Mixed Race Studies

Turning Dreams to Chaos: Multiplicity and the Construction of Identity

Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California
2003
249 pages
ISBN (eBook): 978-3-638-68960-1
Archive No.: V7499
DOI: 10.3239/9783638689601

Tamara Hollins

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Claremont Graduate University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Field of English

This work will reflect on the mutability of meaning in the female mulatto body as well as on the mutability of perception by acknowledging the erroneous nature of race and its concrete results, by examining the valorization and undermining of racial essentialism and heterogeneity, and by revealing passing as bound by the social and legal restraints related to the physical body even as it interrogates racial classifications. Specifically, this study will explore how some nineteenth century, modern, and postmodern American narratives containing mulattoes and passing personas produce a resolution reiterating the structure of race or new subjectivities within or possibly without the color line. Through this exploration, the war between the homogenous Self and the different Other will play out. In an effort to unite a divided personality, the Other will counter attempts by the Self to maintain essentialism. The success lies not in the final outcome but in recognizing the subversive acts of the Other and the irrational tactics of the Self as continuously revealing the subjects as always already married and as surpassing mere essentialism into the multitudinous, heterogeneous One. Still, this work realizes that essentialism has a place in heterogeneity, even if essentialism is a logical error. Duality and conflict are inherent in heterogeneity, or the multitudinous One. The key is not to eradicate, in an essentialist manner, one and not the other, but to live in a state of awareness, respecting and accepting those who knowingly choose to construct identities within or without the color line.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Reading Meaning in the Mixed Body
• Chapter One: Assimilating into What?: Stereotypes, Appearances, and Behavior
• Chapter Two: Eliminating the Tragic: Intersections of Christianity, Racial Uplift, and True Womanhood
• Chapter Three: Passing as Subversion and Reification
• Chapter Four: The Journey Home: Replacing Tragedy with Authority
• Chapter Five: Looking Within and Beyond Race with Irene, Clare, and Angela
• Chapter Six: From the Passing Mulatto to the Biracial Character: Race, Class, Gender, and Family
• Conclusion: The Community of Multiplicity

Purchase the dissertation here.

Racial mixture, racial passing, and white subjectivity in Absalom, Absalom!

The Faulkner Journal
Volume 23, Issue 2 (Spring 2008)
pages 3-22

Masami Sugimori, Instructor of English
University of South Alabama

In his 1987 study of the critical reception of Absalom, Absalom! Bernd Engler points out that “since the mid-Seventies the only interpretations to gain favour have been those which, at least partly, regard Absalom, Absalom! as the conscious realization of an open work of art” (246). Somewhat testifying to how the text’s indeterminacy specifically concerns the interconnection of race and narrative, Engler’s survey also shows that noteworthy monographs from the decade include those concerning “Faulkner’s attitude towards racial questions” (252) as well as “the novel as a study in narratology and/or epistemology” (256). Indeed, even as Quentin and Shreve finalize their reconstruction of the endlessly uncertain past by reading Charles Bon’s white-looking body as “passing white,” Faulkner does not supply any evidence for Bon’s racial mixture outside the white character-narrators’ invention.

Engler is quick to note, however, that most race-related scholarship does not fully attend to the novel’s open-endedness, as exemplified by four studies from 1983: “Walter Taylor,  Eric J. Sundquist, Thadious M. Davis, and Erskine Peters begin, as do most others, with the dubious assumption that Bon’s identity as Sutpen’s part-negro son has been clearly established in the text” (253). And it seems that this problem is still compromising the Absalom, Absalom! scholarship. (1) For example, while critiquing the discursive domination of “‘legitimate’ white caretakers of history,” Maritza Stanchich bases her postcolonial reading upon the same white “legitimacy” and uncritically follows Quentin and Shreve’s re-creation of Bon as “a free mulatto who can ‘pass’ as white”: “When the narrators of different generations are faced with Bon, a free mulatto who can ‘pass’ as white and threatens to upset the South’s rigid race caste, their pre-Civil War and post-Civil War fears overlap and intermingle… The strategy of the narrative seeks to uphold white domination by representing all characters of color through Rosa, Quentin, General Compson and Shreve, the ‘legitimate’ white caretakers of history” (608)…

Read the entire article here.

