In 1964, frustrated by their inability to travel together to visit their families in Virginia and social isolation and financial difficulties in Washington, Mildred Loving wrote in protest to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.[14] Kennedy referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).[11] The ACLU assigned volunteer cooperating attorneys Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop, who filed a motion on behalf of the Lovings in the Virginia trial court to vacate the criminal judgments and set aside the Lovings' sentences on the grounds that the Virginia miscegenation statutes ran counter to the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
On October 28, 1964, after waiting almost a year for a response to their motion, the ACLU attorneys brought a class action suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. This prompted the trial judge in the case, Leon M. Bazile, to issue a ruling on the long-pending motion to vacate. Echoing Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 18th-century interpretation of race, the local court wrote:
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