Mixed Race Studies

Lectures delivered by John Powell under the auspices of the lectureship in Music

The Rice Institute Pamphlet
Volume 10, Number 3 (July 1923)
pages 107-163

Lectures delivered by John Powell
Palace Theatre of Houston
1923-04-05 through 1923-04-06

John Powell

Table of Contents

• I. Music and the Individual (20 pages)
• II. Music and the Nation (38 pages)

From “Music and the Nation”

This is America, a large country. We are the hope of the world. We stand for and safeguard the liberty of the world. We are the greatest country that ever existed or ever will exist. People of every race and clime have come to our shores, The white, the yellow, the red, the black, and the brown are all here in this great melting-pot. They are all free and equal in the brotherhood of man. Eventually they will fuse into a homogeneous mass, and the outcome of this amalgamation will be the highest type of humanity ever known in history—because this is America.

Nobody has more respect for America nor more pride in her than I myself. But it seems to me that the folly of this idea surpasses anything that has ever come within my knowledge. It is idiocy to suppose that mere contact with American soil can change age-old hereditary characters; that, because this is America, the action of ineluctable, biological laws will be suspended. The melting-pot should rather be termed the “witches’ cauldron.” And we can be well assured that no miraculous alchemy will transmute these tainted strains into the perfect superman. Indeed, nothing more preposterous than this theory has ever been preached to a long-suffering people. Why, we would not think of subjecting even our domestic animals to such conditions as these! Everyone knows that if he wishes to breed thorough-bred horses he cannot admix inferior breeds into the stock. The same applies to flowers, to garden vegetables. How dare we sit still and let happen to our children-bone of our bone, blood of our blood-that which we would not allow to happen to the very beasts of the field. I wish here and now to enter my protest against this insidious, this hideous doctrine with every drop of blood in my veins and every ounce of vigor in my body.

If there were no other reason for rejecting this solution of general miscegenation, the negro problem would furnish good and sufficient grounds. If the present ratio were to remain permanent, the inevitable product of the melting-pot would be approximately an octoroon. It should not be necessary to stress the significance of this point. We know that under the Mendelian law the African strain is hereditarily predominant. In other words, one drop of negro blood makes the negro. We also know that no higher race has ever beqn able to preserve its culture, to prevent decay and eventual degeneracy when tainted, even slightly, with negro blood. Sixty centuries of history establish this rule. Since the first page of recorded fact, history can show no exception. Were the American people to become an octoroon race, it would mean their sinking to the level of Haiti and Santo Domingo.

With the constant interchange of population between Europe and America, Europe would likewise inevitably become tainted. This would mean the degeneration of the whole Caucasian race, the annihilation of white civilization. For not only are the physical characteristics of the negro predominant, but the universal experience of the past, as well as the study of our own hybrids and the other negroid peoples of the present time, proves conclusively that his psychology is also hereditarily predominant. This is the reason why every race which has mixed blood with him has decayed. If we, in America, allow this contamination to proceed unchecked, our civilization is inexorably doomed, For the transmission of these characters is effected through the germ plasm; and, whether we accept or discard the more extreme deductions of Weismann, we must still admit that the poison is too deeply embedded to be eradicable by education, or by material, social, or political advantages. Once let our germ plasm become tainted, and all is irrevocably lost. For, granting that natural selection and the course of evolution might eventually produce from this contaminated mass a race of high order, even then aæons would have to elapse before any appreciable results could show themselves, and Anglo-Saxon civilization would long since have vanished eternally from the face of the earth. But if we reject this melting-pot solution, what is left to us?…

Read both papers here and here.

One Big Hapa Family

KCTS 9 Television
Real NW
Seattle, Washington
Monday, 2011-11-14, 22:00 PST

After a family reunion, Japanese-Canadian filmmaker, Jeff Chiba Stearns embarks on a journey of self-discovery to find out why everyone in his Japanese-Canadian family married interracially after his grandparents’ generation.

Using a mix of live action and animation, “One Big Hapa Family,” explores why almost 100 percent of Japanese-Canadians—more than any other ethnic group—marry interracially and how their mixed children perceive their unique multiracial identities.

The stories of our generations of a Japanese-Canadian family to come to life through animation by some of Canada’s brightest independent animators, including Louise Johnson, Ben Meinhardt, Todd Ramsay, Kunal Sen, Jonathan Ng, and the filmmaker himself.

