No Trace Whatsoever

(Marcus Garvey and Walter Plecker in above photo)

This story starts with a man named Walter Plecker. Plecker was Virginia’s first registrar of the Bureau of Vital Statistics and served from 1912 to 1946. To give you an idea of the type of man we are talking about, his obituary in the Richmond Afro-American newspaper was headlined: “Dr. Plecker, 86, Rabid Racist, Killed by Auto”. I don’t “eeeeven” want to talk about who did it…. Plecker was the son of a confederate veteran and was born in 1861, just a few years before the end of the Civil War. He got his medical degree in Maryland in 1885 and was a devoted Presbyterian. Now back in the late 19th century, presbyterian missionaries were teaching that God had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah as punishment for racial intermixing, a view that Plecker would later adapt. Plecker came to Hampton, Virginia in 1892 and started to take a keen interest in obstetrics and public health issues. Now earlier I said something about Sodom and Gomorrah and I mentioned it was a view Plecker would “later” adapt. Plecker trained midwives, created a home incubator, a device that keeps premature infants in a controlled environment and developed home remedies which he prescribed to infants. He is credited for bringing a 50% decline in the infant mortality rates among black mothers at that time. I am not sure if he had put on his hood yet. Anyway he became the public health officer for Elizabeth City County in 1902. In 1912 he took his position as Registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics. In 1915 his mother passed away and that’s when he went full Grand Dragon Of the Seventh Realm or whatever… By 1922 he was a virulent white supremacist with as Dr King would say, ” his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification.” That same year he became a leader of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America. So the Anglo-Saxon Club only accepted white males and was thought of as the cream of “Upper Crust Klandom.” Only real cypress trees and imported silks rope for them… Anyway, in 1924 with the help of two other hooded friends, John Powell and Earnest Cox, they would draft and the Virginia state legislature would pass the “Racial Integrity Act of 1924”. By the way Powell had his name ripped off of the music conservatory at Radford University in 2010 and Cox wrote and self publish two books, one called “White America” in which argued that race mixing would result in the downfall of “White civilization”, and proposed the removal of all people of African descent of breeding age to Africa from the American continent as the solution. As for his second book called “Unending Hate,” in which he argued that the Bill of Rights was in essence a tribal document that forced Southern whites to mingle with Blacks in the public school system… well let’s just say he wasn’t *&&&^% around then and if I wish a n8gg@r would had a face… Cox’s papers are hosted at the archive of Duke University. He died in 1966 when someone ran him over with a car too…. okay I’m kidding.. he died of emphysema and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was a real interesting racist… I didn’t have time to go into his relationship with Marcus Garvey. The two were lifelong friends. We will do an in depth look at this Grand Dragon of the Fourth Lake.. or whatever.. sometime soon.

In 1924, the Virginia General Assembly enacted the Racial Integrity Act. The act reinforced racial segregation by prohibiting interracial marriage and classifying as “white” a person “who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.” The Act required that  all birth certificates and marriage certificates in Virginia to include the person’s race as either “white” or “colored.” So if we were in 1924 Virginia, you would see a lot of colored folks there because all Japanese, Mexicans, Eskimos, Indians and Chinese and anyone accidentally sunburned was colored. The Act wasn’t overturn until 1967 by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia. You know.. I was born in Virginia before 1967.. I will have to check my birth certificate.. those #@@!$. They gonna change it if it is!! Anyway, the Act was passed in a series of Virginian “racial public integrity,” laws. A 1926 statue called the Public Assemblages Act of 1926, which as the name implies dealt with segregation or the legal separation of Americans of different ethnicities. Of course legal segregation became the law of the land in the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision of 1896. I have an article about the decision here. Although federal separate but equal doctrine was decided by that decision, it was already being enforced in most Southern states. I mean they was like, ” I double dare you to come in here…” Another racial public integrity law was passed in 1930 and this law most of us are familiar with. It defined any person with even a trace of African American ancestry as black… we know it as the one drop rule. Finally before we get back to the Racial Integrity Act, one of the most fiendish laws ever enacted in Virginia was called the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924. The law allowed the state to sterilize you if among other things if they decided you were a “born criminal.”  Between 1924 and 1979, Virginia sterilized over 7,000 individuals under the act. Other states followed suit in enacting their own sterilization laws. The law was heard by the Supreme Court in Buck v Bell in 1927, but the Court ruled it constitutional.  In 2001, the Virginia General Assembly passed a joint resolution apologizing for the misuse of “a respectable, ‘scientific’ veneer to cover activities of those who held blatantly racist views.” and In 2015, over a decade later, the Assembly agreed to compensate individuals sterilized under the act.

So to recap the Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, everybody is colored unless I say so. That’s what it boiled down to and being colored sentenced you to a life of misery and hardship in the Deep South especially.. but not exclusively. Of the 48 states, 30 had some kind of racial integrity laws. So there was an exception to the one drop rule. It was called the Pocahontas Clause. It allowed people with claims of less than 1/16th American Indian ancestry to still be considered white. Now you know why Donald Trump kept referring to Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas. It was a racial slur in which racist in the know knew he was saying “She not one of us really. She is white because we say she is white.” The passage: 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”. It was the first time that an official definition of what made a white person white, had been described in law. So this thing about having Indian ancestry in your family was getting to be quite ugly. The Racial Integrity Act called for only two racial categories to be recorded on birth certificates.  In 1930, the US Census for Virginia recorded 779 Indians; by 1940, that number had been reduced to 198. So after the law was enacted, there were fewer and fewer Indians. It all came from a failed amendment to the RIA in 1926. 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. Of course Plecker went out of his mind. For instance, he pressured school superintendents to exclude mixed-race children from white schools and he ordered the exhumation of dead people of “questionable ancestry” from white cemeteries to be reinterred elsewhere.

A year after signing the act, the governor of Virginia asked Plecker to “ease up” on the Indians. Plecker said, “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.” I guess they could still drink from the same water fountain as the white man in 1930, but who is to say… Still Plecker got his way. As registar he directed the reclassification of nearly all Virginia Indians as colored on their birth and marriage certificates, because he was convinced that most Indians had African heritage and were trying to “pass” as Indian to evade segregation. Consequently, two or three generations of Virginia Indians had their ethnic identity altered on these public documents. That’s terrible, but no cigar. African Americans never knew the ethnic identity of their forefathers lessmore have documentation. Anyway, in 1935 the author of the RIA wrote to a man named 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.” The Rhineland children were children  fathered by French Army personnel of African descent who were stationed in the Rhineland during its occupation by France after World War I. Although they too were persecuted, they mostly ended up sterilized and thought of as unfit for the fatherland. Blacks and Indians were not the only people affected by these laws.

About 4,000 poor white Virginians were involuntarily sterilized by government order also. In fact we touched on one case earlier when we mentioned Buck v Bell in 1927. Carrie Buck was sterilized under the guise of being feeble minded after she bore a child out of wedlock. When her sister protested she was sterilized too without her knowledge. There was one lone dissenter in the case and he did not write an opinion. Supreme Court Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote the majority opinion in which he said “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” and with that summation the last of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Laws would stand until 1979. In 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, Virginia’s Assembly repealed the remainder of the Racial Integrity Act and in 1979, it repealed its state Sterilization Act.

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