Racial Integrity Act of 1924

Last updated

Racial Integrity Act of 1924 The Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924 - start of the Qarsherskiyan Cultural Genocide.jpg
Racial Integrity Act of 1924

In 1924, the Virginia General Assembly enacted the Racial Integrity Act, [1] which reinforced racial segregation by prohibiting interracial marriage and classifying as "White" a person "who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian". [2] The act, an outgrowth of the eugenicist and scientific racist ideology widespread at the time, was pushed by Walter Plecker, a staunch advocate of White supremacist policies and eugenics who held the post of registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics. [3]

Contents

The Racial Integrity Act required that all birth certificates and marriage certificates in Virginia to include the person's race as either "white" or "colored". The Act classified all non-whites, including Native Americans, as "colored". [2] The act was part of a series of "racial integrity laws" enacted in Virginia to reinforce racial hierarchies and prohibit the mixing of races; other statutes included the Public Assemblages Act of 1926 (which required the racial segregation of all public meeting areas) and a 1930 act that defined any person with even a trace of sub-Saharan African ancestry as black (thus codifying the so-called "one-drop rule"). [2]

In 1967, the Act was officially overturned by the United States Supreme Court in their ruling Loving v. Virginia . In 2001, the Virginia General Assembly passed a resolution that condemned the Act for its "use as a respectable, 'scientific' veneer to cover the activities of those who held blatantly racist views". [2]

History leading to the laws' passage: 1676–1924

The history of anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. far predates Virginia's Racial Integrity Act. By 1924, 29 other states had also passed anti-miscegenation laws. These laws outlined racial categories of "white" and "colored," with the latter indicating those with Black, Indigenous, or otherwise non-European ancestry. [4]

The colony of Virginia enacted its first law banning all marriage between "white" and "colored" people in 1691. [4] However, since settler arrival in the region, people had been raising families together across racial lines.

Bacon's Rebellion: 1676-1677

In 1676, White settler Nathaniel Bacon led an uprising against Governor William Berkeley. He and others who rebelled were motivated by conquests for land when Berkeley refused to sign over all Native lands for settlers' taking. [5] Bacon’s campaign proclaimed the objective to “ruin and extirpate all Indians in general,” and he led a massacre of nearly fifty Pamunkey in what is referred to as Bacon’s Rebellion. [6] Following this racially-driven coup, he passed Bacon’s law, which sanctioned the enslavement of any Native person taken captive. [5]

18th- and 19th-century racialization and detribalization

In his writings from the eighteenth century, Thomas Jefferson expressed highly racist views on Black people, arguing against the admixture of the Black and White races. Although Jefferson did not believe Indigenous blood was genetically inferior in the same way, he contended that Black and Indigenous intermarriage depleted the Indigeneity of Virginia’s tribes. Jefferson’s theories laid the foundation for both the eugenics movement and the twentieth-century arguments that Virginia’s first peoples were not “real Indians” because they lacked so-called racial purity. [5]

Although Black and Indigenous populations have intermarried since colonial inception, these relationships grew increasingly risky to Virginia’s Native groups. Whites pointed to the admixture of Blackness in Native communities as a way of delegitimizing their ethnic authenticity and land rights. Beginning in 1784, the Virginia General Assembly received several petitions demanding the dissolution of the nearly seven-hundred acre reservation belonging to the Gingaskin Tribe of Virginia’s eastern shore. Their justification centered on the claim that only six real Indians remained on the reservation, with the land being used in reality as “an asylum for free negroes and other disorderly persons.” In 1812, the petition went through. The Gingaskin Tribe was declared no longer Indian and instead classified as “free Negroes,” dispossessing them of all of their reservation land. In the eyes of the General Assembly and White Virginians, the presence of Black blood negated any Indigenous identity, thereby removing their right to tribal lands and placing it in the hands of Whites. [5]

Walter Plecker and the eugenics movement

In the 1920s, Virginia's registrar of statistics, Walter Ashby Plecker, was allied with the newly founded Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America in persuading the Virginia General Assembly to pass the Racial Integrity Law of 1924. [7] The club was founded in Virginia by John Powell of Richmond in the fall of 1922; within a year the club for white males had more than 400 members and 31 posts in the state. [8]

In 1923, the Anglo-Saxon Club founded two posts in Charlottesville, one for the town and one for students at the University of Virginia. A major goal was to end "amalgamation" by interracial marriage. Members also claimed to support Anglo-Saxon ideas of fair play. Later that fall, a state convention of club members was to be held in Richmond. [9]