“One Big Hapa Family” makes us question: Is interracial mixing the end of multiculturalism as we know it?

 For more information, click here.

The Stain of White: Liaisons, Memories, and White Men as Relatives

Men and Masculinities
Volume 9, Number 2 (October 2006)
pages 131-151
DOI: 10.1177/1097184X06287764

Janaki Abraham, Assistant Professor Women Studies
Jawaharlal Neru University

During British colonial rule some matrilineal Thiyya women in North Kerala, India, had liaisons with British men. While the response of the caste (here, a Backward caste) to these liaisons shifted over time, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century many women who had liaisons and their families were excommunicated. A “white connection” became a stain and kinship with the white man was denied or shrouded. This article looks at the ways in which both the liaisons and the denial of the white man as father or relative were located within practices of matrilineal kinship. Furthermore, this article seeks to understand how these liaisons are remembered today and how the presence of the white man as a relative is layered over by processes of forgetting and remembering.

Read or purchase the article here.

Redrawing the Color Line: Gender and the Social Construction of Race in Pre-Revolutionary Haiti

Journal of Caribbean History
Volume 30, Numbers 1 & 2 (1996)
pages 28-50

John D. Garrigus, Associate Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

This article examines the social and political construction of race in French colonial Saint-Domingue. After 1763 white elites redefined the category “free coloured” using negative images of femininity rooted in French political discourse. This engendering of racial stereotypes solidified a racial hierarchy that whites found alarmingly fluid. Planters’ councils and the governors they opposed evoked images of sexually powerful women and effeminized men to explain colonial despotism and disorder. In the late 1780s, however, free men of colour deliberately asserted their civic virtue and virility, challenging these stereotypes and eventually destroying the colonial racial hierarchy.

By 1789 French Saint Domingue was home to the largest, wealthiest, and most self-confident free population of African descent in the Americas. Comprising close to half the colony’s free population, these gens de couleur won civil equality with whites from the French Legislative Assembly in April 1792 and their political demands helped produce the Haitian Revolution. Why did such an extraordinary population emerge in this colony?

This article contends that the size, wealth, and self-confidence of this group were partly the result of new social and legal definitions of race formulated in Saint-Domingue after 1763. As this frontier society became the centerpiece of the French empire after the Seven Years’ War, prejudice established a deep and apparently permanent gulf between “whites” and “people of colour.” This new legal and social discrimination was deeply influenced by politicized French gender stereotypes, which whites used to reinforce a new, biological conception of racial difference. Old colonial families were relabeled gens de couleur. After 1769 whites considered free people of mixed African/European descent to be not merely “between” whites and blacks, but morally and physically inferior to both races. This exaggeration of the difference between white and brown colonists reinforced the ambiguous category “free people of colour” and served as an effective target during the French Revolution for wealthy “mulattos” and “quadroons” eager to claim full citizenship.

At the heart of the new racism were conflicts over Saint-Domingue’s political and cultural identity. After the Seven Years’ War new immigration from Europe and the increasingly “civilized” tone of elite colonial society raised the question of how “French” Saint-Domingue could become. Could a slave plantation colony produce a civic-minded public of the sort said to be emerging in France at this time? Many colonial planters, magistrates, and merchants wanted to believe it could. These elites appropriated metropolitan political discourse to explain why free Dominguan society differed from France. After the Seven Years’ War they began to describe free men and women of colour as passionate, narcissistic, and parasitic, terms used in France to vilify powerful women at court. This redirected and highly politicised misogyny helped solidify the ambiguous category gens de couleur, placing these families and individuals firmly outside respectable colonial society. The new image of people of mixed ancestry answered troubling questions about white behaviour in Saint-Domingue and seemed to guarantee that an orderly, rational colonial public could emerge. Grafting a stereotyped effeminacy onto emerging biological notions of race legitimised the disenfranchising of free people of colour, some of whom were indistinguishable from “whites” in wealth, education, distance from slavery, even physical appearance. In Saint-Domingue’s rough-and-tumble seventeenth-century buccaneer society, race was not the obsession it would later become. Early censuses did not distinguish between “whites” and “mulattoes,” but between free and enslaved residents. Before the massive importation of slaves for sugar work, children of mixed African/European descent were apparently considered free from birth. Even in 1685, the metropolitan authors of France’s slave law, the Code Noir, were more concerned about sin than race and racial mixture. The Code ordered colonial officials to confiscate mixed-race children and slave concubines from their owners, but stated that if a master married his slave mistress, she would be automatically free, as would the children of their union. Under the original terms of the Code Noir, ex-slaves enjoyed all the rights of French subjects…

