The Common wealth of VIrginia's offical state slogan is "Virginia is for Lover's" . This slogan came about after the state office of tourism decided to have a contest in 1968 to help bolster visitors to the home of George Washington and a host of other "Founding Fathers".
In 1963, Richard P. and Mildred Loving filed a motion in the Virginia State Court of appeals to overturn an earlier conviction rendered by a local magistrate that sentenced them to 1 year in prison for marrying outside of their race. This case later was argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and was successfully overturned, thereby ending misegination laws in the United States (legally speaking that is). Alabama was the last state in the union to take these laws off of their state books in 2000 (that's right).
Anyway, Mildred Loving died this week at the age of 68. Her husband, Richard, died in 1975.
Kelly and I were married in Virginia and she always likes to say, "We were married in Virginia because VIrginia is for Lovers!"
I researched that slogan this afternoon and this is the information I found:
This article is about the slogan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Is_For_Lovers
This article is about the original people:
This is the article from the Virginia Office of Tourism that explains how the Ad Firm came up with the slogan.
http://www.virginia.org/site/features.asp?FeatureID=140
The Supreme Court case would be fresh in the minds of anyone who lived in Virginia at the time and across the country for that matter because in 1968/69 black and white people could legally get married. I have no doubt that history played a part in the slogan (Virginia is for History Lovers….Williamsburg, Va comes to mind) but I would doubt that the Loving’s were not in the picture somewhere in the creation of the slogan. As a conspiracy theorist, all of that other stuff they mention, how George Woltz eliminated other things so that they came up with the minimalist “Virginia is for Lover’s” sounds like a good cover story to mask using the Loving’s name in the Ad.
Lastly, when reading the last article, notice how in the State Tourism office they have this caption: The year was 1969 and then they begin to rattle off things that were happening that had “Love” or “Lovers” in the title – favorite song “Love Theme”, favorite book “Love Story” etc.
The campaign began in 1968, one year removed from the famous Supreme Court ruling so Ad agencies had to know about the case, the connection and the name….Lovings. And yet even now, the state of Virginia cannot bring itself to see that case as important in the mood of the country at the time.
For me, there is no doubt that the later named Martin Agency was thinking about it, loud and clear….they needed an alternate story. I think they snowballed the state of Virginia into thinking the slogan was about loving history or the beach or universities or festivals…..the underlying theme to all of this was that the state finally settled the case for all “lovers” across the union, so they (the ad agency) wanted to incorporate that into the slogan and they were lucky in that they had a softball thrown right at them: Loving vs. Virginia …even the case has the ad written in it 3 years before the ad campaign!
Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
May 13th
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k10
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forgottendemon
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bisexuallover
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