20th Century

It wasn’t until the 20th century that the lawmakers started tightening up the racial definitions and making it more difficult to be “white” and impossible to be “Indian.”

The “one-drop rule,” by which anybody with even one “drop” of African “blood”…became “colored,” did not become Virginia law until 1923. The “rule” gained currency, however, in Anglo-Virginians’ minds long before that. By the mid-nineteenth century, many white Virginians had become so sensitive about possible nonwhite “blood” in their families that even the mention of descent from obviously nonwhite Pocahontas could start a fight. That sensitivity, coupled with resistance to the efforts of historians in northern states to discount Jamestown’s contributions to the founding of an English-American nation, caused the resurrection by Southern historians of John Smith’s 1624 “Generall Historie,” with its already revisionist view of Pocahontas. ^{1Helen Rountree and E. Randolph Turner III, Before and After Jamestown: Virginia’s Powhatans and Their Predecessors (University Press of Florida, 2002), 197.}

“I know other races, especially blacks, have had a hard time. But fortunately nobody ever tried to deny them their heritage. Nobody ever tried to deny they existed.” Bernard Beverly (Chief West Virginia Monacan). ^{2Sandra F. Waugaman and Danielle Moretti-Langholtz, We’re Still Here: Contemporary Virginia Indians Tell Their Stories (Richmond: Palari, 2000), 28.}

“We were the third race in a two-race state…I remember once traveling with my father and we pulled into a gas station because I had to go to the bathroom and there was one bathroom marked ‘white’ and one bathroom marked ‘colored’. I said, ‘Dad, what do I do?’” (Stephen Adkins, Chief Chickahominy Tribe).^{3 Warren Fiske, “Part 2: The black-and-white world of Walter Ashby Plecker,”Hampton Roads Pilot Online (August 18, 2004). http://www.weyanoke.org/pdf/plecker2.pdf. Last accessed 05/06/08.}

An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity–1924

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia, That the State Registrar of Vital Statistics may as soon as practicable after the taking effect of this act, prepare a form whereon the racial composition of any individual, as Caucasian, negro, Mongolian, American Indian, Asiatic Indian, Malay, or any mixture thereof, or any other non-Caucasic strains, and if there be any mixture, then the racial composition of the parents and other ancestors, in so far as ascertainable, so as to show in what generation such mixture occurred, may be certified by such individual, which form shall be known as a registration certificate. The State Registrar may supply to each local registrar a sufficient number of such forms for the purpose of this act; each local registrar may personally or by deputy, as soon as possible after receiving said forms, have made thereon in duplicate a certificate of the racial composition as aforesaid, of each person resident in his district, who so desires, born before June fourteenth, nineteen hundred and twelve, which certificate shall be made over the signature of said person, or in the case of children under fourteen years of age, over the signature of a parent, guardian, or other person standing in loco parentis. One of said certificates for each person thus registering in every district shall be forwarded to the State Registrar for his files; the other shall be kept on file by the local registrar.

"The New Family and Race Improvement," by W.A. Plecker, Virginia Health Bulletin (vol.17:12) [Read complete bulletin]

5. It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. For the purpose of this act, the term “white person” shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons. All laws heretofore passed and now in effect regarding the intermarriage of white and colored persons shall apply to marriages prohibited by this act.

Walter Ashby Plecker

As much as we held in esteem individual negroes this esteem was not of a character that would tolerate marriage with them, though as we know now to our sorrow much illegitimate mixture has occurred…If you desire to do the correct thing for the negro race…inspire [them] with the thought that the birth of mulatto children is a standing disgrace.

Plecker's 1943 Letter [enlarge]

Plecker was a white supremacist and a zealous advocate of eugenics—a now discredited movement to preserve the integrity of white blood by preventing interracial breeding. “Unless this can be done,” he once wrote, “we have little to hope for, but may expect in the future decline or complete destruction of our civilization.”^{4http://hamptonroads.com/node/65121. Last accessed 05/06/08.}

Walter Ashby Plecker was born in Augusta County, Virginia, on April 2, 1861, on the eve of the Civil War. He graduated from the University of Maryland Medical School in 1885. From 1912 to 1945, Plecker served as the first registrar of Virginia's newly-created Bureau of Vital Statistics. To Plecker there was only black or white, and there were no Indians left in Virginia. His white supremacist views on miscegnation and eugenics led to his forcing Indians and other non-whites to register themselves as blacks. This policy has resulted in the inability of several Virginia Indian tribes to now gain federal recognition, not to mention all of those indigenous peoples who have lost the connection with their heritage.

In August 1947, while crossing a street in Richmond, Plecker was hit by a car and died at age 86.

Repeal of Racial Integrity Act—
Loving v. Virginia

The Racial Integrity Act began to crumble on June 12, 1967 when the United States Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia. The portion of the law which had prohibited marriages between “whites” and “nonwhites” was found to be contrary to the guarantees of the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution. In 1975, Virginia’s General Assembly repealed the rest of the Racial Integrity Act. In 2001, a bill (HJ607ER) passed by a vote of 85-10 in the House and 40-0 in the Senate. The bill expressed the General Assembly’s profound regret for its role in the eugenics movement. On May 2, 2002, Governor Mark Warner issued a statement also expressing “profound regret for the Commonwealth's role in the eugenics movement.”^{5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_Integrity_Act_of_1924.}

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute, the “Racial Integrity Act of 1924,” unconstitutional, thereby ending all race-based legal restriction on marriage in the United States.^{6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia.}

The plaintiffs, Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, were residents of the Commonwealth of Virginia who had been married in June of 1958 in the District of Columbia, having left Virginia to evade a state law banning marriages between persons of different races. Upon their return to Virginia, they were charged with violation of the ban, pled guilty, and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. The trial judge in the case, Leon Bazile, echoing a common sentiment of the time, proclaimed that

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

The Lovings moved to the District of Columbia, and in 1963 began a series of lawsuits seeking to overcome their conviction on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, ultimately reaching the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court overturned the convictions in a unanimous decision, dismissing the Commonwealth of Virginia's argument that a law forbidding both white and black persons from marrying persons of another race, and providing identical penalties to white and black violators, could not be construed as racially discriminatory. In its decision, the court wrote

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. ^{7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia.}

Fight for Federal recognition

Fight for treaty rights

Last updated 05/08/2008