Melanated People

3 yrs

The original inhabitants of Virginia looked very different from the European immigrants who started arriving after Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. The Africans brought to Virginia in colonial times were easily distinguished from both Europeans and Native Americans...

For centuries, Virginia law defined race in just a handful of categories - white, black, free people of color, Indian. Legal and social discrimination has provided strong incentives for various groups to minimize or obscure any genetic relationship with blacks in particular.

Dr. Walter Plecker served as the first registrar of Virginia's Bureau of Vital Statistics, which was created in 1912.

In the most egregious example of racial stereotyping, he sought to define "pure" whites based on the theory of eugenics. By his standards, codified by the General Assembly in the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, any black ancestor - no matter how many generations ago - would disqualify someone from being white. One drop of Negro blood would cause a person to be categorized as black. He actively encouraged local and state officials to consider all people with a mixed-race heritage as "colored." According to Plecker, those who might be described as mulatto or Indian were non-white, and anyone who was not classified as white had to be classified as black. He contended that the Native American tribes had lost what he considered to be their racial integrity, and were no longer a distinct group. There was no middle ground, no mixed-race status authorized by the 1924 law, with just one exception made for some "white" descendants of Pocahontas. The fear of Plecker and the racists in the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America who supported him was that 10,000-20,000 Virginians who were "near white" but had one drop of Negro blood would behave differently, and their children are likely to revert to the distinctly negro type. Dr. Plecker sought to categorize many of the Indians in Virginia as black in order to stop light-skinned people with black ancestry from passing as white people and thus avoiding the Jim Crow discrimination laws. However, he was unable to use the equivalent of "one drop" of Native American blood categorize someone automatically as 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. Plecker's one-drop rule was constrained by so-called First Families of Virginia (FFV's). They traced their ancestry back to Thomas Rolfe, the son of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, and were proud of their connection to what they considered to be Native American royalty. As described by one member of the Virginia elite. Of the Carys of Virginia, a noteworthy one was Colonel Archibald Cary, of Ampthill, near Richmond, on the James, known as "Old Iron" in the American Revolution. He married a Miss Randolph of the Curls branch of that numerous family. Through these Curls Randolphs we have received a dash of Pocahontas blood, and I have found no reason to decry this attenuated strain of descent from the long-gone little Indian princess whose high fidelity and noble unselfishness made its indelible mark upon colonial history.
As a result, Virginians whose ancestry was one-sixteenth Native American or less were declared to be "white" in the Racial Integrity Law of 1924. Whites could not have one drop of black blood, but they could have a Native American grandparent. That 1/16th "loophole" enabled descendants of Pocahontas to remain within white society, unaffected by the Jim Crow laws requiring segregation of the races.

As described in one review of his career:

"he led the effort to purify the white race in Virginia by forcing Indians and other nonwhites to classify themselves as blacks. It amounted to bureaucratic genocide."

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