The Racial Integrity Act and the Bureau of Vital Statistics
Enacted 20 March 1924; struck down 12 June 1967 in Loving v. VirginiaCapitol Square: the General Assembly and the Bureau of Vital Statistics, Richmond City, VA
Virginia made it a crime for a white person to marry anyone with any trace of other ancestry, and put a eugenicist registrar in Richmond in charge of deciding who was what. His re-labelling of Virginia Indians as colored is still called a paper genocide.
The Racial Integrity Act was enacted on 20 March 1924. It defined a white person as one with "no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian", classed everyone else as colored, prohibited marriage across that line and required applicants for a marriage licence to register a race. One exception was written in for the state's own gentry: a person with one-sixteenth or less American Indian ancestry and no other non-Caucasian ancestry could still count as white, which protected the many prominent Virginia families claiming descent from Pocahontas and John Rolfe. The same General Assembly passed the Eugenical Sterilization Act that year, and followed in 1926 with the Public Assemblages Act requiring the races to be separated in theatres, halls and public meetings.
Enforcement ran out of the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Richmond, where Walter Ashby Plecker was the state registrar from 1912 to 1946. Plecker applied a stricter rule than the statute gave him, treating anyone with even a trace of negro blood as colored; in 1930 the Assembly caught up with him, redefining colored to mean any ascertainable degree of negro ancestry - the one-drop rule in law.
His particular target was Virginia's Indigenous people. Plecker circulated to local registrars, clerks and schools lists of surnames he held to be descended from free negroes, and he went back through birth certificates recorded before 1924 that said "Indian" and reissued them as "colored". In December 1943 he asserted that Virginia had no Indians left. The paperwork was the instrument: a tribe cannot be documented out of existence, but its members can be, one certificate at a time.
The Supreme Court struck down the marriage ban on 12 June 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, holding that its racial classifications served no legitimate purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination. The General Assembly denounced the act in 2001. The cost of Plecker's thirty-four years did not end there: the Virginia tribes that have since won federal recognition had to prove unbroken descent using records the state had deliberately falsified.
The act applied across Virginia; the decisions about who was white, colored or Indian were made in Richmond, and the Indigenous birth records were rewritten there.
Sources
- The Racial Integrity Act, 1924: An Attack on Indigenous IdentityNational Park Servicenps.govThe act's definition of whiteness, the Pocahontas exception, Plecker's tenure from 1912 to 1946, the surname lists, the rewriting of pre-1924 Indian birth certificates, and the effect on federal recognition of Virginia tribes.
- Racial Integrity Laws (1924-1930)Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.orgThe 20 March 1924 enactment, the companion sterilization act and 1926 Public Assemblages Act, Plecker's stricter standard, the 1930 one-drop amendment, Loving v. Virginia, and the Assembly's 2001 denunciation.
- Virginia Health Bulletin: The New Virginia Law To Preserve Racial Integrity, March 1924Document Bank of Virginia, Library of Virginialva.virginia.govPlecker's own bulletin to local clerks: the text of the law, his instructions for issuing marriage licences, and his case for racial separation.
- Walter Plecker asserted that Virginia Indians no longer exist, December 1943Library of Virginialva.virginia.govThe registrar's 1943 assertion, in the state library's own holdings.