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Virginias Racial Integrity Act and the
Destruction of Indian Race in the Early Twentieth Century
On March 20, 1924, the Virginia legislature, with support from the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, enacted the Racial Integrity Act. This act for the first time made a clear legal definition of a white person as one "who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian." The "one-drop rule"-the idea that a single drop of black blood makes one black-was an extension and revision of already existing anti-miscegenation laws that strictly prohibited interracial marriages. In addition to more carefully defining a white person, the 1924 law also provided a special exemption-the "Pocahontas exception"-that defined as white "persons who have one-sixteenth or less American Indian blood and have no other non-Caucasic blood." This provision was included to protect the racial status of Virginias leading families who were the descendants of Pocahontas and John Rolfe and other early settlerIndian marriages from being categorized as blacks.1 But the problem with the law turned out not to be the definition of whiteness, but with the definition of Indians. The man in charge of enforcing the Racial Integrity Act, Virginias state registrar Walter A. Plecker, did not favor the Pocahontas exception. He believed the Indians in Virginia were using the Pocahontas exception as a way to pass as white despite what he considered their interracial mixture with blacks. Through his office he ignored the provision of the law that allowed individuals to have some Indian blood and still be considered white, and eventually denied Indians the right to claim their own independent racial status.
This article examines why Walter Plecker opposed the claims Indians made for their racial identity and was unwilling to accept Indi- ans as a third racial category in Virginia. It does so by explaining the background of the 1924 law and then by looking into two court cases brought by two mixed-race Indians that occurred only a few months after the act was passed. We will come to understand that Plecker found the law deeply troubling because it could not secure a biracial society in Virginia. The latter part of the article focuses on Pleckers attempts to eliminate the racial category of Indians when he used the law...