Jimmy Brown and Kathy Brennan were married in the little chapel at Lewis & Clark, where the high school sweethearts had graduated two years earlier.
In front of his family and friends, Brown sang to his bride, Sunshine on My Shoulders.
Brennan’s parents opposed the match and refused to give her away. They said it was religion. But Brown and Brennan suspected it had more to do with the color of his skin.
Jimmy Brown is black.
“There was high school prom, marriage, jobs, a baby, a house. More babies. New houses. Hawaii trips,” Brown told the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners Thursday. “When I look back, I realize all the good choices we made. We raised four beautiful children who know who they are. And they have the image of a successful relationship. They valued education. They graduated from college. We did all the right things.”
The couple wed in 1976, under the protective eye of armed Portland Police officers; less than a decade after the United States Supreme Court struck down a ban on interracial marriage. In that case a judge in Virginia sentenced a white man named Richard Loving and his wife Mildred, who was black, to a year in jail. He agreed to suspend the sentence if the couple would leave the state.
The Supreme Court, in June 1967, ruled Virginia’s law violated the United States Constitution. The day has come to be known as Loving Day, and is celebrated across the nation each June.
“Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’” Justice Earl Warren wrote in the court’s unanimous opinion. “We find the racial classifications in these statutes repugnant to the Fourteenth Amendment.”
“I remain struck by how something as simple as loving someone could be a felony offense,” said Commissioner Loretta Smith, who brought forward the proclamation honoring Loving Day.
Manijeh Mehrnoosh left Iran in 1986 and fell in love with an Afro-Dominican, Pakistani man she met in Albuquerque. The concept of an interracial marriage had never occurred to her in a country where many marriages were arranged and racial diversity was limited, she told the board Thursday.
“If people want to follow their hearts, it’s beautiful,” she said. “As a result, I have my daughter.”
Her daughter, 22-year-old pre-med student Mariam Rija said she delights in the difficulty people have in defining her, because it challenges and stretches people’s notions of racial divides.
“It happens all the time,” she said. “People ask, ‘What are you?’ I say, ‘I don’t know. A cheese lover?’”
For Jimmy Brown and his wife Kathy Brennan, the change happened slowly.
On their first Christmas Eve as man and wife, they drove to Brennan’s family’s house; their first visit since the wedding nearly two years earlier. Brown sat in the car for hours while his wife made peace inside. The following spring Kathy’s father stopped by their apartment with a pack of beer, and the two men sat down and talked.
Then the couple’s first child, Megan, was born.
“They say a child can change the heart of people,” Brown said. And she did.
Today the couple has four children and eight grandchildren.
They no longer face the obvious affronts of those early years, when an elderly white woman on the bus called them “disgusting,” or the little boy about 5 or 6 who used a racial slur when he saw Brown.
Brown grew up poor, without a dad around. People didn’t expect much from him, he said. People told him and Kathy that they wouldn’t make it either; their love was a phase. Forty years later, Brown is pretty sure they’re wrong.
“I will love her until the day I die,” Brown said of Brennan. “There’s a bedrock there that says, this won’t change. I’m in this for the long haul, we’re going to get through this."