The Virginia assembly's 21st-century explanation for the laws summarizes their development:

The now-discredited pseudoscience of eugenics was based on theories first propounded in England by Francis Galton, the cousin and disciple of famed biologist Charles Darwin. The goal of the "science" of eugenics was to improve the human race by eliminating what the movement's supporters considered hereditary disorders or flaws through selective breeding and social engineering. The eugenics movement proved popular in the United States, with Indiana enacting the nation's first eugenics-based sterilization law in 1907. [10]

Despite the fact that there is no genetic basis for racial difference, the Racial Integrity Act proclaimed to preserve the purity of Whiteness by keeping so-called “colored blood” out of the “White” gene pool. [11] Given that the three major proponents of the Racial Integrity Act—Walter Plecker, John Powell, and Earnest Cox—were spurred on by non-reservation groups (including the Chickahominy and Rappahannock) organizing to assert their identities, it can be noted that racialization became a tool for dispossession. [5] Eugenics served as a racist cloak for material drivers.

Implementation and consequences: 1924–1979

The combined effect of these laws adversely affected the continuity of Virginia's American Indian tribes. The Racial Integrity Act called for only two racial categories to be recorded on birth certificates, rather than the traditional six: "white" and "colored" (which now included Indian and all discernible mixed-race persons). [12] The effects were quickly seen. In 1930, the US census for Virginia recorded 779 Indians; by 1940, that number had been reduced to 198. In effect, Indians were being erased as a group from official records. [7]

In addition, as Plecker admitted, he enforced the Racial Integrity Act extending far beyond his jurisdiction in the segregated society. [13] For instance, he pressured school superintendents to exclude mixed-race (then called mulatto) children from white schools. Plecker ordered the exhumation of dead people of "questionable ancestry" from white cemeteries to be reinterred elsewhere. [12]

Indians reclassified as colored

As registrar, Plecker directed the reclassification of nearly all Virginia Indians as colored on their birth and marriage certificates. Consequently, two or three generations of Virginia Indians had their ethnic identity altered on these public documents. Fiske reported that Plecker's tampering with the vital records of the Virginia Indian tribes made it impossible for descendants of six of the eight tribes recognized by the state to gain federal recognition, because they could no longer prove their American Indian ancestry by documented historical continuity. [13] The RIA prohibited midwives as labeling anyone as Indian on their birth certificate, and prevented anyone from marrying as an Indian on their marriage license. Thus, those classified as White people could only marry other "White people, and those classified as colored, including Indigenous Virginians, could only marry within that identification. [5]

The Pocahontas exception

1890 US census report on Virginia Indians Virginia.png
1890 US census report on Virginia Indians

The Racial Integrity Act was subject to the Pocahontas Clause (or Pocahontas Exception), which allowed people with claims of no more than 1/16 American Indian ancestry to still be considered white, despite the otherwise unyielding climate of one-drop rule politics. [14] [15] The exception regarding the American Indian blood quantum was included as an amendment to the original Act in response to concerns of Virginia elites, including many of the First Families of Virginia, who had always claimed descent from Pocahontas with pride, but now worried that the new legislation would jeopardize their status. [16] [17] The exception stated:

It shall thereafter 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. [14]

While definitions of "Indian", "colored", and variations of these were established and altered throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, [18] [19] [20] this was the first direct case of whiteness itself being defined officially. [16]

Enforcement

Once these laws were passed, Plecker was in the position to enforce them. Governor E. Lee Trinkle, a year after signing the act, asked Plecker to ease up on the Indians and not "embarrass them any more than possible." Plecker responded, "I am unable to see how it is working any injustice upon them or humiliation for our office to take a firm stand against their intermarriage with white people, or to the preliminary steps of recognition as Indians with permission to attend white schools and to ride in white coaches." [21]

Unsatisfied with the "Pocahontas Exception", eugenicists introduced an amendment to narrow loopholes to the Racial Integrity Act. This was considered by the Virginia General Assembly in February 1926, but it failed to pass. [22] [ citation not found ] If adopted, the amendment would have reclassified thousands of "white" people as "colored" by more strictly implementing the "one-drop rule" of ancestry as applied to American Indian ancestry. [23] [ citation not found ]

