[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1695271465114{margin-top: -35px !important;}”][vc_column css=”.vc_custom_1700009268301{padding-right: 64px !important;padding-left: 64px !important;}”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1696192815853{padding-top: 24px !important;}”]Walter Ashby Plecker was unassuming in appearance: a small-town doctor whose penchant for number-crunching earned him the position of registrar in Virginias Bureau of Vital Statistics in 1912. But appearances were indeed deceiving. With Plecker at the helm, the bureau went on an all-out war against “amalgamation”.
Plecker was not the author of the Racial Integrity Law of 1924–Virginia’s infamous “one drop” statute, which created two racial categories, “pure” white and everybody else. But he–and allies such as John Powell of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America–pushed hard to enforce the act’s provision for “ancestral registration”.
Virginians shied away from compliance in that area, according to J. David Smith in The Eugenic Assault on America: Scenes in Red, White, and Black. Indeed, “passing” might have been commonplace among whiter-skinned African- Americans since at least 1662, when the first anti-miscegenation laws were passed in Virginia, but even for allegedly “pure” whites, proof of racial purity might have been difficult to obtain.
And at least one group of whites who had been proud of their so-called impurity lobbied successfully to have the act revised. The aristocratic descendants of Pocahontas– resentful of being lumped in with “Negroes, Mongolians, American Indians, Malayans, or any mixtures thereof, or any other non-Caucasian strains”–twisted arms until the legislature decreed that persons with no more than one-sixteenth Native American ancestry might still be considered white.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]