For example, as he charted the somatic varieties produced by different combinations of African and European “blood,” Moreau also described distinct moral qualities. Blacks were strong and passionate while whites were graceful and intelligent. Therefore, mulattoes, who were one-half black, were stronger than quarterons, who were only one-quarter African. According to Moreau, African appetites for physical pleasure were especially pronounced when combined with white qualities. Mulattoes lived for sexual gratification, and the offspring of a mulatto and a black had a “temperament impossible to contain.”

Convinced that black women had strong psychological and physical inclinations to be mothers, Moreau believed that mulatto and quadroon women had difficulty giving birth, due to their physical and moral deficiencies. Men of mixed descent were similarly flawed. Mulattos were often intelligent and attractive, but they were lazy, beardless, foppish, and sensual, according to Moreau. Nor did free coloured military service challenge this image:

It seems that then [in the ranks a mulatto] loses his laziness, but all the world knows that a soldier’s life, in the leisure it provides, has attractions for indolent men … A mulatto soldier will appear exactly to the calls of day, perhaps even to those of the evening, but it is in vain that one tries to restrict his liberty at night; [the night|] belongs to pleasure and he will not indenture it, no matter what commitments he has made elsewhere…

Read the entire article here.

Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Harvard University Press
September 1999
368 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches; 14 halftones, 2 tables
Paperback ISBN: 9780674951914

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Professor of American Studies & History
Yale University

• Winner of the 1999 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association
• 1999 Best Book on the Social Construction of Race, Sponsored by the American Political Science Association Section on Race, Ethnicity and Politics
• Co-Winner of the American Political Science Association’s 1999 Ralph J. Bunche Award

America’s racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of “whiteness studies” and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants “race” has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were reracialized to become Caucasian. He provides a counterhistory of how nationality groups such as the Irish or Greeks became Americans as racial groups like Celts or Mediterraneans became Caucasian.

Jacobson tracks race as a conception and perception, emphasizing the importance of knowing not only how we label one another but also how we see one another, and how that racialized vision has largely been transformed in this century. The stages of racial formation—race as formed in conquest, enslavement, imperialism, segregation, and labor migration—are all part of the complex, and now counterintuitive, history of race. Whiteness of a Different Color traces the fluidity of racial categories from an immense body of research in literature, popular culture, politics, society, ethnology, anthropology, cartoons, and legal history, including sensational trials like the Leo Frank case and the Draft Riots of 1863.

Table of Contents

• Note on Usage
• Introduction: The Fabrication of Race
• I. The Political History of Whiteness
  • 1. “Free White Persons” in the Republic, 1790–1840
  • 2. Anglo-Saxons and Others, 1840–1924
  • 3. Becoming Caucasian, 1924–1965
• II. History, Race, and Perception
  • 4. 1877: The Instability of Race
  • 5. Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews
• III. The Manufacture of Caucasians
  • 6. The Crucible of Empire
  • 7. Naturalization and the Courts
  • 8. The Dawning Civil Rights Era
• Epilogue: Ethnic Revival and the Denial of White Privilege
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index

The Multiracial Identity Movement: Countless Ways to Misunderstand Race

MixedRaceStudies.org
2011-11-04

Steven F. Riley

In Jen Chau’s essay, “Multiracial Families: Counted But Still Misunderstood,” in the October 31, 2011 issue of Racialiscious, reveals just how much race is misunderstood by some activists within the multiracial identity movement and exemplifies why the movement—in its current form—is incapable of leading us into a post-racial future.

