Walter Ashby Plecker 1861–1947 Physician. Eugenicist. White Supremacist.
A rabid believer in white supremacy and eugenics, he used his position as state registrar of vital statistics to erase Virginia's Indigenous people—at least on paper.
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Walter Ashby Plecker 1861–1947 Physician. Eugenicist. White Supremacist.
A rabid believer in white supremacy and eugenics, he used his position as state registrar of vital statistics to erase Virginia's Indigenous people—at least on paper.
https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/200/stories/181
In 1912, Dr. Walter Plecker became the first registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, in Richmond. An avowed white supremacist, he helped craft the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which recognized only white and Black races. It made marriage between white persons and non-white persons a felony and reclassified most citizens claiming Indian identity as Black. Virginia Indian tribes had difficulty documenting their heritage because official records wiped out their cultural identity. Due in part to Plecker’s “paper genocide,” no Virginia tribe received federal recognition until 2018.
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White and Everything Else: Promotion the 1924
Virginia Racial Integrity Act
https://digitalshowcase.lynchburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1150&context=utcp
During the early twentieth century, a movement influenced by the tenets of Social
Darwinism took root in the United States. Members of the movement used its principles to
“improve the American race” through selective breeding. The leaders of the movement
adopted the name eugenics and the participants worked at strengthening genetics in two
major ways: the sterilization of persons with so-called genetic defects and an effort to
eliminate miscegenation. The Commonwealth of Virginia pursued both aspects of eugenics
with great fervor. Under the leadership of Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker, Virginia took a radical
stance against racial amalgamation through legislation defining race. The process of
instituting the laws was fraught with successes and failures, but eventually created the most
drastic race legislation of its time which attracted the attention of national eugenicists, like
Harry Hamilton Laughlin. The effectiveness of the laws passed in Virginia led to interest in
the greater American eugenics community, including efforts in other state legislatures and
the national government, but eventually failed to create change in the policies outside of
Virginia.
Virginia had a long history of segregation and institutionalized racism. In 1630, a
white man, Hugh Davis, was publicly whipped for “abusing himself to the dishonor of God
and shame of Christians by defiling his body in lying with a Negro.”1 In 1662, the colony
amended its anti-fornication statute placing heavier penalties on interracial mixing. In 1691,
the British colony passed a law outlawing interracial marriage. In 1705, a law was passed
that listed the “child, grand child, or great grand child of a negro” was black.2 In 1787, the new state passed a law defining a person with one-fourth or more “Negro blood” as a
mulatto.3 In 1910, the state passed a law identifying a black person as someone with one-
sixteenth or more “black blood,” which more accurately defined the earlier law by further
defining race. Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker, director of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics
from its creation in 1912 to the time of his resignation in 1946, argued the 1910 statute did
not help solve the negro problem in Virginia, citing the number of mulattoes in 1910 was
222,910 and the number of mulattoes in 1920 as 164,171. To Plecker, the decline in the
number of Virginia mulattoes indicated more mulattoes passing into the white race.4
Historian Joel Williamson argues the opposite: mulattoes were more than likely marrying
into the black race, as there is no literature suggesting interest in the white race.
Continues on
White and Everything Else: Promotion the 1924
Virginia Racial Integrity Act
https://digitalshowcase.lynchburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1150&context=utcp