Plecker reacted strongly to the Pocahontas Clause with fierce concerns of the white race being "swallowed up by the quagmire of mongrelization", [24] particularly after marriage cases like that of the Johns and Sorrels, in which the women of these couples argued that the family members listed as "colored" had actually been Native American because of historically unclear categorizing.[ citation needed ]

Involuntary sterilization

Historians have not estimated the impact of the miscegenation laws. There are records, however, of the number of people who were involuntarily sterilized during the years these two laws were in effect. Of the involuntary sterilizations reported in the United States prior to 1957, Virginia was second, having sterilized a total of 6,683 persons (California was first, having sterilized 19,985 people without their consent). Many more women than men were sterilized: 4,043 to 2,640. Of those, 2,095 women were sterilized under the category of "Mentally Ill"; and 1,875 under the category "Mentally Deficient". The remainder were for "Other" reasons. Other states reported involuntary sterilizations of similar numbers of people as Virginia. [25]

Leaders target persons of color

The intention to control or reduce ethnic minorities, especially Negroes, can be seen in writings by some leaders in the eugenics movement:

In an 1893 "open letter" published in the Virginia Medical Monthly, Hunter Holmes McGuire, a Richmond physician and president of the American Medical Association, asked for "some scientific explanation of the sexual perversion in the Negro of the present day." McGuire's correspondent, Chicago physician G. Frank Lydston, replied that African-American men raped white women because of "[h]ereditary influences descending from the uncivilized ancestors of our Negroes." Lydston suggested as a solution to perform surgical castration, which "prevents the criminal from perpetuating his kind. [26]

In 1935, a decade after the passage of Virginia's eugenics laws, Plecker wrote to Walter Gross, director of Nazi Germany's Bureau of Human Betterment and Eugenics. Plecker described Virginia's racial purity laws and requested to be put on Gross' mailing list. Plecker commented upon the Third Reich's sterilization of 600 children in the Rhineland (the so-called Rhineland Bastards, who were born of German women by black French colonial fathers): "I hope this work is complete and not one has been missed. I sometimes regret that we have not the authority to put some measures in practice in Virginia." [27]

Despite lacking the statutory authority to sterilize black, mulatto, and American Indian children simply because they were "colored", a small number of Virginia eugenicists in key positions found other ways to achieve that goal. The Sterilization Act gave State institutions, including hospitals, psychiatric institutions and prisons, the statutory authority to sterilize persons deemed to be "feebleminded" — a highly subjective criterion.

Joseph DeJarnette, director of the Western State Hospital in Staunton, Virginia, was a leading advocate of eugenics. DeJarnette was unsatisfied with the pace of America's eugenics sterilization programs. In 1938, he wrote:

Germany in six years has sterilized about 80,000 of her unfit while the United States — with approximately twice the population — has only sterilized about 27,869 in the past 20 years. ... The fact that there are 12,000,000 defectives in the US should arouse our best endeavors to push this procedure to the maximum ... The Germans are beating us at our own game. [28]

By "12 million defectives" (a tenth of the population), DeJarnette was almost certainly referring to ethnic minorities,[ citation needed ] as there have never been 12 million mental patients in the United States.

According to historian Gregory M. Dorr, the University of Virginia School of Medicine (UVA) became "an epicenter of eugenical thought" that was "closely linked with the national movement." One of UVA's leading eugenicists, Harvey Ernest Jordan, PhD was promoted to dean of medicine in 1939 and served until 1949. [29] He was in a position to shape the opinion and practice of Virginia physicians for several decades. This excerpt from a 1934 UVA student paper indicates one student's thoughts: "In Germany, Hitler has decreed that about 400,000 persons be sterilized. This is a great step in eliminating the racial deficients." [30]

The racial effects of the program in Virginia can be seen by the disproportionately high number of black and American Indian women who were given forced sterilizations after coming to a hospital for other reasons, such as childbirth. Doctors sometimes sterilized the women without their knowledge or consent in the course of other surgery. [31]

Responses to the Racial Integrity Act

In the early 20th century, persons of color in everyday southern society feared to voice their opinions due to severe oppression. Magazines such as the Richmond Planet offered the black community a voice and the opportunity to have their concerns heard. The Richmond Planet made a difference in society by openly expressing the opinions of persons of color in society.[ citation needed ] After the passing of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 the Richmond Planet published the article "Race Amalgamation Bill Being Passed in Va. Legislature. Much Discussion Here on race Integrity and Mongrelization ... Bill Would Prohibit Marriage of Whites and Non-whites ..."Skull of Bones" Discusses race question." [32] The journalist opened the article with Racial Integrity Act and gave a brief synopsis of the act. Then followed statements from the creators of the Racial Integrity Act, John Powell and Earnest S. Cox. Mr. Powell believed that the Racial Integrity Act was needed as "maintenance of the integrity of the white race to preserve its superior blood" and Cox believed in what he called "the great man concept" which means that if the races were to intersect that it would lower the rate of great white men in the world. He defended his position by saying that non-whites would agree with his ideology:

The sane and educated Negro does not want social equality ... They do not want intermarriage or social mingling any more than does the average American white man wants it. They have race pride as well as we. They want racial purity as much as we want it. There are both sides to the question and to form an unbiased opinion either way requires a thorough study of the matter on both sides.

Indigenous responses to the Racial Integrity Act were persistent and varied. Virginia’s Tidewater Native communities did not want to be lumped into the category of “colored” that subjected Black Americans to the disenfranchisement of Jim Crow laws. Some of these involve establishing Indigenous-only schools as a method of cultural preservation, creating alliances with the Baptist Church which supported their racial identity as separate from Black Americans, and working with White ethnographers to prove their lineage. [33] At the same time, Indigenous refusal to be lumped into the Black side of a racial binary came at a cost to Black-Indigenous relationships. As Plecker contended that tribe members were not "real Indians" because of the presence of Black ancestry in their communities, many groups chose to distance themselves from Blackness by kicking out members with traits phenotypically identifiable as Black and even establishing anti-miscegenation laws of their own. [5] Jack D. Forbes writes:

Those who had more than one-thirty-second African blood could not remain on the reservation as “Indians,” even though they might have lived there all of their lives…We can speculate that families were permanently split...

The pushback against the effects of the Racial Integrity Act tore families apart, with Afro-Indigenous people whose ancestors had lived on the reservation for generations being completely ostracized from the community. In an attempt to evade Jim Crow racism, many Indigenous groups perpetuated it themselves. [5]

Lasting impacts: 1967-2006

Supreme Court, repeals and apology: 1967–2002

On June 12, 1967, the US Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that the portion of the Racial Integrity Act that criminalized marriages between "whites" and "nonwhites" was found to be contrary to the guarantees of equal protection of citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In 1975, the Virginia General Assembly repealed the remainder of the Racial Integrity Act. In 1979, it repealed the Sterilization Act. In 2001, the General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a bill (HJ607ER [34] ) to express the assembly's profound regret for its role in the eugenics movement. On May 2, 2002, Governor Mark R. Warner issued a statement also expressing "profound regret for the commonwealth's role in the eugenics movement," specifically naming Virginia's 1924 compulsory sterilization legislation. [35]

Petitions for tribal recognition

The Racial Integrity Act had lasting impacts on the ability of Indigenous groups to be formally recognized as tribes, barring them from the land and legal rights that come with that status. For a long time, people pointed to the presence of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry to deny the western Chickahominy Tribe recognition. They finally received it in 1983. Similar events occurred with the Nottoway and Pamunkey tribes, with the Virginia Council of Indians not granting recognition to the Nottoway Tribe until 2006. [5]