Part of the “quiet” that Ms. Chau is experiencing is due to the realization that President Barack Obama is not the multiracial messiah some had thought he would be. He is neither a messiah, nor is he—as he has stated on multiple occasions—multiracial.  Unfortunately, in many ways, the policies of our first black President differ little from our previous white President (George W. Bush). Is this the “black-white mix” we were hoping for? Perhaps the quiet is the palatable disappointment in President Obama’s first three years office. What part of “race is a social construction” does she not understand?  As succinctly stated by Professor Richard Thompson Ford,

“Because race is a social category and not a biological or genetic one, Obama’s mixed parentage does not determine his race. Mixed parentage may influence one’s appearance, and a person whose appearance is racially ambiguous can influence how she is perceived. In such instances, race may be a question of personal affiliation to some extent. And mixed parentage may influence how one chooses to identify. But for the most part, society assigns us our races. At any rate, Obama’s appearance is not ambiguous, and he unquestionably identifies as black.” (Emphasis is mine.)

A good first step would be to for activists respect Obama’s identity as they would like us to respect theirs.

My theory—which differs considerably from Ms. Chau’s—is that the “quiet” is due to fact that multiracial-identity movement is simply not the progressive force she and others think it is; and we—including activists themselves—are beginning to recognize that.  In many ways, the multiracial-identity movement mimics the tactics, ideologies and demagogueries of the right-wing conservative adherents that it claims to fight.

The problems with the movement are numerous, but they can be narrowed to three major issues: 1) Race as biology, 2) Ahistoricity, and 3) the refusal to discuss the role of white supremacy within the discourses of multiraciality.

After nearly a century of scientific acknowledgment that there is no such thing as “race” as a biological concept, why do some in the movement still pursue issues dealing with so-called “multiracial medicine?”  A truly progressive movement would preface all of its statements with the fact that “race” in short, was a concept used to justify the extermination and enslavement of non-Europeans.

Another deficiency in the multiracial movement is its unwillingness to acknowledge that so-called “racial mixing” in the Americas is a five-century—not four decade—aspect of our history.  Thus even if “race” were a biological concept, we are all most certainly “mixed” by now.  Rather than making hypocritical (demanding the freedom to self-identify for some but not for others) pronouncements on President Obama’s heterogeneous background, multiracial activists should also consider the heterogeneity of the First Lady Michelle Obama, the overwhelming vast majority of black and Latino Americans, and yes, a significant segment of white Americans. In 1927, 40 years before the mythological baby-boom that was allegedly brought about by Loving v. Virginia and just seven years after the last 20th-century census that would enumerate “mixed-race” people (Ms. Chau seems to have forgotten the seven past censuses starting in 1850 that counted mixed-race individuals), anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, revealed that,

“The word “Negro” is, biologically, a misnomer, for the African Negroes, brought to the United States as slaves, have crossed in breeding with the dominant White population, as well as with the aboriginal American Indian types with whom they came into contact, so that there is today only a small percentage of the American Negroes who may be considered Negro in the ordinary sense of the term.” (The emphasis is mine.)

When an early 20th-century anthropologist—in the midst of an overtly racist era—can show more insight that 21st century activists—in the midst of the so-called “Age of Obama” era—we have a serious problem.

Lastly, the most deafening “quiet” within the multiracial movement, is its silence on the role of white supremacy in the continuing oppression and shaping of identities here in United States and around the world.  It is the ideology of white supremacy that created the notion of race as biology, then racialized and dehumanized, enlslaved, and exterminated people around the world for centuries—and continue to do—to preserve the current Eurocentric hegemonic paradigm.  As Professor G. Reginald Daniel has warned,

“We should be especially concerned about any half-hearted attack on the Eurocentric paradigm in the manner of interracial colorism that merely weakens rather than eradicates the dichotomization of blackness and whiteness, while leaving intact the racial hierarchy that maintains white privilege.”

The type of incidents that agitate the multiracial identity movement today are not the growing wealth disparities among racialized groups, or current vigorous attempts to curtail voting rights of minorities ahead of the 2012 General Election, but rather the freely chosen racial identity by the President or the chosen racial identity of the child of a Hollywood celebrity.  As Ms. Chau has stated, there are many ways that we have to fight racism and ignorance, yet the movement—particularly on the internet—is more interested in exploiting the bodies of young people by hosting “mixed-race” fashion shows that conjure-up images of Quadroon Balls from the early 19th-century or posting photographs of the allegedly “multiracial person of-the-day” in a self-aggrandizing exercise that Professor Rainier Spencer has coined as “miscentrism.”  At this rate, the multiracial-identity movement will be no more effective in combating racism and ignorance than a lukewarm decaffeinated soy-triple-shot no-fat latte at Starbucks.

