by Edwin Black
Plecker’s audience expanded beyond eugenic circles. The American Public Health Association invited him to read a paper before its fifty-third Annual Meeting in October of 1924, in Detroit. At the event, Plecker preached to the nation’s most important public health officials that whites and nonwhites could not “live in close contact without injury to the higher [whites], amounting in many cases to absolute ruin. The lower [nonwhites] never has been and never can be raised to the level of the higher.” The association was so taken with Plecker’s advocacy that it reprinted much of his speech in the American Journal of Public Health. The journal praised Virginia’s law as “the most perfect expression of the white ideal, and the most important eugenical effort that has been made in the past 4,000 years.” Such platforms only served to legitimize Plecker’s views.58
Soon Plecker was pushing for similar “one drop” racial integrity laws in other states. Exporting such legislation was essential to his strategy since Virginians of any complexion could easily cross state lines to marry. In one article Plecker complained, “White and coloreds… quietly move to Washington or northern States and become legally married. In some instances, they even return to their home State and live in marriage relations…. “59
To help make Virginia’s race law a national standard, Virginia Governor E. Lee Trinkle proudly distributed copies of the Racial Integrity Act to every governor in America, with a personal letter requesting that they propose similar legislation in their own states. John Powell reported to one interested Midwestern legislator, “He [Trinkle] received thirty-one replies. Nineteen of these, most of them from southern governors, were noncommittal; eleven, the majority from the north and west, strongly approved; the only disapproval came from the governor of Minnesota. “60
Powell added, “Of course, laws against intermarriage cannot solve the negro problem in any of its aspects-industrial, economic, political, social, biological or eugenical. They can, however, delay the evil day and give time for the evolvement of an effective solution… a real and final solution.”61
Even if some governors were hesitant, legislators and activists across the nation were eager to replicate the law. Ohio senator Harry Davis requested more information, which Plecker provided along with a detailed briefing on the difficulties of lobbying such a bill. A Maryland lawmaker, John R. Blake, asked for a copy of the law plus a recommendation for a speaker to address the legislature. When the race-minded Reverend Wendell White of South Carolina wrote for more information on such a law, Plecker gladly sent it, bemoaning the vague response of that state’s governor. Plecker encouraged the clergyman, “If such men as you and others will get behind him [the governor of South Carolina] and the legislature, you can get this or a better law across. “62
To help, Plecker’s Bureau of Vital Statistics mailed literature to legislators in “all of the States, appealing to them to join Virginia in a united move to preserve America as a White Nation.” The first two states to emulate Virginia’s statute were Alabama and Georgia. Wisconsin attempted to follow suit. Other states were slow to approve “one drop” measures, in part because of increasing civil rights activism. With methodical lobbying, however, the eugenics movement hoped to spur more such laws. To that end, Laughlin asked Plecker to compile a special chart for Eugenical News entitled “Amount of Negro Blood Allowed in Various States for Marriage to Whites.”63
Plecker’s bureaucratic ire did not confine itself to white and Negro unions. Asians were also barred from marrying whites. For instance, on February 28, 1940, Spotsylvania Circuit Court Clerk A. H. Crismond issued a marriage license to a local couple, Philip N. Saure and Elsie M. Thomas. Upon checking, Plecker discovered that the groom was a native of the Philippines and the bride an Italian-American born in Pittsburgh. Assuming the woman was white, Plecker chided, “You as Clerk were not authorized to issue a marriage license to a person of any of the colored races, including Filipinos.” He lectured the clerk parenthetically in typical eugenic prose, “The Italians from the Island of Sicily are badly mixed with former negro slaves, and if this woman is from there, it is… [possible] she herself would have a trace of negro blood.”64
At about the same time, Plecker informed a California researcher that Virginia was also disallowing marriages between whites and Hindus because they were “of the colored races… who are considered either Mongolian or Malay, I am not sure which.” He told a South Boston, Virginia, contact that Portuguese were admixed with Negroes, and equally disqualified. His eugenic tracts bemoaned the presence of 500,000 to 750,000 Mexicans in Texas and called for their expulsion south of the border.65
But Plecker harbored a special animus toward one ethnic group. He despised Native Americans. Because he believed that American Indian tribes had intermixed for generations with whites and some Negroes, Plecker was satisfied that pure Indians no longer existed. To him, they were all mongrels. Worse, because Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act contained a historic loophole for those with no more than one-sixteenth Indian ancestry, Plecker saw the exemption as a demographic escape tunnel for those of mixed Negro lineage. From the outset, Plecker embarked upon a furious campaign to eradicate American Indian identity.
