A lot of great information here. I've talked about my own family's role in the "Pocahontas Exception" in the early days of the new ZZLP, but this goes a little more in depth.
www.nps.gov
At the beginning of the 20th century, the eugenics movement was gaining momentum. Eugenics is the practice of controlling reproduction to alter the genetic characteristics of a population. Some advocates of eugenics believe that methods like selective “breeding” and sterilization would benefit human society by promoting beneficial traits. But who decides which traits are desirable and which are undesirable? Historically, eugenics has been used to justify white supremacy, resulting in discriminatory policies and heinous practices like forced sterilization.
One such policy was the Racial Integrity Act, which was passed in Virginia in 1924. The new law prohibited interracial marriage and ushered in a long period of discriminatory racial designation administered by the government. One of the Act’s main proponents was a physician named Walter Ashby Plecker. As the head of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912-1946, Plecker was responsible for ensuring that all infants born in Virginia received birth certificates that included their racial designation. An active eugenicist, Plecker used bureaucracy as a weapon against Black and Indigenous people across the state of Virginia.
It wasn’t until 1967 that the Racial Integrity Act was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in the Loving vs. Virginia case. Nevertheless, Plecker’s legacy of racial discrimination still impacts communities today, in particular Tribal communities. Many find it difficult to document their ancestral lineage due to the “paper genocide” that identified all non-white individuals as “colored” regardless of their identity. Despite this challenge, seven Tribes have gained federal recognition in Virginia.
Eugenic Origins of the Racial Integrity Act
Eugenics argued that “genetic purity” could lead to a more utopian society. The idea was to select and support the proliferation of “desired” heritable characteristics through control over the parental rights of specific communities.
Sterilization had become one of the many tools employed by eugenicists across the world, including Nazi Germany. On July 14, 1933, the Nazi government passed the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Defective Progeny, allowing the mass sterilization of the “hereditarily weak,” such as the deaf and blind, those with physical deformities or mental illnesses, and various groups under persecution such as the gay and lesbian community and Jews.
The United States was no stranger to these cruel “treatments” and likely informed the rest of the world on eugenicist practices. In 1907, the state of Indiana had passed the world’s first sterilization law. And, in 1924, the “The Virginia Sterilization Act” was enacted, initially targeting the intellectually disabled.
Walter Plecker Champions the Act
Walter Ashby Plecker was born in Augusta County, Virginia in the spring of 1861. After securing a medical degree from the University of Maryland in 1885, he relocated to Hampton, Virginia and began working as the public health officer for Elizabeth City County. He took a strong interest in obstetrics and helped reduce birth-mortality rates by 50%. However, he was also a staunch advocate of eugenics and white supremacy.
In 1912, Plecker was selected to serve at the head of the newly created Bureau of Vital Statistics in Virginia. The responsibility of the office was primarily to ensure that all infants born in Virginia received birth certificates, including racial designation. In the following years, Plecker pushed for the creation of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act.
Passed in 1924, the act outlawed interracial marriage and added strict definitions to racial classifications. It also criminalized the falsification of racial identity on legal documents, stating that, “the term ‘white person’ shall apply only to such person as has no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian.” Any who fell outside of this definition were to be identified as “colored.” While registration of racial identity was technically voluntary, it was required for things such as registering for the draft, enrolling in school, marrying, or issuance of a birth certificate. Racial identification was not limited solely to “blood traces.” The law allowed racial identity to be determined by things such as physical features and even family names.
The Pocahontas Exception
Existing laws had allowed any person with one sixteenth or less of American Indian blood and no other non-caucasian blood to identify as white. This was because many prominent white Virginian families had long espoused themselves to be descendants of Pocahontas and John Rolfe. This became known as the “Pocahontas Exception,” and allowed many white families to maintain their ancestral connection to Pocahontas without nullifying their white racial identity.
However, Plecker feared that this would lead many mixed-race Virginians to pass themselves off as having Native American ancestry instead of black ancestry in order to afford themselves the privileges associated with being identified as white. He writes that “some of these mongrels, finding that they have been able to sneak in their birth certificates unchallenged as Indians are now making a rush to register as white” and that “one hundred and fifty thousand other mulattoes in Virginia are watching eagerly the attempt of their pseudo-Indian brethren, ready to follow in a rush when the first have made a break in the dike.” As a consequence, he decided that “there are no native born Virginia Indians free from negro intermixture.”
In 1930, the General Assembly officially updated the Racial Integrity Act to define a “colored” person as anyone who holds even “one drop” of “negro blood.” As far as Plecker was concerned, this meant that all Native Americans in Virginia would now be identified as “colored.” Any birth certificates predating 1924 that identified a person as “Indian” were overwritten as “colored,” as assigned by the state. His racist investigations and practices were comprehensive, issuing lists of surnames descendant from “free negroes” to be used in the racial identification of “colored” persons.
abc7.com
