
but we also have to remember that we've had Brown vs. Board
of Education decided, so we had to have a change to "separate
but equal" in order to get to Loving.
>> DEB TAYLOR: Well, before we move to opening the microphones
up to the students, I do want to give a shout-out
to a wonderful teacher's guide that the publisher
of the book has prepared.
It was actually done by a colleague, Dr. Ebony Thomas
from the University of Pennsylvania.
So, there are great questions and opportunities
to really pursue these subjects in a much more in-depth way.
I think that we've been given a great introduction
to how we can see this story and how we can place it
in our own national history.
So, if there are students who have questions,
would you please approach the microphones?
I see there's somebody approaching the microphone.
That's great.
Bear with me because I can see nothing.
These lights are shining in my eyes, so if I miss someone who is standing
at a microphone, you might need to do a little wave.
>> ELIZABETH HAYES: There we go.
>> DEB TAYLOR: That's better.
>> ELIZABETH HAYES: That helps.
>> DEB TAYLOR: Yes.
Is there someone?
>> PATRICIA POWELL: Once they start, they won't stop.
[pause]
>> DEB TAYLOR: While we're waiting for a student to come
to the microphone, I have another question for Patricia particularly.
We focus a lot on the Lovings and as a couple,
and we see how they grow together in their community.
Did you find any kind of written information about the children
that grew up in that household at that time when they were trying
to establish their legal right to be married?
>> PATRICIA POWELL: Are you talking
about Richard and Mildred's children?
>> DEB TAYLOR: Richard and Mildred's children.
>> PATRICIA POWELL: What I know about that is
that the parents did not want their children
to have anything to do with it.
They did not want their children to be burdened by it in any way,
so they kept it from their children,
so their children did not know much about it at all.
>> DEB TAYLOR: What they were going through.
>> PATRICIA POWELL: Plus, they were quite young.
This was up 'til 1967.
They were born in the late '50s, so they were under 10 years old.
>> DEB TAYLOR: Okay.
Do we have a question yet?
Okay.
>> AUDIENCE: What are you guys' thoughts on the book?
>> PATRICIA POWELL: What?
>> ELIZABETH HAYES: What's the question?
>> DEB TAYLOR: What are your thoughts about the book?
>> AUDIENCE: The story.
>> DEB TAYLOR: What are your thoughts
about how the book might be received by young people?
>> SHADRA STRICKLAND: I think when I received the book ...
When we're working on these things, it's all in the air.
It doesn't become a book until it becomes a book.
So, you're delivering these beautiful words,
you're delivering this artwork, and you're having conversations
about what the book might look like and how it is received,
but you never know until you get it.
When I received this in the mail, the first thing I thought
as an artist is like, "Oh, it's so beautiful."
It's just such a beautiful, substantial book.
A very important piece of ...
It feels very important in your hands, so I was glad for that.
And I think that young readers will appreciate
that as they're reading the story and taking it very seriously
as a piece of literature.
And in terms of the story itself, it's a beautiful love story.
It really is a beautiful love story,
and Patricia can talk a bit more about that.
>> PATRICIA POWELL: Well, I think partly, what's so interesting
about it is the story is all told in verse.
There's a whole lot of white space on the page, so it's easy to read.
It's fast to read.
There are photographs from the Civil Rights Movement,
most of which I first found at the Library of Congress.
It's not like you just go to the Library of Congress and say,
"May I have that photo, please?"
There's quite a process.
You find the photo at the Library of Congress, and then you find
out who owns it, and you find out who you must pay
to get permission to use it.
But, I think that you'll look at these photographs, this one is,
"Race-mixing is communism," and you go, "Whoo!
That's interesting."
And you think about it and you go, "What does that mean?,"
and I think what it means is in 1959 when this photo was taken
and where this is placed in the book in 1959, the timeline of the book,
the US was just terrified of communism and the USSR.
It was just the worst slur you could use
for an American, so they just used it.
So, there's a whole lot of American history in here
that it just gives you a view of the Civil Rights Movement,
a particular thread of the Civil Rights Movement.
We've got the Freedom Riders.
We have the lunch counters.
I think we have another person at the microphone.
>> DEB TAYLOR: Yes.
We've got a question up here.
>> AUDIENCE: What challenges did you face while writing the book?
>> SHADRA STRICKLAND: I'm sorry?
>> DEB TAYLOR: What challenges did you face while working on the book?
>> AUDIENCE: Or creating a drawing or just making it.
>> DEB TAYLOR: Creative challenges did you face.