Melville Jean Herskovits

American Anthropologist
Volume 66, Issue 1 (February 1964)
pages 83-109
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1964.66.1.02a00080

Alan P. Merriam

Melville Jean Herskovits (1895-1963)

Melville Jean Herskovits was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, September 10, 1895, and spent his childhood there and in Texas. In 1920 he took his Ph.B. at the University of Chicago, and later came under the influence of Franz Boas, then at Columbia University, where he took an M.A. in 1921 and his doctorate in 1923. In 1924 he married Frances Shapiro, and their daughter, Jean, was born in 1935. He held the post of lecturer in anthropology at Columbia University from 1924 to 1927, and was at Howard University in 1925. In 1927 he moved to Northwestern University where he remained, as full professor since 1935, until his death February 25, 1963.

Facts of this nature tell us but little about a man who gave his intellectual life to anthropology, of his devotion to his field of study, or of the enormous integrity he brought to it. It is, rather, in looking at the fruits of his devotion that we see the scope and brilliance of his productivity and the constant theme of humanitarianism, based always on the facts of research, that marked his work.

From 1923-1927 Herskovits carried out his first major series of studies as Fellow of the Board of the Biological Sciences of the National Research Council; this was a detailed program of physical anthropology titled “Variability under Radical Crossing.” The project came to be centered about variability, homogeneity and heterogeneity, and the problem of Mendelian inheritance in race crossing; it began with early anthropometric studies of Negro boys in New York City and Riverdale, New York (#28, 37). In 1925, Herskovits pointed out the importance of the range of variability in studying a mixed racial grouping (#31: 70), and suggested that a significant means of understanding heredity in racial crossing could be achieved through the study of genealogies of individuals concerned (#121, 61). This led immediately to the question of homogeneity and heterogeneity (#39) in the American Negro population, and Herskovits concluded:

That the variability of family strains can be utilized as an indication of the homogeneity or heterogeneity of a population; that the Negro-White population of New York is of surprisingly great homogeneity of type; that in this instance, at least, the result may be taken as an indication of the heterogeneity of racial origin; and that there is not in this population great variation between families, but rather within them. (#43 : 12)

The concept of low variability in family lines and high variability within families of New York Negroes was so different from that generally prevailing that Herskovits sought a further explanation which he found in the element of social selection (#35, 63, 100)…

Read the entire article here.

Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix [Review: Glazier]

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries
Volume 49, Number 2 (October 2011)

Steven D. Glazier, Adjunct Professor of Anthropology
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Spencer, Rainier. Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix. L. Rienner, 2011. 355p bibl index afp ISBN 9781588267511.

Spencer’s insightful analysis and critique of ideologies surrounding “multiracialism” in the 21st-century US highlights the “multiracial identity movement” and “generation mix” (young adults who see themselves as the first generation of Americans with parents of different races). As he correctly points out, this self-portrayal is false, since most black and white Americans are racially mixed. Part 1 (“The Mulatto Past”) offers a succinct overview of white American ideas about mulattoes—notably, the incorrect views of Chicago sociologists Robert Park, Everett Stonequist, and Edward Reuter, who depicted mulattoes as conflicted and psychologically flawed… …Containing both careful philosophical arguments and unsubstantiated pronouncements, Spencer’s presentation is highly repetitious, but nevertheless an important, innovative study. Summing Up: Recommended.

Read the entire review in the October 2011 issue of Choice.

Guess who’s coming to brunch? Dating and the hybrid subject

Race-Talk
2011-10-26

Adebe D. A., Race-Talk Cultural Editor

I don’t have enough hands to count how many times people have asked me if my parents are “still together” and upon hearing that yes, they have been together for over 25 years, expressed sincere surprise at this fact. Interracial marriages are apparently not supposed to work; the miscegenation taboo prevails. I guess whoever says race doesn’t exist is not only color-blind but sleep-walking.
 
