Florence and Ed met in the 1960’s in Nashville while they were in college – Ed at Vanderbilt and Florence at Fisk University. They began dating after getting to know each other as co-facilitators for the Upward Bound program and got married in 1968, just over a year after the Loving v. Virginia decision. They have two adult sons and a granddaughter.
In this episode of the Loving Project podcast, Florence and Ed share what it was like to date as an interracial couple in Tennessee in the 1960’s, how they handled objections from family members, and their concerns about having biracial children at a time when they had no models of multiracial families to look to. They also reflect on the 50th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the court decision that enabled them to marry in Florence’s home state of North Carolina and made marriages like theirs legal nationwide.