Practices of distancing from Blackness also continued in Indigenous communities. Anti-Black racism has resulted in Indigenous churches excluding Black members from worship as recently as 2004, though they permit White members into the community. These colonial legacies of racism have formed a concept of identity as racial rather than cultural. [5]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Racial Integrity Act of 1924. State legislature of Virginia.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Brendan Wolfe, Racial Integrity Laws (1924–1930), Encyclopedia Virginia .
  3. ↑ Michael Yudell, "A Short History of the Race Concept" in Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture (ed. Sheldon Krimsky & Kathleen Sloan: Columbia University Press, 1971). p. 19.
  4. 1 2 "Loving v. Virginia | History of the Supreme Court". civics.supremecourthistory.org. Retrieved December 11, 2025.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Coleman, Arica L. (2013). That the blood stay pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the predicament of race and identity in Virginia. Blacks in the diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University press. ISBN   978-0-253-01043-8.
  6. ↑ Schmidt, Ethan A. (2012). "Cockacoeske, Weroansqua of the Pamunkeys, and Indian Resistance in Seventeenth-Century Virginia". The American Indian Quarterly. 36 (3): 288–317. doi:10.1353/aiq.2012.a487083. ISSN   1534-1828.
  7. 1 2 "Modern Indians A.D. 1800-Present", First People: The Early Indians of Virginia, Dept. of Historic Resources, State of Virginia, accessed April 14, 2010
  8. ↑ David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region, Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983, pp. 240–242, accessed April 14, 2010
  9. ↑ "Anglo-Saxon Club Founds Two Posts in Community", The Cavalier Daily (UVA), October 5, 1923, accessed April 14, 2010
  10. ↑ HJ607ER, Paragraphs 1–3 Archived 2011-07-09 at the Wayback Machine
  11. ↑ Bliss, Catherine (2025). What's real about race? untangling science, genetics, and society. Norton shorts (First ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN   978-1-324-02176-6.
  12. 1 2 Fiske, Part 1
  13. 1 2 Fiske, Part 2
  14. 1 2 "Preservation of Racial Integrity (1924)". www.encyclopediavirginia.org. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  15. ↑ Maillard, Kevin Noble (2005). "The Pocahontas Exception: The Exemption of American Indian Ancestry from Racial Purity Law" . SSRN Working Paper Series. 12 (2): 351–386. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.871096 . ISSN   1556-5068.
  16. 1 2 "Racial Integrity Laws (1924–1930)". www.encyclopediavirginia.org. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  17. ↑ Maillard, Kevin A. (2007). "The Pocahontas Exception: The Exemption of American Indian Ancestry from Racial Purity Law". Michigan Journal of Race and Law. 12: 370 – via University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository.
  18. ↑ "General Provisions as to Slaves (1860)". www.encyclopediavirginia.org. Retrieved November 7, 2018.
  19. ↑ "An Act to amend and re-enact the 9th section of chapter 103 of the Code of Virginia for 1860 (1866)". www.encyclopediavirginia.org. Retrieved November 7, 2018.
  20. ↑ "Colored Persons and Indians Defined (1887)". www.encyclopediavirginia.org. Retrieved November 7, 2018.
  21. ↑ Warren Fiske, "The Black and White World of Ashby Plecker: Part 2" Archived October 5, 2007, at the Wayback Machine , The Virginian-Pilot, August 18, 2004, on the Weyanoke Association Website
  22. ↑ The Washington Post, February 9, 1926
  23. ↑ The Richmond News Leader, February 1926, ?
  24. ↑ Sherman, Richard (1988). ""The Last Stand": The Fight for Racial Integrity in Virginia in the 1920s". The Journal of Southern History. 54 (1): 69–92. doi:10.2307/2208521. JSTOR   2208521.
  25. ↑ "Men Behind Hitler – Appendix 1". www.toolan.com. Archived from the original on April 17, 2012. Retrieved October 22, 2017.
  26. ↑ Dorr, Gregory M. (October 2006). "Defective or Disabled?: Race, Medicine, and Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and Alabama". Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. 5 (4). Fremont, OH: Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: 359–92. doi:10.1017/S1537781400003224. ISSN   1943-3557. OCLC   54407091. S2CID   161688514. Archived from the original on October 11, 2008. Retrieved July 26, 2008.
  27. ↑ Michael Plunkett, Editor, Afro-American Sources in Virginia: A Guide to Manuscripts, The John Powell Papers, University of Virginia Press, 1995
  28. ↑ DAVE MCNAIR, "Erasing history: Wrecking ball aiming for DeJarnette?", The Hook, Issue 0528, 2006-07-13
  29. ↑ "About the School – University of Virginia School of Medicine". www.medicine.virginia.edu. Archived from the original on October 15, 2015. Retrieved October 22, 2017.
  30. ↑ Gregory M. Dorr, Assuring America's Place in the Sun: Ivey Foreman Lewis and the Teaching of Eugenics at the University of Virginia
  31. ↑ Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985)
  32. ↑ T. J. Moppins and W. M. Trotter, "Race Amalgamation Bill Being Passed In Va. Legislature", (Richmond Planet, March 1, 1924) https://www.loc.gov/item/sn84025841/1924-03-01/ed-1/
  33. ↑ Feller, Laura J. (2022). Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia: Powhatan People and the Color Line. Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN   978-0-8061-9065-5.
  34. ↑ "Bill Tracking – 2001 session > Legislation". leg1.state.va.us. Archived from the original on July 9, 2011. Retrieved October 22, 2017.
  35. ↑ Branigin, William (May 3, 2002). "Warner Apologizes To Victims Of Eugenics" . Retrieved October 22, 2017– via www.washingtonpost.com.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.