Friday, May 16, 2008

Mildred Loving and American history

The obituary section is, most of the time, the most thoughtful and best written part of The Economist.

Today, in kind but unsentimental language, we learn of how two almost invisible people became transiently famous, then a part of history, and then vanished away again...

Mildred Loving | Economist.com

... Mrs Loving wanted to return for good. When the Civil Rights Act was being debated in 1963, she wrote to Robert Kennedy, the attorney-general, to ask whether the prospective law would make it easier for her to go home. He told her it wouldn't ...

It's a remarkable story about American history, and how the mechanics of American law create history from the ahistoric.

It would play differently in the age of Oprah.

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