You Have No Right: Law and Justice in Virginia – Individual Rights and Civil Liberties

As we commemorate the sesquicentennial of the American Revolution in 2026, we are reminded that individual rights were a cornerstone for independence and the development of the United States. The actions of Virginians provide particularly good examples to learn about the role of the law and the courts in defining and protecting the rights and liberties of American citizenship. The state’s legal culture and how Virginians interpret the concepts of law (what is written in constitutions, statutes, and court decisions) and justice (a moral precept by which individual people or societies determine right and wrong) are the results of the actions of private citizens and of men and women who hold public office or serve the public as officers of the courts. Legislators make the laws, and judges interpret and apply the laws, but voters, jurors, and citizens are in many ways influential participants in shaping the laws, the legal process, and how courts and other legal institutions function.

For most of Virginia’s history, laws outlawed marriage between white people and people of other races. The earliest prohibitions against interracial marriage were clauses in laws regulating slaves and slavery; later prohibitions were in laws defining race. In 1691 the assembly first prohibited the marriage of any white person to any free or enslaved Indigenous person or person of African descent as part of an act intended to deal with the problem of enslaved people running away.

Legal prohibitions against interracial marriage were not always followed. Robert Wright, a free Black man, married Mary Godsey, a white woman, in 1806. In January 1815 she eloped with a white man, but Wright overtook the couple and persuaded his wife to return. That November, she fled with the same man to Tennessee. Wright petitioned for a divorce. The General Assembly rejected his petition because the marriage had never been legal. In an 1849 act, the Assembly explicitly voided all marriages “between a white person and a negro.”

After the Civil War and emancipation, the General Assembly amended the Code of Virginia to tighten existing restrictions on marriage. In 1873 it made interracial marriages contracted outside of the state illegal. In 1878 the Assembly made it illegal to go out of state to marry a person of another race and increased prison sentences for both parties. The 1924 Racial Integrity Act was part of a series of laws designed to further prevent racial intermixing. As director of the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912 to 1946, Dr. Walter Plecker enforced the division of Virginians into strictly defined racial categories of “white” and “colored.” Every person living in Virginia had to register as either “white” or “colored.” This designation determined whom a person could marry and where he or she could attend school, among other things. Plecker obsessively documented birth and marriage registration submitted to his office and interfered to stop marriages between people who he believed did not correctly describe their racial classification. Some Virginians filed lawsuits disputing their racial classification and claiming their right to get married.

In 1925, Atha Sorrells filed suit against Rockbridge County Circuit Court Clerk A.T. Shields after he denied her a license to marry Robrt Painter on the grounds that she was not white. A judge ruled in her favor, arguing that there was not “an appreciable amount of foreign blood” because Sorrells’s Indian ancestor had lived almost 130 years ago. The decision angered Plecker, but he advised against appealing the Sorrells case to the state’s Supreme Court out of concern that the court might rule in her favor. Plecker regularly investigated what he believed were mixed-race marriages, including in 1937 when he informed the Botetourt County clerk that Grace Mohler and Samuel Christian Branham were not legally married because Plecker classified him as “Negro.”

Loving v. Virginia

Richard Perry Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a multi-racial woman, were lawfully married in Washington, D.C., on June 2, 1958. They returned home to Caroline County, where they were arrested weeks later. At that time, Virginia was one of twenty-four states that had laws forbidding interracial marriage. In January 1959, the Caroline County Circuit Court sentenced the Lovings to one year in prison, which was suspended for a period of twenty-five years if they left Virginia immediately and did not return together. After living in Washington, D.C., for five years, Mildred Loving filed suit with the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union, arguing that the Virginia law violated the Constitution of Virginia and the U.S. Constitution.

Caroline County judge Leon Bazile attempted to block their appeal in 1965 with his final ruling. He found them guilty and sentenced them to a year in jail, explaining that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And 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.” Virginia’s Supreme Court of Appeals ruled that the law did not deprive the couple of the equal protection of the laws.