Although the history of racial passing does not evoke the clearcut ethical responses that we have to slavery it is an important part of the larger story of racism and racial repression in this country. The frequency of passing is further evidence of the fraudulence of race as a meaningful construct for other than divisive exploitation. The experiences of the black Creole men and women that I have focused on are examples of the extreme risks African-Americans born at the turn-of-the-century often felt forced to take to circumvent a poverty that was socially engineered by white supremacists who wanted to preserve decent paying jobs for whites. Therefore, to read the history of “passing” as a tragic mulatto story of self-hatred, or as evidence of a “devil may care,” Caribbean-style multiracial identity in South Louisiana is to misread the history of American race relations…

Arthé A. Anthony, “‘Lost Boundaries’: Racial Passing and Poverty in Segregated New Orleans,” The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Volume 36, Number 3 (1995): 310.

“Lost Boundaries”: Racial Passing and Poverty in Segregated New Orleans

The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association
Volume 36, Number 3 (Summer, 1995)
pages 291-312

Arthé A. Anthony, Professor of American Studies, Emeritus
Occidental College, Los Angeles

On sunny summer Sunday afternoons in Harlem
when the air is one interminable ball game
and grandma cannot get her gospel hymns
from the Saints of God in Christ
on account of the Dodgers on the radio,
on sunny Sunday afternoons
when the kids look all new
and far too clean to stay that way,
and Harlem has its
washed-and-ironed-and-cleaned-best out,
the ones who’ve crossed the line
to live downtown
miss you,
Harlem of the bitter dream,
since their dream has
come true.

—Langston Hughes, 1951

Racial passing is a well-known theme in pre-World War II African-American literature. Adrian Piper’s recent essay, “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” is an example of continued interest in the topic. In addition, “passing” is used in cultural studies as a metaphor for masking the real-and most often marginalized-self. This article examines racial passing, with an emphasis on the lives of black Creole women, in relation to the economic impact of racial repression and segregation on black life in New Orleans. My conclusions are drawn, in large part, from an analysis of thirty extensive oral history interviews that I conducted with eighteen women and twelve men born between 1885 and 1905, and living in downtown New Orleans in 1977. Each of the men and women that I interviewed thought of themselves as “Creole,” and participated in the familial and social networks of the city’s black Creole community.

Their occupations and educations were representative of the choices then available in New Orleans. All of them worked, although the kind of work that they did changed over the life cycle; they were primarily cigar makers, seamstresses, skilled craftsmen in the building trades, postal carriers, printers, and school teachers. A few of them attended the city’s private high schools and normal schools, an accomplishment that has to be understood within the context of the limited availability of an education-private or public-for African-Americans at the turn of the century. Many others were forced to terminate their educations, in more than one instance as early as the third grade, to begin working, whereas others finished apprenticeships. Their personal lives were equally varied as reflected in the extended, nuclear and augmented households in which they lived, and their individual experiences with parenting, divorce and remarriage, as well as widowhood and desertion. Most, but not all of them, were Catholics. Despite their individual differences, as a group the Creoles of color that I interviewed shared first-hand experiences with hard work and racial discrimination. The women-a group that has been overlooked in New Orleans historiography-experienced both racial and sexual discrimination.

Each of the men and women I interviewed offered insightful interpretations of the worlds in which they lived. They were all very familiar with the myriad practices of racial passing; although they were not all light-skinned, they all knew of individuals-often a parent, spouse or friend-who had passed. More important than examples of the intricate mechanics of passing were their observations about the reasons individuals did so. Lillian Gelbart Simonet, for example, born in 1904, identified a relationship between passing for white and poverty when she remarked:

There are whole families of these people in New Orleans, (who are not necessarily Creoles), who have just been absorbed and gone to various parts of the country and they’re white. Sometimes you just can’t blame them because they have had a hard time. Creole people, with all of the airs, had a hard time to get along [because] they [the young women] would not be domestics. Some were fortunate enough to get work at El Trelles, a cigar factory . . . and Wallace Marine had a cigar factory . . . they weren’t prepared to do any kind of work that required any kind of education at all because half of them hadn’t finished high school.”

The observations of Mrs. Simonet, a retired public school teacher, call attention to the limited opportunities available to the majority of black Creoles who were poor and uneducated, unlike herself.

