Philip Hirschkop

Philip Jay Hirschkop (born May 14, 1936) is an American civil rights lawyer.

With fellow American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) volunteer cooperating attorney Bernard S. Cohen, the two represented Mildred and Richard Loving in several court cases to overturn the Lovings' conviction for interracial marriage in the state of Virginia.

Philip Hirschkop was born May 14, 1936, in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of three boys in an Orthodox Jewish family.

In his youth, his family relocated from Brooklyn to the safer Hightstown, New Jersey, where he attended a small high school.

In Hightstown, he made friends with a number of African American migrant workers who briefly lived there as they passed through town while working in the potato fields, often under terrible conditions.

He saw them often as they shopped in his father's clothing shop.

He attributed "his passion for social justice" to meeting the workers in his childhood.

They were married in Washington, D.C. in 1958, and after returning to their home in Caroline County, Virginia, six weeks after their marriage, they were arrested and charged with violating interracial marriage laws, a felony carrying one to five years.

On the day of their wedding, twenty-four states banned interracial marriage.

The couple were sentenced to one year in prison, but their sentence was suspended on condition that they leave the state for 25 years.

At one point according to attorney Hirschkop, Mildred, though five months pregnant and the mother of a young child, was held in a small dirty jail cell for the better part of a month.

Other clients have included Martin Luther King Jr., H. Rap Brown, Norman Mailer, the American Nazi Party, PETA, and "numerous anti-war protesters during the 1960s and 1970s."

In the 1960s, after the McCarthy era, he served as the vice chair of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee, which now is the Defending Dissent Foundation.

Not long after, he traveled to Mississippi to fight for voting rights, and to help investigate the infamous "Mississippi Burning" murders of three civil rights workers in 1964.

After the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Mildred wrote Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, inquiring if the law could allow her and her husband to live in Virginia.

Kennedy forwarded the letter to the ACLU office in Washington.

The case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court, and on April 10, 1967, Hirschkop and Cohen were permitted to share the oral argument for the Lovings.

In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the Lovings in Loving v. Virginia, overturning their conviction and ending the enforcement of state bans on interracial marriage.

On April 10, 1967, only a few years out of law school, Hirschkop argued as a volunteer cooperating attorney for the ACLU on behalf of the petitioners Richard and Mildred Loving in the case of Loving v. Virginia before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Hirschkop's co-counsel was fellow Virginian Bernard S. Cohen, who had also recently completed law school at Georgetown.

On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court rendered its unanimous decision overturning a Virginia State Supreme Court of Appeals ruling in favor of the state to create and enforce interracial marriage laws known as anti-miscegenation laws.

The decision validated that interracial marriage bans were unconstitutional and their existence in some states and not others denied the couple equal protection under the law guaranteed by the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment.

Most significantly, it reversed the right of states to create laws that banned interracial marriage or enforce such laws where they existed.

Hirschkop has served on the ACLU's national Board of Directors and as Chair of the ACLU of Virginia, which he helped found in 1969.

He also served as executive director of the Penal Reform Institute.

He has been a member of the Virginia State and Washington D.C. bars.

Hirschkop went on to argue two additional cases before the Supreme Court in the 1970s.

Immediately after high school, at the age of eighteen, Hirschkop joined the Army as a Green Beret in the 77th Special Forces Air Group as a paratrooper.

After the army, he attended Columbia University.

While in law school in the evenings at Georgetown University, he used his Mechanical Engineering degree from Columbia to work days as an examiner in the US Patent and Trademark office, though he soon discovered that a career in patent law would not stimulate him.

While still in law school at Georgetown, he attended a party with a number of African-American civil rights lawyers assembled by President Kennedy and was greatly influenced.

Not long after, he met the prominent civil rights attorney William Kunstler, who mentored him throughout his early career.

On a trip to Danville, Virginia, to defend protestors, he witnessed what he described as "one of the worst beatings of black people ever seen in the south".

Over fifty were hospitalized.

He later claimed that experience made him a civil rights lawyer.

Richard Loving was a white construction worker, and Mildred was of both black and native American origins according to her attorneys, though in 2004 she claimed Indian-Rappahannock and not African ethnic origins.

On February 17, 2017, the General Assembly of Virginia passed a resolution commending Philip Hirschkop and his co-counsel Bernard S. Cohen, lauding their work on Loving.

On June 26, 2021, Hirschkop was interviewed and spoke in detail about the case, which video presentation is available online.

The Supreme Court ruling voided the existing interracial marriage laws of 15 mostly Southern states, including all the states of the former Confederacy.

A few states, notably Alabama, continued to have bans on interracial marriage on the books, though they could no longer be enforced.