This memoir excerpt will be published in full in the Northern Colorado Writers Anthology, Spring 2023, a collection dedicated to the theme of “Exception/All: An Exploration of Normal"
In June 1967 Pete learned he had been selected for a summer job in California with the Student Health Project, a federal anti-poverty program. He asked and I said yes and watched him move into action. Pete was the great planner, the great provider, controller, idea man, with notes on index cards in his pocket and boxes of loose change on the dashboard. We had to get to California soon. But where to get married? The District, where I lived, had a waiting period for blood testing; Virginia, where Pete lived, prohibited interracial marriage. The laws of slavery had written that one-part Negro blood meant you were the master's property, and Jim Crow titrated blood along similar lines.
One week the law was violence; the next week the law was liberation, and (to paraphrase Dinah Washington) what a different a week can make. On June 12, 1967, a date now known as Loving Day, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Loving vs. Virginia, struck down anti-miscegenation laws, starting with the one in Virginia. Aware of the historical moment we occupied, Pete called ahead to let the Arlington County Courthouse clerks know when we were coming. The person he spoke with was flustered and said that they were not ready. They said that we should wait, but we were not waiting for Virginia anymore.
“We’ve not received the Supreme Court’s order back from the Attorney General yet,” the clerk said to him. Oh, cradle of the Bill of Right, get your foot off our necks!
“Well, we’re coming,” Pete replied. “We’ll be there Friday, so I guess we’ll have to bring a Washington Post reporter with us.” Pete was bluffing, of course, about the reporter. But when we appeared on June 16 at the courthouse, no one blinked an eye. The forms asked about our bloodlines, and in the box marked "race," Pete wrote "B" for Black and I wrote "H" for human. The justice of the peace, who was also a Baptist minister, seemed excited to perform the ceremony—not because we were the first interracial couple in Virginia’s history—I’m not sure if he even noticed that—but because he had composed what was then something new, an ecumenical wedding service between a Christian and a Jew. He was planning to use it the following week and said he’d like to practice his ceremony on us—since Pete was B for Baptist and I was H for Hebrew! Ours was a short wedding ceremony in chambers with four of our friends, and a judge prattling on about Adam and Eve and a babbling brook. We suppressed giggles, rolled our eyes, and got out of there as fast as we could.
The next day, we loaded up Pete’s taxicab with its new $29.99 Earl Scheib aqua blue paint job. Then Pete and I, like thousands of young people that summer, went to San Francisco, where we lived in Haight Ashbury. After all, it was the Summer of Love.