>> SHADRA STRICKLAND: In making the illustrations,
the hardest thing was sort of taking this idea of visual journalism
and applying it to history because I've never done that before.
All of my drawings prior to had been very ...
Can we advance the slides a little bit?
Had been very direct and on the spot.
Is there no one direct ...
Okay, the slides aren't working.
So, I think for me, the biggest challenge was the research
where Patricia had spent ...
How long did you spend researching the book?
>> PATRICIA POWELL: About an hour, an hour and a half.
Change that hour to a year.
>> SHADRA STRICKLAND: Right, right.
>> PATRICIA POWELL: And a half.
>> SHADRA STRICKLAND: So, knowing that the author had spent
so much time researching the book, and my deadline was a little tighter
for making the illustrations,
I didn't want to make any mistakes, right?
You can see in this slide, my drawing process is instead
of erasing mistakes, I would just redraw it,
so a lot of the drawings I would do seven,
eight times before I felt like they were solid.
I had to rely that YouTube clip that we saw was a main source
of inspiration for me even though Mildred was a little older during
that interview, but having to find as many photographs as possible.
This is a collection of photographs
by a photojournalist named Grey Villet.
And he spent time with the Lovings, taking these pictures
so that they could run this ad and this article in LIFE Magazine.
This was invaluable for me.
And I think that it's important for us now
as we are a very documentary society where we are Instagramming
and Facebooking and Twittering ...
Twittering.
I'm so old.
>> DEB TAYLOR: Tweeting.
>> PATRICIA POWELL: Tweeting.
>> SHADRA STRICKLAND: Tweeting.
Sorry, Tweeting.
These things live on, and generations after us will go back
and use this information.
I was grateful to have this even though this wasn't done
in the age of the internet.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you.
>> DEB TAYLOR: Just before that next question, I just want to remind you
that the book will be on sale in the lobby at a discount price,
so you will be able to purchase copies of the book today.
Another question?
>> AUDIENCE: Obviously, for them, it was a really long process
of getting their whole case all the way to the Supreme Court.
When they moved, that was hard for them,
but why didn't they just move somewhere that wasn't Washington,
DC, somewhere that was more inclusive but not in Virginia?
Because I feel like it was such a long, hard process for them
that it was like, "Oh, if we just leave
and go somewhere that's similar, it would be okay."
Why do you think they-
>> DEB TAYLOR: Why didn't they leave Virginia and go?
>> AUDIENCE: No.
Why did they go to DC instead of somewhere more similar
to where they were coming from?
>> PATRICIA POWELL: They wanted to be as close to home as possible.
In the nine years from the time they were arrested in '58
until it was decided in 1967 by the Supreme Court, they came home.
They were rearrested once on Easter Sunday or the day before Easter.
Then they snuck home from time to time and stayed
with her sister Garnet in an adjoining county, in King
and Queen County, or Essex County, I believe,
and so they were close to home.
Eventually, they were given a stay of ...
>> ELIZABETH HAYES: Well, there was a stay of their sentence,
but the judge amended, the second time amended the order
so that they could go to Virginia.
They couldn't cohabit.
>> PATRICIA POWELL: And at one point,
they lived in an adjoining county, King and Queen County,
but they were supposed to lie very low and keep their apartment
in Washington, DC so they could race home if there was any trouble.
>> DEB TAYLOR: Of course, these weren't wealthy people.
These weren't people with resources to move and to move away from family
where there was support and what have you.
They didn't have a lot of educational background
to change jobs and to do all of the things that we would think of today.
>> ELIZABETH HAYES: Plus, I believe they lived with one
of Mildred's cousins, so that made it possible as attractive as well.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you.
>> DEB TAYLOR: We've got another question?
One over here?
All right.
>> AUDIENCE: You all kept mentioning that if somebody
like a white person was one-16th African American,
they weren't considered white, correct?
If he wasn't considered white or if someone wasn't considered white
and they would date a black woman,
would it still be frowned upon in society?
Or if Richard Loving was one-16th African American
and wasn't considered white,
would he have received the same punishment?
>> AUDIENCE: Do you understand?
>> ELIZABETH HAYES: If Richard had been ...
>> AUDIENCE: If Richard had been 1/16th percent African American
and not considered white and he still married Mildred,
would she still get the same punishment?
>> ELIZABETH HAYES: If it wouldn't be a problem.
They both would be considered non-white.
And that's the other thing,
these laws that separated whites from blacks.
The fact of the matter is from the beginning,
this country hasn't just been white and black.
There had been Latinos.
There had been Asians.
So, one of the requirements when you start having laws
that separate people to white
and black is how do you characterize people
who are neither white nor black?