Virginia’s fabled history of settlement began with Indians. Years before any European landed in America, the Algonquin ruled the wooded lands which later became known as Virginia. Dashing Stream and his wife, Scent Flower, gave birth to Powhatan, who rose to become a noble chief ruling a federation of Algonquin tribes. Powhatan’s daughter was the beautiful Pocahontas, who in legend and perhaps in fact saved Captain John Smith by persuading her father to spare Smith’s life when he was Powhatan’s captive. Ultimately, in a well-documented saga, she married John Rolfe and sailed for England, where in 1617 she died of smallpox at the age of twenty-two. Their Virginia descendants included the Randolphs, the Bollingses, the Rolfes, the Pendletons, the Smiths, the Wynnes, the Yateses, and many others who helped build Virginia during the earliest Colonial times and eventually constituted Virginia’s aristocracy.66
But three hundred years of population admixture, genocide and oppressive living conditions for those who remained had reduced the continent’s many once proud tribes to a decimated remnant. The U.S. Census Bureau counted Indians in varying ways at various times, employing an array of definitions, all subject to local discretion, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Partially as a result of these inconsistencies, Indian demographic statistics ebbed and flowed in American population records, and their legal status was complex and troubled. But on June 2, 1924, Congress finally granted citizenship to all Indians not already naturalized under its Indian Citizenship Act. This law was ratified less than two weeks before the effective date of Virginia’s own Racial Integrity Act. The new federal Indian law, together with Virginia’s one-sixteenth Indian exemption, outraged Plecker.67
He embarked on a systematic effort to identify the lower class descendants of American Indians who had intermarried with whites and Negroes, and to reclassify them from Indian or white to mongrel. Among his main targets were the Monacan Indians, mainly of Amherst County, who descended from the Monacan Confederacy and dated back to Pocahontas’s day. Others he pursued included the Rappahannock, Chickahominy and Pamunkey tribes. These Indian communities were small and often cloistered. Some two hundred dwelled in Rockbridge County. In King William County there were probably fewer than 250. In another county, there were just forty individuals who called themselves Indians but whom Plecker claimed derived instead from the illegitimate daughter of a Negro and a white.68 All were targets for the registrar.
American Indians throughout the state vigorously objected when the Bureau of Vital Statistics attempted to reclassify them as Negro, or mongrel, or even nonwhite. “We had considerable trouble,” Plecker admitted in a correspondence, “in establishing the position of the American Indian, and admitted those with one-sixteenth or less of Indian blood, to accommodate our Pocahontas descendants and one or two other cases known to us in the State.
That clause, however, has given us much trouble, as a number of groups who have but a trace of Indian blood, the rest being negro and white, are claiming exemption under that clause. In at least one county, some who are descendent of antebellum ‘free negroes’ with a considerable admixture of illegitimate white blood, are claiming themselves Indians and seem to have been meeting with success.”69
Most of Virginia’s Indians were rural poor, living in modest cabins near mission churches. It was easy to marginalize them as unfit. Physically, most of them bore only the strong, classically handsome features of American Indians, including high cheekbones, thick black hair and their traditional complexion. Some, however, did possess blond hair, reflecting clear Anglo-Saxon parentage. A few, presumably descended from intermarriages with free Negroes in the prior century, possessed darker skin.70
Virginia’s registrar, however, only allowed for two classifications, white and nonwhite. All 1,300 of Virginia’s local registrars were under orders to watch for Indians with any trace of Negro ancestry registering as white. In at least one case, the local registrar consulted a hair comb hanging inside a Monacan church. “If it passes through the hair of an applicant,” explained Plecker, “he is an Indian. If not, he is a negro.” In a private letter, Plecker described the hair comb as being “about as reliable as some of their [the Indians’] other tests.” In Eugenical News, he bragged that his “systematic effort to combat” what he called “near-whites” included utilizing “living informants” as well as the state’s oldest tax and registration records.71 If he couldn’t get them one way he would get them another way.
