Social media is a cold world!!!
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..the dude
I posted this earlier. Hilarious
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.
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.”
For decades, Plecker bluffed, lied, and bullied local officials, midwives, educators, and married couples in his crusade to preserve white supremacy. Plecker scrutinized every birth, death, and marriage certificate filed in Virginia. He often insisted that people who claimed “Indian blood” refile paperwork as “Negro,” because he believed Virginia’s “real” Indians had “vanished.” If “remnants” remained, he often wrote, they were likely “Negroes in feathers.”
How Virginia Used Segregation Law to Erase Native Americans
A century ago, Virginia's Racial Integrity Act became a model for segregation. Its impact on Native people is still felt.
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