Although Orville H. Hampton is credited as screenwriter along with Raphael Hayes, Hayes stated in an interview that he had never worked with Hampton on the script and in fact had never even met him. Hampton was assigned to write the script by producer/director Larry Peerce, and according to Hayes, Peerce thought Hampton's script was so awful that he ditched it and hired Hayes to rewrite it. However, after arbitration, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) ruled that Hampton's name should be in the credits as co-screenwriter.
Intermarriage between African-Americans and Caucasians was illegal in 14 states until the US Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia was handed down on June 12, 1967. The court unanimously ruled that anti-miscegenation marriage laws were unconstitutional. In his opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State." Interestingly, many anti-miscegenation marriage laws were enacted in the wake of African-American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson's marriages to two Caucasian women, as p
The band playing at the wedding is the Kenny Bass Orchestra.