IN JUNE 1958 Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving drove north from rural Virginia to Washington, DC to wed. Their honeymoon period, however, was short-lived. About a month after they had returned home, in the early hours of the morning, local police roused them out of bed and arrested them. Their crime was violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which banned marriage between blacks and whites. A state court ruled that they could either leave Virginia for 25 years or spend a year in prison. They duly fled the state.

It took nine years for America’s Supreme Court to quash their convictions, in a landmark ruling handed down on June 12th, 1967. The decision also revoked anti-miscegenation laws in 17 other states. Since the ruling, which is celebrated annually on "Loving Day", interracial and inter-ethnic marriages have steadily increased in America, from around 5% of all weddings in 1970 to 18% in 2015.

But these encouraging overall figures mask sharp differences in the rates of interracial marriages between specific groups. Of the roughly 400,000 interracial weddings in 2015, 82% involved a white spouse, even though whites account for just 65% of America’s adult population. Conversely, marriages between members of different racial minorities, such as those between blacks and Asians who make up just 1.4% of interracial weddings, are disproportionately rare. Moreover, immigrants are responsible for much of the increase in the interracial-marriage rate. For example, women from five south-east Asian countries—four-fifths of whom are recent immigrants—account for one in ten of all interracial marriages to white men. But the figures are far lower for other racial groups which suggests that the taboo on interracial couples among those born in America has not yet vanished.

The latest numbers on the specific pairing that put the Lovings at risk of going to prison reinforce this finding. To be sure, blacks and whites tie the knot with each other far more than they once did: they made up to 14% of all marriages in 2015, seven times higher than their share in 1979. Nonetheless, these marriages are still under-represented as a proportion of all interracial marriages. The Supreme Court was able to demolish the legal barriers to interracial marriage with a stroke of the chief justice’s pen. But half a century later, the social obstacles are only gradually being worn away.