How Virginia Used Segregation Law to Erase Native Americans
https://time.com/6952928/virginia-racial-integrity-act-history/
On March 20, 1924, the Commonwealth of Virginia enacted the nation’s cruelest, most draconian, segregation law. Designed to preserve white racial “purity,” the legislation became a model for states across the Jim Crow South and beyond.
In the halls of Richmond’s capitol building, lawmakers congratulated themselves on passing the Act to Preserve Racial Integrity, popularly known as the Racial Integrity Act. The Act made it a felony to falsify the racial identity of an individual on birth, death, or marriage certificates, and banned marriages between whites and nonwhites. Both offenses carried a sentence of one year in jail.
Some white Richmonders, though, weren’t satisfied. They worried about a loophole in the law that would dilute the purity of white “blood.” Leading white supremacists had wanted the Racial Integrity Act to solidify Virginia’s black-white racial binary. To do so, they called for the Act to erase the presence of Native people. In the coming decades, some used the Act to do just this, engaging in a form of “bureaucratic genocide” to re-cast Native people as Black, rendering them less visible in the historical record. The legacies of these policies endure to this day.
Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act belongs to a settler colonial tradition extending back to the early 1600s. In 1630, Hugh Davis, a white man, received a public whipping for “defiling his body by lying with a Negro.” Over the ensuing decades, similar cases prompted Maryland (1661) and Virginia (in 1662 and 1691) to pass stricter laws against interracial marriage and cohabitation.
How to define the progeny of interracial sex and marriage continued to vex lawmakers throughout the 18th century. In 1785, Virginia’s General Assembly passed a law that held “every person who shall have one-fourth part or more Negro blood shall be deemed a mulatto.” In 1910, new legislation redefined nonwhites as people with “one-sixteenth or more Negro blood.”
But as white racial anxieties surged in the early 1900s, these older racial definitions failed to satisfy increasingly vocal white racial extremists. They saw threats to white “blood” everywhere. Small but growing numbers of Asian immigrants sparked fears of a “yellow peril,” while “swarthy” multitudes from Southern and Eastern Europe caused growing concern among “old stock” Anglo-Americans.
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But it was the enemies within who truly terrified the defenders of white racial purity. Some claimed to possess data proving that mixed-race (or “colored”) populations had grown by over 80% between 1890 and 1910. Was the American population becoming “mongrelized”? Would white Americans take the threat of “race suicide” seriously and act to stop the “rising tide of color”?
In Virginia, Anglo-Saxon Clubs, white supremacist social organizations formed in the 1920s to lobby for stronger anti-miscegenation laws, answered the call. Their racial ideology combined eugenics, or the belief that racial characteristics were inherited from one generation to the next, and longstanding racial prejudices against Black and Native Americans.
The future of white supremacy seemed secure when the Racial Integrity Act became law in 1924. But for people like John Powell, a leading figure in the Anglo-Saxon Clubs, a dangerous loophole remained.
While the Act clearly defined a white person as someone “who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian,” the “Pocahontas Clause” allowed for exceptions. The Clause was a concession to prominent Virginia families who claimed descent from the 1614 marriage of the Pamunkey teenager Pocahontas and the English planter John Rolfe.
Under the Clause, these “descendants” enjoyed a “white” legal status if they had less than 1/16th Native American ancestry.
For Virginia’s Anglo-Saxon Clubs, the Pocahontas Clause represented an open invitation for light-skinned African Americans to try to pass as Indians, or worse, white.
Walter Plecker agreed. Plecker despised the Pocahontas Clause and lobbied lawmakers for increasingly draconian segregation laws.
Between 1912 and 1946, Plecker served as the Commonwealth’s Registrar of Vital Statistics. In this position, Plecker turned to old census records to rewrite history and prove that people claiming “Indian blood” were actually “Negroes.” Under Plecker’s reign, Virginia reclassified hundreds of Virginia Indians—going back to the 1850s—from “Indian” to “Negro.”
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How Virginia Used Segregation Law to Erase Native Americans
https://time.com/6952928/virginia-racial-integrity-act-history/
