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From:
Subject: Re: Walter Ashby Plecker(1861-1946)
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 20:32:03 EDT


No, Plecker was not around in 1857, but the laws that he began espousing in
the early 1900s were already in place. Sorry, I did not mean to muddy the
waters. Here is some information on racial purity and American policy.

Laws forbidding marriage between people of different races were common in
America from the Colonial period through the middle of the 20th century. In
the very early days of Colonial America there was not much thought of races,
only survival. By around 1662, racial laws began to appear. Then by the late
1700s, early 1800s laws and ideas began to enlarge upon those already in
place. By 1915, twenty-eight states made marriages between "Negroes and white
persons" invalid; six states included this prohibition in their
constitutions. These laws also forbid other things for 'negroes,' including
owning property, voting, schooling their children with 'white' children as
schooling became available.

Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 stands out among anti-miscegenation
laws that can be traced to eugenic advocacy. We do have to remember that this
was a sign of the times, but these eugenic ideas are a shame and a disgrace
to America and particularly to Virginia. To fashion a successful legislative
strategy, three local Virginia eugenicists – John Powell, Earnest Cox and
Walter Plecker – consulted with Madison Grant and Harry Laughlin. Powell, a
celebrated pianist and composer, was the founder of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of
America, an elitist version of the Ku Klux Klan dedicated to maintaining
"Anglo-Saxon ideals and civilization in America." Like The Passing of the
Great Race, Cox's book White America emphasized white supremacy and the
dangers of racial mixing. Plecker was registrar at the Bureau of Vital
Statistics of the Virginia Board of Health. His ideas on racial interbreeding
as the source of "public health" problems appeared in state-published
pamphlets distributed to all who planned to marry. These phamphlets are
available to be read today via the state archives of Virginia. They make your
skin crawl.

When The Racial Integrity Act became law, it included provisions requiring
racial registration certificates and strict definitions of who would qualify
as members of the white race. It emphasized the "scientific" basis of race
assessment, and the "dysgenic" dangers of race mixing. Its major provision
declared: "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. …the term "white person" shall apply
only to such person as has no trace whatever 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 is interesting to note that at least 16 members of the Virginia General
Assembly who claimed to be descendants of Pocahontas objected to the first
draft of the law they proposed, because it defined as "non-white" anyone with
1/64 of American Indian ancestry. Alabama and Georgia eventually copied the
Virginia law. Within a decade, similar laws prohibiting inter-ethnic
marriages and attempting to sort citizens by percentage of Jewish "blood"
were adopted by the government of Nazi Germany.

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.

But Plecker's power to grant birth, death, and marriage certificates gave him
unprecedented and awesome powers over Virginians who had less clout than the
Pocahontas contingent. With the stroke of a pen, Plecker could write an
individual into "Negro" status--and legal and social oblivion. Plecker was
only too willing to exercise that power, thus making him a figure of dread to
Indians in general, but particularly to the Powhatan remnants in Rockbridge
and Amherst counties, until his retirement and subsequent death in 1946. He
was forced to retire after WWII because it was thought that he might be tried
at Nuremberg. Some time later, crossing Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA where
he lived, Plecker was run over by a truck and killed.

According to Helen Rountree, a Old Dominion University professor who has
written extensively on Virginia's Powhatan tribes, Plecker believed that all
Indians had "polluted" their blood by mingling it with free
African-Americans--or "free issues", in the local vernacular. Plecker thus
saw those who claimed Indian ancestry as opportunists seeking what Rountree
called a "way station to whiteness"-- in other words, he saw all Indians as
blacks attempting to "pass."

Plecker intimidated mid-wives, wrote threatening pamphlets, editorialized in
newspapers, and trained an entire generation of county clerks and health
service workers in his methods. When all else failed, he simply changed
records to suit his prejudices, striking out the designation "Indian" and
replacing it with "Negro" or "colored" or "mulatto"--or writing notations on
the back.

Hope this is helpful.
NancyS








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