Walter Ashby Plecker (April 2, 1861 – August 2, 1947) was an American physician and public health advocate who was the first registrar of Virginia's Bureau of Vital Statistics, serving from 1912 to 1946. He was a leader of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, a white supremacist organization founded in Richmond, Virginia, in 1922. He drafted and lobbied for the passage of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 by the Virginia legislature; it institutionalized the one-drop rule.

Early life and education

Plecker was born in

Augusta County Augusta County is a county in the Shenandoah Valley on the western edge of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The second-largest county of Virginia by total area, it completely surrounds the independent cities of Staunton and Waynesboro. Its county ...

, the son of a returned

Confederate Confederacy or confederate may refer to: States or communities * Confederate state or confederation, a union of sovereign groups or communities * Confederate States of America, a confederation of secessionist American states that existed between ...

veteran. Sent to Staunton as a boy, he graduated from Hoover Military Academy in 1880 and obtained a medical degree from the University of Maryland in 1885. He was a devout Presbyterian, and throughout his life he supported the denomination's fundamentalist Southern branch, funding missionaries who believed, as he later would, that God had destroyed

Sodom and Gomorrah Sodom and Gomorrah () were two legendary biblical cities destroyed by God for their wickedness. Their story parallels the Genesis flood narrative in its theme of God's anger provoked by man's sin (see Genesis 19:1–28). They are mentioned frequ ...

as punishment for racial intermixing.

Career

Plecker settled in

Hampton, Virginia Hampton () is an independent city (United States), independent city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. As of the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census, the population was 137,148. It is the List ...

, in 1892, and before his mother's death in 1915, he worked with women of all races and became known for his active interest in

obstetrics Obstetrics is the field of study concentrated on pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period. As a medical specialty, obstetrics is combined with gynecology under the discipline known as obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN), which is a surgi ...

and public health issues. Plecker educated midwives, invented a home

incubator An incubator is anything that performs or facilitates various forms of incubation, and may refer to: Biology and medicine * Incubator (culture), a device used to grow and maintain microbiological cultures or cell cultures * Incubator (egg), a de ...

, and prescribed home remedies for infants. His efforts are credited with an almost 50% decline in birthing deaths for black mothers. Plecker became the public health officer for Elizabeth City County in 1902.http://www.virginiamemory.com/online_classroom/shaping_the_constitution/people/walter_ashby_plecker In 1912, Plecker became the first registrar of Virginia's newly created Bureau of Vital Statistics, a position he held until 1946. An avowed white supremacist and an advocate of eugenics, he became a leader of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America in 1922. He wanted to prevent miscegenation, or marriage between races, and he also thought that a decreasing number of mulattoes, as classified in the census, meant that more of them were passing as white. With the help of John Powell and

Earnest Sevier Cox Earnest Sevier Cox (January 24, 1880 – April 26, 1966) was an American Methodist preacher, political activist and white supremacist. He is best known for his political campaigning for stricter segregation between blacks and whites in the Uni ...

, Plecker drafted and the state legislature passed the " Racial Integrity Act of 1924". It recognized only two races, "white" and "colored" (black). It essentially incorporated the one-drop rule, classifying any individual with any amount of African ancestry as "colored". This went beyond existing laws, which had classified persons who had one-sixteenth (equivalent to one great-great-grandparent) or less black ancestry as white. In 1967, the United States Supreme Court invalidated the law in

Loving v. Virginia ''Loving v. Virginia'', 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a List of landmark court decisions in the United States, landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, laws ban ...

. In particular, Plecker resented African Americans who passed as Native Americans, and he came to firmly believe that the state's Native Americans had been "mongrelized" with its African American population. In fact, since shortly after the Civil War, Native Americans from all over the country had been brought to the Hampton area to be educated alongside blacks, at times inter-marrying, although Hampton's Indian schools had closed down as racial discrimination against Native Americans and the eugenics movement both grew in the state. Plecker refused to recognize the fact that many mixed-race Virginia Indians had maintained their culture and identity as Native Americans over the centuries despite economic assimilation.E. Moten, "Racial Integrity or 'Race Suicide': Virginia's Eugenic Movement, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Work of Walter A. Plecker"
''Negro History Bulletin'', April–September 1999, p. 2, accessed April 8, 2008 Plecker ordered state agencies to reclassify most citizens who claimed American Indian identity as "colored", although many Virginian Native Americans continued to live in their communities and maintained their tribal practices. Church records, for instance, continued to identify them as Native Americans. Specifically, Plecker ordered state agencies to reclassify certain families whom he identified by surname, because he decided that they were trying to pass and evade segregation. This remained legal in the

South South is one of the cardinal directions or Points of the compass, compass points. The direction is the opposite of north and is perpendicular to both east and west. Etymology The word ''south'' comes from Old English ''sūþ'', from earlier Pro ...

until federal legislation overturned it in the 1960s. In addition, Plecker lobbied the US Census Bureau to drop the category "mulatto" in the 1930 and later censuses. This deprived mixed-race people of recognition of their identity and it also contributed to a binary culture of hypodescent, in which mixed-race persons were often classified as part of the group with lower social status.J. Douglas Smith, "The Campaign for Racial Purity and the Erosion of Paternalism in Virginia, 1922–1930: 'Nominally White, Biologically Mixed, and Legally Negro'"
''Journal of Southern History'' 68, no. 1 (February, 2002): 65–106, accessed 6 November 2022

Death

Plecker was hit by a car while crossing a Richmond street, and he died on August 2, 1947, less than a year after his retirement. He is buried in Hollywood cemetery in Virginia beside his wife, who died more than a decade earlier. They had no children. For years Plecker never sought out friends, and he described his hobbies as "books and birds", and he gained a reputation for never smiling. His obituary in the ''Richmond Afro-American'' newspaper was headlined: "Dr. Plecker, 86, Rabid Racist, Killed by Auto". Plecker's racial policies continue to cause problems for the descendants of what are now sometimes called the First Virginians. Members of eight Virginia-recognized tribes struggle to achieve federal recognition because they cannot prove their continuity of heritage through historic documentation, as federal laws require. First encountering European Americans during the colonial period, the tribes mostly had treaties with the

King of England The monarchy of the United Kingdom, commonly referred to as the British monarchy, is the constitutional form of government by which a hereditary sovereign reigns as the head of state of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies (the Bailiw ...

rather than with the United States government."House Approves Federal Recognition for VA Tribes On Eve of 400th Jamestown Anniversary, Tribes Reach Recognition Milestone", Office of U.S. Congressman Jim Moran, 8 May 2007
Plecker's policies destroyed and altered records that individuals and families now need in order to prove their cultural continuity as Indians. In 2007, the House of Representatives passed a law to recognize the Virginia tribes at the Federal level. In January 2018, the

Senate A senate is a deliberative assembly, often the upper house or chamber of a bicameral legislature. The name comes from the ancient Roman Senate (Latin: ''Senatus''), so-called as an assembly of the senior (Latin: ''senex'' meaning "the el ...

passed the bill and the president signed it into law."Trump signs bill giving recognition to 6 Virginia tribes"
by Associated Press, January 30, 2018.

Quotes

* "Let us turn a deaf ear to those who would interpret Christian brotherhood as racial equality." (1925) * the "sickening and saddest feature...the considerable number of degenerate white women giving birth to mulatto children" (1925) * "...insanity, tendency to crime, and immorality are almost surely transmitted to their children, especially when both parents are of the same class. The worst forms of undesirables born amongst us are those whose parents are of different races."

References

External links