Andrea Perez, a white woman, and Sylvester Davis, a black man met while working in the defense industry in Los Angeles.

The county clerk, named W. G. Sharp, refused to issue the license based on California Civil Code, Section 60: "All marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mongolians, members of the Malay race, or mulattoes are illegal and void" and on Section 69, which stated that "no license may be issued authorizing the marriage of a white person with a Negro, mulatto, Mongolian or member of the Malay race".

In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Douglas Edmonds held that the statute violated the religious freedom of the plaintiffs since the anti-miscegenation law infringed on their right to participate fully in the sacrament of matrimony.

In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Carter wrote that the statutes under consideration were "the product of ignorance, prejudice and intolerance" that "never were constitutional" because when first enacted "they violated the supreme law of the land as found in the Declaration of Independence".

With regard to "the desirability or undesirability of racial mixtures", he noted that the petitioner's brief included several quotations from Adolf Hitler's autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, and stated that "[t]o bring into issue the correctness of the writings of a madman, a rabble-rouser, a mass-murderer, would be to clothe his utterances with an undeserved aura of respectability and authoritativeness".