The Lovings appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 12, 1967, the court unanimously ruled in Loving v. Virginia that Virginia’s marriage law violated the Fourteenth Amendment, with Chief Justice Earl Warren writing that “Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival.” The court overturned the Lovings’ convictions, and interracial marriage was legalized in the United States.

Constitutional Amendment

Homosexual couples also faced prohibitions against marriage. Fights over same-sex marriage came to a head in Virginia in 2006, when voters ratified an amendment to the state constitution stating that “only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this Commonwealth and its political subdivisions.” The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated Virginia’s constitutional ban in 2014 in Bostic v. Schaefer. In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage throughout the nation. In November 2026, Virginians will vote on a referendum to repeal the provision defining marriage as between one man and one woman and to prohibit the state from denying a marriage license to two adult persons based on sex, gender, or race.

Sometimes the law and the courts do not protect individual rights and civil liberties of all citizens, but favor some at the expense of others.

Buck v. Bell

In 1924, the General Assembly attempted to improve social welfare by granting mental institutions the means to prevent people considered “feeble-minded” or having inherited diseases or conditions from having children. Behind the law was the eugenic assumption that such traits as alcoholism, epilepsy, or feeblemindedness were hereditary and that sexual sterilization could thus prevent their transmission.

Carrie Elizabeth Buck was born in Charlottesville in 1906 and placed with a foster family at age three. Her foster parents took her out of school after sixth grade to perform housework for them. In 1923 she became pregnant after her foster parents’ nephew raped her. The family had her committed to the Virginia State Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded after her daughter was born in March 1924. Shortly after Buck’s commitment, Albert S. Priddy, superintendent and physician at the colony, selected her to be the subject of the test case for the constitutionality of Virginia’s recently enacted involuntary sterilization statute. They chose Buck in the belief that she had inherited feeblemindedness from her mother and that her daughter showed signs of slow mental development as well.

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell agreed that the state could require sterilization of people it deemed socially unfit. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the court that the state had a right to “prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

Referring to Carrie Buck, her mother, and her daughter, Holmes went on to state that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” She was sterilized that year and released from the colony. She married twice, and family and friends later denied the accuracy of her diagnosis. Carrie Buck Eagle Detamore died in 1983.

Bottoms v. Bottoms

Sharon Lynne Bottoms, a twenty-three-year-old divorced mother with custody of her two-year-old son, had become involved in a long-term relationship with another woman. In 1993, her mother, Pamela Kay Bottoms, filed a petition in the Henrico County juvenile court to obtain custody of her grandson on the grounds that he was living in an environment that was harmful to his mental and physical well-being. Judge William G. Boice agreed and awarded custody of the boy to his grandmother. A Henrico Circuit Court judge upheld Boice’s ruling, calling the lesbian relationship between Bottoms and April Wade “illegal” and “immoral,” which made Bottoms an “unfit parent.”

Sharon Bottoms appealed to the Virginia Court of Appeals, which ruled in June 1994 that custody should be returned to her. Kay Bottoms then appealed to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which in 1995 reinstated her custody. The 4-to-3 decision noted that homosexuality could not be the sole factor in determining whether a parent is fit or unfit, but the opinion noted that the “moral climate” of the home and the “social condemnation” that the child might experience as a result of growing up in a lesbian household were among the factors taken into consideration.

Sharon Bottoms returned again to the Henrico County Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court in 1995 to request custody of her son, but in February 1996 Judge Boice upheld his 1993 ruling that she was not a fit parent, in part because she cooperated with producers of a made-for-TV movie about the case. Later that year Sharon Bottoms abandoned her legal fight and accepted twice-monthly visits with her son on condition that April Wade not take part.

In December 2011, Virginia’s Board of Social Services approved regulations to allow state-licensed private adoption agencies to deny same-sex couples the right to adopt a child. The 2014 ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Bostic v. Schaefer permitted same-sex partners to adopt a child together as a married couple in Virginia. In 2020, the General Assembly approved a law prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation in all areas.