Intermarriage between African-Americans and Caucasians was illegal in 16 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 pointed out in Ken Burns' documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2004). Johnson married his white mistress Etta Duryea in late 1910 or early 1911, then married another white woman, Lucille Cameron, soon after his first wife's September 1911 suicide. The two marriages outraged white America, and Johnson and Cameron fled America for Canada and then Europe under threat of lynching. Their relationship was fictionalized in the stage play, and subsequent movie, La gran esperanza blanca (1970), for which the Caucasian playwright Howard Sackler won the Pulitzer Prize. The 1913 Massachusetts anti-miscegenation marriage law, which did not recognize any marriage made in a state forbidding the marriage of different classifications of people (the law left unspoken the racial issue of black and white; in Virginia, blacks were allowed to marry other, non-white "races"), was considered inoperative after Loving v. Virginia until in 2005, then-governor Mitt Romney used it as the basis to deny out-of-state couples the right to wed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts after the Bay State's Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.
No company would distribute the film until its positive reception at the Cannes Film Festival. The producers then recovered their production expenses after an advance from distributor British Lion Films.
Producer Anthony Spinelli (Sam Weston in the credits) chose to film in Painesville, Ohio because he knew the town from growing up in the area - Northeast Ohio - and that it closely resembled the town in the story by Orville H. Hampton who had never been there.
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.