Howard P. Jeter Living Memorial

Mildred Loving, Matriarch of Interracial Marriage, Dies at 68

Tuesday , May 06, 2008

RICHMOND, Va. —  Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.

Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.

"I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble — and believed in love," Fortune told The Associated Press.

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

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This past April my father Howard Jeter passed away. This is the first year without him, and I’ve been thinking about his accomplishments a lot particularly with the MLK Day holiday.

My Personal Heritage

I am, like Derek Jeter, of mixed heritage. My dad was mainly African-American and Anglo with a considerable amount of Native American. We are direct descendants of Pocahontas and the Mataponai tribe in Virginia. The first Jeter in our family came over from England in the 1600s as an indentured servant. We’ve been around here for nearly 400 years. My mom is German-American on both sides and blonde. Her side of the family came over around the same time.

Family reunions are amazing. You can see virtually every color of the rainbow of people within them. The resemblance between distant family members was uncanny. You would see certain facial features even though you were separated by thousands of miles and in our case, multiple different ethnic backgrounds. One of my cousins married an Irishman, but her daughter looks a lot like my daughter born four years later.

I was approached at the 2000 family reunion held in DC by a man who told me, "…you look like my son." I, being in the family spirit, replied that I’d been hearing that a lot that night. I pointed out two other cousins who I resembled.

We introduced ourselves, found we had the same name, and had a great conversation. Later one my cousins came up to me and asked me if I knew that man was Derek Jeter’s dad. 

But it didn’t matter. Dr. Charles Jeter had told me earlier when I asked why his son wasn’t there that he had to work and just couldn’t make it. I think he knew then that I had absolutely no idea who he was. Of course I was from the West Coast and baseball really doesn’t drive the hero worship that it does back east.

Now I’ve heard recently that Derek Jeter lives in Vista, north of San Diego. If true we should get together and play some XBox when he’s not gallivanting around with the Hollywood crowd.

The Jeter Family in Civil Rights

Our contributions to civil rights are surprising and I didn’t find out about most of my dad’s accomplishments until after he passed away. He was the first black substitute teacher in several Bay Area districts, like El Cerrito. He was also the first African-American permanent teacher hired into the San Francisco school district and taught at Balboa High School during the 1960s and 1970s.

There’s more about my dad Howard Jeter in his memorial blog if you’re interested, I’m just hitting the highlights here.

I remember reading several civil rights books and being able to meet Dick Gregory, the author of one, during a speech he was giving in the 1980s at UC Berkeley. He greeted my dad like an old friend, and this was something that I had noticed around Berkeley. People knew my father everywhere he went, but at the age of twelve I didn’t know that it was on a national level.

My dad ran against Ron Dellums in an early Democratic primary that Ron won in the late 1960s (or Wikipedia says 1970). Ron Dellums went on to serve over thirty years in office and now has a federal building named after him in Oakland. I met him in the 1980s, and he also greeted my dad by name.

Another member of our family, Mildred Jeter, was part of the groundbreaking civil rights decision that overruled the Virginia ban on interracial marriage in Loving v. State of Virginia. This occurred 40 years ago to the day that my father passed away.

My political stance is neutral. Having not experienced the same level of discrimination as my father I’m fortunate for the work that they laid for me yet I also retain a certain amount of belief that the pendulum can swing too far in areas like quotas and preferential treatment.

MLK Day 2008: Going Forward From Here

Prejudice of one kind or another continues in the heart of man. This isn’t something limited to regions, or political parties, or class structure. It’s just how we’re wired. We’re tribal by nature and tend to group into clans. My mom experienced the same sort of prejudice against her when she taught on the Navajo reservation.

Prejudice of any kind is overcome by long term exposure to a different culture and the earning of respect by professionalism in work and loyalty in personal friendships. It’s overcome by involving oneself in the community they live in.

As my aunt once said, we’ve been vocal for generations and one more struggle is a walk in the park. She’s had numerous lifetime achievements for over fifty years of community service given to her where she lives in New Jersey.