Plecker employed his usual pejorative tactics in erasing “Indian” as a racial category from the state’s records. He sarcastically accused one Indian family in Rockbridge County of having a bloodline that included several Indians who had intermarried with some whites and Negroes. He instructed local registrar Aileen Goodman to change their classification to “colored” and brashly notified the accused individual that, “In the future, no clerk in Virginia is permitted to issue a marriage license… [to] persons of mixed descent with white people and our Bureau expects to make it very plain to clerks that this law must be absolutely enforced.” The Rockbridge family members were no longer Indians.72
Even when no Negro bloodline was apparent, Plecker was adamant. He identified one man in Lexington, Virginia, as “one-fourth Indian, three-fourths white, who cannot be distinguished from a white man. He attended one of the colleges of Virginia, studied law, and married into a good family in Rockbridge County. There are several similar cases in Southwest Virginia where Indians… have married white women and their children are passing as white.” He informed the local registrar, “You see [to it] that the mixed people of your territory are registered either as colored or ‘free issue.’” Disallowing even the category “mixed Indian,” Plecker instructed, “the term ‘mixed’ without the word ‘Indian’ after it might be acceptable but we would prefer one of the other terms.” The Lexington, Virginia, family members were no longer Indians.73
At one point Plecker visited an Indian church following its Sunday service, and after two hours sternly informed the assembled that no matter how they protested, they would be registered as “colored and would continue to be so and that none of them would be considered anything else.” Some years later, when the clerk of Charles City tried to issue a marriage license to a member of the church, Reable Adkins, and even included the birth certificate attesting to the man’s white lineage, Plecker simply changed the records. “We received this certificate for this birth with both parents given as white,” he acknowledged. “Of course we will not accept the certificate in that way…. All of the Adkins group and others associated with them under their Chickahominy Charter are classed in our office as colored and never as white or Indian. In reply to your inquiry as to whether a marriage license should be issued to them other than colored, when they present birth certificates stating that they are Indian, I wish to state emphatically that this should not be done…. They are negroes and should always be classed as negroes, regardless of any birth certificate they present…. When the certificates come in to us we index and classify them as negroes.” A special form was usually attached to the back of the certificate nullifying the category. Adkins family members were no longer Indians.74
Plecker’s interference even extended beyond Virginia. For example, Plecker wrote to William Bradby of Detroit, Michigan, advising that his birth certificate claiming to be of “half-breed Indian” parentage would be disallowed. Leaving no room for argument, Plecker declared simply, “We do not recognize any native-born Indian as of pure Indian descent unmixed with negro blood.” Bradby’s family members were no longer Indians.75
To bolster his assertion that Indians simply no longer existed, only mongrel mixtures, Plecker turned for scientific support to the Carnegie Institution and its Eugenics Record Office. For years prior to the passage of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, the ERO had focused on the Indians of Virginia as examples of the unfit. In 1926, the Carnegie Institution financed and published the results of extensive fieldwork by two of its Virginia researchers who had examined some five hundred tribal members in one area. The Carnegie Institution’s book, printed under its own imprimatur with Davenport’s close supervision, was entitled Mongrel Virginians.76
Mongrel Virginians was heralded for its academic completeness. It asserted that all living descendants of the several hundred Indians in question “have been visited time and again by one or both of the authors. In addition every known white, colored or Indian person in the county, state or nation who could furnish information concerning the deceased or living has been consulted and asked to give any material of value to the investigation.” The Carnegie report lumped all of these Indians into one new group, which they called the “Win Tribe.” Indeed, the subtitle of Mongrel Virginians was The Win Tribe. No one had ever heard of a Win Tribe prior to this volume. The book explained “WIn” stood for “White-Indian-Negro.”77
