When Demetria Mills-Obadic heard about the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage, she screamed so loud that her co-workers rushed to her cubicle to see if she was having a medical emergency.
But her shouts were of joy, and she wasn’t the only happy one in her office: her father, Roger Mills, also a lawyer there, was giddily spreading the word.
The two represent a 45-year continuum in a family fight to expand civil rights through marriage. Her father, who is white, battled for the right to marry a black woman in 1970 and helped end enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws. She pushed for domestic partner benefits in Georgia.
The elder Mills said he never sought his fight.
“I just fell in love,” he said.
His daughter described the power of the court’s decision to affect American lives. A gay friend with whom she spoke sobbed as she shared how how relieved she was that her wife was now technically also the mom of her two adopted children.
“It’s like we’ve finally been accepted into the American family,” Mills-Obadic said. “This is making our country stronger because it’s making our families stronger.”
Roger Mills won his civil rights fight in Mississippi as a 24-year-old law clerk. Because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s aptly-named “Loving” decision, striking down a Virginia law forbidding interracial marriage, he assumed he was free to marry a black woman.
Mills thought he’d have no problem getting a marriage license. When he went to the county clerk’s office, though, he was confronted with a “white” book and a “black” book. “I registered both of us in the white book,” he said, adding dryly: “There was somebody in the clerk’s office who didn’t agree with what I was doing.”
Opponents obtained a court order blocking the union.
Mills was working with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund on racial integration of schools and found colleagues to help. Eventually, a federal judge ordered the issuance of the marriage license.
On Aug. 2, 1970, Mills’ lover, Berta, became his wife, “toppling a legal barrier against interracial marriage that had been on the books for more than 100 years,” the New York Times reported.
Mississippi’s anti-miscegenation law remained on the books but was no longer enforced. “After our marriage,” Roger Mills said, “it was all over.”
They had two girls — Demetria and her older sister — and wanted to enroll them in “white” schools in DeKalb County after moving to Atlanta. So Mills had a deeply personal reason to continue his fight for school integration.
He and his daughter now work in the same federal office that enforced the integration of DeKalb schools: the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.
Mills-Obadic followed her father’s example. Two years ago, in a civil ceremony in New York, she married longtime partner Sylvie Obadic. A decade before that, she had stood up to her employer of that time, the Fulton County Commission. The county didn’t grant health or other benefits to gay partners. But those were potentially on offer after a commissioner proposed a change of policy. Another commissioner, who described unmarried couples as “shacking,” opposed the idea.
“This is the civil rights struggle of the 21st century, ” Mills-Obadic said in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article in June 2003, after speaking out at commission meetings with other gay employees. The next month, the Fulton commission extended benefits to partners of gay employees.
On Friday, Mills-Obadic said she has struggled with things others take for granted, like getting a passport when her married surname didn’t match the name on her Georgia driver’s license, or filing tax returns.
Like so many others, she has been amazed by society’s embrace of gay marriage. A decade ago, “I was thinking it was probably some time in the next 50 years. I didn’t expect it to be this soon.”