I remember reading an article a while ago on how, according to higher education research, mixed-race people are perceived as “more attractive.” Conducted by Dr. Michael Lewis of Cardiff University’s School of Psychology, the research involved a collection of 1205 randomly-chosen black, white, and mixed-race faces (a limited choice of representative faces altogether). Each face was then rated for its perceived attractiveness, and it was found that mixed-race faces took the cake. The findings were then presented to the British Psychological Society…

…Contrary to popular opinion, I am not flattered by the fact that studies are interested in my face, because frankly, they don’t really see me at all. When mixed-race gets talked about in the media, it’s often automatically celebrated as a marker of socio-political progress, completely disconnected from the racial trauma of being deemed inauthentic by others, the wounds of self-questioning, and the reality of racialized violence and fetishization. I have been asked by previous partners if my hair, eyes, and even skin color were “real” as if I were a specimen to be poked and prodded at; as if my personhood were dependent upon the undressing of some enigma. The point was not if I colored my hair or if it were naturally this or that hue; the point lied in the question, the strange liberty people have found in dissecting what I am…

Read the entire article here.

The Black-and-White World of Walter Ashby Plecker

The Virginian-Pilot
2004-08-18

Warren Fiske

Lacy Branham Hearl closes her eyes and travels eight decades back to what began as a sweet childhood.

There was family everywhere: her parents, five siblings, nine sets of adoring aunts and uncles and more cousins than she could count. They all lived in a Monacan Indian settlement near Amherst, their threadbare homes circling apple orchards at the foot of Tobacco Row Mountain.

As Hearl grew, however, she sensed the adults were engulfed in deepening despair. When she was 12, an uncle gathered his family and left Virginia, never to see her again. Other relatives scattered in rapid succession, some muttering the name “Plecker.”

Soon, only Hearl’s immediate family remained. Then the orchards began to close because there were not enough workers and the townspeople turned their backs and all that was left was prejudice and plight and Plecker.

Hearl shakes her head sadly.

“I thought Plecker was a devil,” she says. “Still do.”

Walter Ashby Plecker was the first registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, which records births, marriages and deaths. He accepted the job in 1912. For the next 34 years, 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…

…From the grave, Plecker is frustrating the efforts of Virginia tribes to win federal recognition and a trove of accompanying grants for housing, health care and education. One of the requirements is that the tribes prove their continuous existence since 1900. Plecker, by purging Indians as a race, has made that nearly impossible. Six Virginia tribes are seeking the permission of Congress to bypass the requirement.

“It never seems to end with this guy,” said Kenneth Adams, chief of the Upper Mattaponi. “You wonder how anyone could be so consumed with hate.”..

…Plecker’s first 12 years on the job were groundbreaking and marked by goodwill. He educated midwives of all races on modern birthing techniques and cut the 5 percent death rate for black mothers almost in half. He developed an incubator – a combination of a laundry basket, dirt, a thermometer and a kerosene lamp – that anyone could make in an instant. Concerned by a high incidence of syphilitic blindness in black and Indian babies, he distributed silver nitrate to be put in the eyes of newborns…

…Plecker saw everything in black and white. There were no other races. There was no such thing as a Virginia Indian. The tribes, he said, had become a “mongrel” mixture of black and American Indian blood.

Their existence greatly disturbed Plecker. He was convinced that mulatto offspring would slowly seep into the white race. “Like rats when you’re not watching,” they “have been sneaking in their birth certificates through their own midwives, giving either Indian or white racial classification,” Plecker wrote.

He called them “the breach in the dike.” They had to be stopped.

Many who came into Plecker’s cross hairs were acting with pure intentions. They registered as white or Indian because that’s how their parents identified themselves. Plecker seemed to delight in informing them they were “colored,” citing genealogical records dating back to the early 1800s that he said his office possessed. His tone was cold and final.

In one letter, Plecker informed a Pennsylvania woman that the Virginia man about to become her son-in-law had black blood. “You have to set the thing straight now and we hope your daughter can see the seriousness of the whole matter and dismiss this young man without any more ado,” he wrote.

In another missive, he rejected a Lynchburg woman’s claim that her newborn was white. The father, he told her in a letter, had traces of “negro” blood.

“This is to inform you that this is a mulatto child and you cannot pass it off as white,” he wrote.

“You will have to do something about this matter and see that this child is not allowed to mix with white children. It cannot go to white schools and can never marry a white person in Virginia.

“It is a horrible thing.”…

…Plecker’s racial records were largely ignored after 1959, when his handpicked successor retired. Virginia schools were fully integrated in 1963 and, four years later, the state’s ban on interracial marriage was ruled unconstitutional. In 1975, the General Assembly repealed the rest of the Racial Integrity Act…

Read the entire article here.