I am satisfied however that right now my children will grow up with the knowledge that our very legitimacy is due to the struggles of the 20th century. Our family was not a bystander in this struggle, rather we were directly involved.

That’s my family’s legacy. I’m proud to have known their personal involvement and been able to chronicle some of it. In honor of my dad and of Martin Luther King, I’m posting it today.

The Oakland Tribune ran a great news obituary about Dad today. Here’s a quote from it:

In 1948, Mr. Jeter had a white friend purchase a four-plex apartment house on Ashby Avenue in Berkeley for him because black people were not allowed to own property.

“He lived there and he collected rent from white tenants, but he pretended to be the gardener so no one would be upset,” said his son. “He battled discrimination quite a bit in the 1950s and’60s.

When some of the tenants found out, they moved out in protest.”
Mr. Jeter later worked on the Committee for Fair Housing to secure fair housing for all people.
Fighting for equality, it seems, ran in the Jeter family.

Mildred Jeter, a cousin, was married to Richard Perry Loving, a white man, and in 1963 the two began a series of lawsuits to overcome a conviction for violating a ban on interracial marriages. In a landmark civil rights case, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1967.

“Our whole family was raised with the viewpoint that if it’s not fair, you fight it for yourself and your family,” Charles Jeter said.

It’s nearly midnight, and I’m just now finishing up the eulogy notes for tomorrow. How to summarize nearly ninety years in less than twenty minutes seems to be a huge challenge since I’m finding out more about Dad in bits and pieces from his friends and family than he talked about in my entire life.

It’s a contrast; ask anyone who knows me more than a few minutes and they’ll know more than they ever wanted about me. Yet Dad did things differently. He was focused on a lot of issues that kept him occupied further than I realized as a child.

http://haloscan.com/tb/insidebayarea/5711810

Friday the 13th started out like any other week. I drove up the night before, and was ready to see Dad at Eden Memorial where he had been moved. I was frustrated with the medical community at large, and after three years of working with Dad it was not difficult to see the pattern which was emerging.

This time was different. Recovery was not going as swift as it had before. He was having a lot of trouble yesterday according to the doctor I spoke with and today as I saw him I could tell that it was going to be difficult for him to recover - or he wouldn’t at all. For the first time, he was not responding at all to my touch or voice. This time was scary, and yet peaceful.

The nurse, Amos, was very kind in his manner and touch. I knew Dad was in the best of care. Rare, in my opinion, but he was lucky enough to have someone for at least this watch cycle who was professional and caring. This person Amos would do his best to take care of him.

Dad’s blood pressure was the problem; it kept dropping. Both the doctor and the nurse were grim. Dad seemed to be trending well in the past few hours so I decided to come back later. After lunch. Maybe some shopping to try and take my mind away from the way his eyes looked, open, teary yet fixed.

This was one day in which later wasn’t going to happen for us.

Howard Jeter’s Memorial Service - April 21st (Earth Day Weekend)

Back in the early sixties and prior, the Bay Area was segregated. My cousin relates:

Your father couldn’t get a permanent teaching job in the fifties, although he was the first black substitute teacher in Berkeley and in El Cerrito. I remember when I was going to Willard Jr. High one of my classmates talking about a teacher who they knew and I said, “That’s my uncle.”

Back then, I was only one of two black kids going to Willard who lived in Berkeley. This was in 1954 or thereabouts. As they integrated the schools it was from Oakland.

Dad was the treasurer for the Committee for Fair Housing, as per the oral history by A. Wayne Amerson about Northern California and racial relations. Mr. Amerson was the Chairman of the Finance Committee for the Committee for Fair Housing.

Mr. Amerson related the pressure involved with their movement:

…And then, while all this pressure was on from both our headquarters and the headquartes uptown; one night, someone burned a cross on Dr. Fred Stripp’s front lawn. The next day we had this piece of literature run off for the Negro area, and it shook people up a little bit.