You have to fit them into these categories.
>> PATRICIA POWELL: In fact, if you were Native American
in Virginia during that, between '24 and '67, you were colored
because you were not white, unless you lived on the reservation.
That's the only way you could have your Native American status.
>> SHADRA STRICKLAND: But, even the idea of one-16th,
how can you even determine that, right?
Richard, constituently, if he were one-16th African American
or one-16th Native American, he still potentially would have looked
like he was a pure Caucasian man and they probably still would have had
to go through what they went through.
Unless they did a DNA test which wouldn't happen back then ...
There's still not really a way to prove that.
>> DEB TAYLOR: A question over here?
>> AUDIENCE: As opposed to all other court cases throughout history,
why choose this one to write about?
>> DEB TAYLOR: With all of the legal cases that there were,
racially-based legal cases, why this one?
Why did this one compel you more than many others?
>> PATRICIA POWELL: As the author?
Well, it's the one that won.
I mean, of all civil rights cases?
As I said before, it's a love story.
I had never written a love story before.
I wanted to write it for teenagers.
I'm a children's and young adult author,
and I think love is interesting.
I got to do research, what I consider research, about love.
I talk to my husband a whole lot about our falling in love,
but I also listen to music that I listen to when I was in my 20s,
when I was falling in love frequently.
And I loved writing the scene
for which Shadra showed you the illustration
of them running through the woods.
I find it the most incredibly romantic.
It's several pages long, but it's very quick
and they never say a word.
They just go out in the middle of the night,
she sneaks out, and they run together.
Whoo! That's pretty cool.
>> DEB TAYLOR: We've got a question back here?
>> AUDIENCE: What was your motive
for choosing this love story instead of other love stories?
>> DEB TAYLOR: Why this love story,
since you wanted to write a love story?
>> PATRICIA POWELL: Well, because this ...
Well, okay.
I could say in general, it's very attractive.
It's very compelling because it is a civil rights story.
I just finished writing Josephine:
The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker.
Actually, I've written it ages ago, but it was in production.
And she was not only an African American dancer who made it huge
in Paris in the '20s, although she was American,
she could not be a superstar in this country,
and she was also a civil rights worker.
So, Chronicle Books knew that I was interested in civil rights,
and Ginee Seo, our publisher at Chronicle Books,
asked me if I was interested
in writing this story, and I absolutely was.
And I really just have to give a huge shout-out to Melissa Manlove,
my editor, who just had a vision for this book that really has so much
to do with why this book looks the way it does.
Also, Jennifer Tolo Pierce, our designer.
It's sort of an interesting thing that the way Shadra
and I communicate while we were making the book is I talk
to Melissa, my editor, Melissa talks to Jennifer, the designer,
the designer talks to Shadra, and then they go, "Doot, doot, doot,
doot, doot, doot," back again.
>> SHADRA STRICKLAND: We didn't actually meet until March
of this year after the book came out,
but that's how it goes in publishing.
>> DEB TAYLOR: Wow.
We've got time for one more question.
>> AUDIENCE: If the movie was already out, why did you feel
like you had to write a book about it as opposed
to just watching the movie?
>> PATRICIA POWELL: I wrote the book long before the movie came out.
I started the book, I'm trying to remember, it was 2012.
I think it was 2012.
First of all, it was supposed to come out in 2015,
then it was supposed to come out in 2016, and then it came
out in January 31st of 2017, so there was a world
in which it would have come out earlier than the movie.
The things that hold it back are things like a designer quit
at Chronicle, and Jennifer Tolo Pierce, our designer,
had to take over a whole lot of everybody else's work.
I don't know what else held it back, but now it's the 50th anniversary
of the judgment, the US Supreme judgment from 1967 to 2017,
so it's kind of poetic that way, right?
>> DEB TAYLOR: Then very often,
when there is a historic milestone commemoration, we will have a book,
we'll have movies, we'll have TV shows, we'll have lots
of discussions, so it's not just one piece of media
that can address a story because we receive these stories
in so many different formats.
Well, I just want to thank my esteemed panel
who did an awesome job.
>> PATRICIA POWELL: Thank you.
>> SHADRA STRICKLAND: Thank you.
Thanks, Deborah.
[applause]
>> DEB TAYLOR: I want to thank the Young Readers Center
for organizing today's event, and all of the volunteers and all
of the staff who really put things together for us and who work
to make sure and to thank you for your wonderful questions
and your wonderful contribution.
So, we hope that you will have a chance to read this book
and see the wonderful change that it made in our country's history.
So, thank you all very much.
[applause]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc dot gov.
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