Defiant Love: California couples reflect on when interracial marriage was outside the law

INTERRACIAL: Court struck down marriage ban in '48

By Matt O'Brien
Contra Costa Times

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OAKLAND -- It was the kind of kiss that could change the world.

More than 60 years later, sitting on a couch in her Hercules home, her eyes still sparkle when she thinks about it.

"With that kiss, we both knew, 'Oh, boy, this is big.' I knew that my whole life was going to change because I knew I was in love with him." Jeanne Tobey was white. Bill Lowe was black. Getting married was illegal.

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So in May 1948, the couple defied California's ban on interracial marriage by leaving the state. Boarding a train at the West Oakland station, they headed north through Oregon and across the Columbia River to Vancouver, Wash., where a friend had helped arrange a visit to the county clerk's office.

They avoided the stares.

"The justice of the peace was just as nice as he could be," said Jeanne Lowe, who turned 80 this year. "He didn't say a word." Apart from a shared passion for social-justice causes, there was little that set apart the Lowes from other young couples of their generation.

They met at a club gathering in Oakland's Redwood Regional Park in 1947 and became fast friends. Bill Lowe, who had served as a submarine repairman during World War II, would pick up his new girlfriend for dates in his 1937 Chevy coupe.

He grew up as a foster child in a predominantly black neighborhood of South Berkeley. She grew up on an all-white street in East Oakland. Her parents and grandparents were devoted to communist and progressive causes, including racial equality, but were still stunned to learn that Jeanne Tobey's sweetheart was a black man. "My parents didn't consider themselves prejudiced, but they had an only child who was stepping into the unknown," she said.

The first time Bill Lowe proposed, Jeanne Tobey declined. Two weekends later, while alone and cleaning her family's house, she broke down in tears. She had changed her mind.

Mixed marriages had been banned in California for almost as long as it was a state, so the couple could not have expected that before the year was over, a landmark court ruling would have allowed them to marry in Oakland. Washington, at the time, was the closest place to go.

And unlike many other states, California would not prosecute the returning newlyweds under anti-miscegenation laws that governed what race could mix with another -- just as long as they got married someplace else.

At a wedding celebration back home, Bill's family, who hosted, was welcoming. Hers was polite. Their gifts were those of modest households living in a difficult time: an alarm clock and handmade ashtrays, a blanket from her parents, a used toaster.

In October 1948, six months after the Lowes obtained their Washington marriage license, the California Supreme Court in a divisive 4-3 ruling became the first in the 20th century to strike down a state ban on interracial marriage.

Los Angeles couple Andrea Perez and Sylvester Davis had filed the lawsuit. They were devout Catholics who met on a workplace assembly line. Davis was black and Perez, from a Spanish-speaking family of Mexican descent, was regarded by state law as white. The county clerk refused to give them a marriage license when they went to pick one up in 1947.

What happened next, in some ways, was a fluke, say scholars who have studied the decision. The couple stumbled into the hands of an acquaintance, lawyer Dan Marshall, who vigorously sued Los Angeles County, first casting the claim as one based on freedom of religion because the Catholic Church supported their desire to marry.