“The Wins themselves claim to be of Indian descent,” the book asserted. “They are described variously as ‘low down’ yellow negroes, as Indians, [and] as ‘mixed.’ No one, however, speaks of them as white. The Wins themselves in general claim the Indian descent although most of them realize they are ‘mixed,’ preferring to speak of the ‘Indian’ rather than of a possibility of a negro mixture in them.”78
The Carnegie report assessed their usefulness to society as follows: “It is evident from this study that the intellectual levels of the negro and the Indian race as now found is below the average for the white race. In the Wins, the early white stock was probably at least of normal ability, i.e. for the white…. [Today, however,] the whole Win tribe is below the average, mentally and socially. They are lacking in academic ability, industrious to a very limited degree and capable of taking little training. Some of them do rather well the few things they know, such as raising tobacco or corn-a few as carpenters or bricklayers, but this has been the result of years of persistent supervision by the white landlords. Less than a dozen men work even reasonably well without a foreman…. Very few could tell the value of either twenty-five or seventy-five cents.”79
Nor did the Carnegie report find redeeming qualities in the Indian culture it described. “There is practically no music among them,” the study reported, “and they have no sense of rhythm even in the lighter mulatto mixtures. As is well known, the negro is ‘full’ of music. Some of them [the mulattoes] have been given special training in music, but no Win has ever shown any semblance of ability in this line.”80 No mention was made of the Indians’ legendary rhythmic dances or songs and their many drums and other musical instruments.
Mongrel Virginians was accorded credibility because of its prestigious authorship, and its touted academic rigor. “Amidst the furor of newspaper and pamphlet publicity on miscegenation which has appeared since the passage of the Virginia Racial Integrity Law of 1924,” the report assured, “this study is presented
not as a theory or as representing a prejudiced point of view, but as a careful summary of the facts of history.”81
Plecker seized on Mongrel Virginians to prove his point and help him reclassify Indians. He helped popularize the book around the state with his own enthusiastic reviews. Eugenical News extolled the study to the movement at large.82
Despite Mongrel Virginians, Indians and others fought back. Several sued Plecker from the beginning and made substantial progress in the courts. Plaintiffs’ attorneys were often unyielding in their objections. One such attorney, J. R. Tucker, demanded that Plecker stop interfering with a birth certificate and threatened, “I find nowhere in the law any provision which authorizes the Registrar to constitute himself judge and jury for the purpose of determining the race of a child born and authorizing him to alter the record…. I desire and demand a correct copy of the record… without comment from you and without additions or subtractions, and I hereby notify you that unless I obtain a prompt compliance… I shall apply to a proper court for a mandamus to compel you.”83
In a candid note, Plecker admitted to his cohort Powell that his bureau’s strategy was based in no small way on simple intimidation. Tucker’s ultimatum had rattled Plecker. “In reality,” he conceded, “I have been doing a good deal of bluffing, knowing all the while that it could not be legally sustained. This is the first time my hand has absolutely been called.”84
As early as November of 1924, one judge by the name of Henry Holt ruled against Plecker, setting the stage for a test case. “In twenty-five generations,” wrote the judge in an incisive opinion, “one has thirty-two millions of grandfathers, not to speak of grandmothers, assuming there is no inter-marriage. Half of the men who fought at Hastings were my grandfathers. Some of them were probably hanged, and some knighted. Who can tell? Certainly in some instances there was an alien strain. Beyond peradventure, I cannot prove that there was not.” Nor could the judge find any two ethno-logic authorities who could agree on the definition of pure Caucasian.85