In the larger scheme of twentieth-century American race categorization, individuals were either black or white. Individual whites may have had preferences for light-skinned or dark-skinned African-Americans in their employ.  But overall the ethnic and cultural nuances and phenotypical differences that were critical to the intraracial dynamics of the black community were disregarded by whites in the segregated economy of New Orleans in the 1900s-1920s. Many Creoles of Color consequently were willing to accept the risks of passing for white rather than suffer the deteriorating material and social conditions endured by persons living and working as “colored.”…

…Although the history of racial passing does not evoke the clearcut ethical responses that we have to slavery it is an important part of the larger story of racism and racial repression in this country. The frequency of passing is further evidence of the fraudulence of race as a meaningful construct for other than divisive exploitation. The experiences of the black Creole men and women that I have focused on are examples of the extreme risks African-Americans born at the turn-of-the-century often felt forced to take to circumvent a poverty that was socially engineered by white supremacists who wanted to preserve decent paying jobs for whites. Therefore, to read the history of “passing” as a tragic mulatto story of self-hatred, or as evidence of a “devil may care,” Caribbean-style multiracial identity in South Louisiana is to misread the history of American race relations…

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, & Struggles against Subjection

Indiana University Press
2011-12-23
236 pages
Paper 6 x 9
ISBN: 978-0-253-22336-4

Nadine Ehlers, Professor
Department of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Nadine Ehlers examines the constructions of blackness and whiteness cultivated in the U.S. imaginary and asks, how do individuals become racial subjects? She analyses anti-miscegenation law, statutory definitions of race, and the rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon of racial passing to provide critical accounts of racial categorization and norms, the policing of racial behavior, and the regulation of racial bodies as they are underpinned by demarcations of sexuality, gender, and class. Ehlers places the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler’s account of performativity, and theories of race into conversation to show how race is a form of discipline, that race is performative, and that all racial identity can be seen as performative racial passing. She tests these claims through an excavation of the 1925 “racial fraud” case of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and concludes by considering the possibilities for racial agency, extending Foucault’s later work on ethics and “technologies of the self” to explore the potential for racial transformation.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Racial Disciplinarity
• 2. Racial Knowledges: Securing the Body in Law
• 3. Passing through Racial Performatives
• 4. Domesticating Liminality: Somatic Defiance in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander
• 5. Passing Phantasms: Rhinelander and Ontological Insecurity
• 6. Imagining Racial Agency
• 7. Practicing Problematization: Resignifying Race
• Bibliography
• Index

Science: Passers

TIME Magazine
1946-08-12

Will U.S. whites eventually absorb the nation’s Negroes—as Italy, Mexico and Portugal have absorbed theirs? So thought James Bryce, and so, for more than a generation, have thought many sociologists. “It is now estimated,” wrote Author Herbert Asbury in Collier’s last week, “that there are at least between 5,000,000 and 8,000,000 persons in the U.S., supposed to be white, who possess Negro blood… Authorities generally agree that between 15,000 and 30,000… Negroes go over to the white side every year.”

Author Asbury’s conclusions are disputed by Sociologist John H. Burma of Grinnell College, who thinks the “authorities” exaggerate. In the American Journal of Sociology he argues that the number of Negroes passing as whites is much smaller.

Facts about Negro “passing” are understandably hard to come by. Guesstimates have depended largely on a pioneering study made in 1921 by Duke University Sociologist Hornell Hart.

Analyzing the U.S. census, he discovered an odd discrepancy in the population of native whites: between 1900 and 1910, the group which was aged 10 to 14 in 1900 somehow grew instead of shrinking. When deaths and emigrations were totaled and deducted, the group mysteriously gained 170,000 in population. Other studies showed that every year some 20,000 Negroes unaccountably disappeared from the census statistics. The obvious explanation: the Negroes had become native “whites.”

Read the entire article here.

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White [Discussion]

Lillian Goldman Law Library
Yale University
2011-03-07

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

Moderator: Claire Priest, Professor of Law
Yale University

The Lillian Goldman Law Library together with the Yale Law School Legal History Forum and the Yale Black Law Students Association invite you to a discussion featuring an important new book by Professor Daniel J. Sharfstein, with critical commentary by Professor Claire Priest.
 
The Invisible Line unravels the stories of three families who represent the complexity of race in America and force us to rethink our basic assumptions about who we are. For example, one of the families that started out black produced a Yale-educated Confederate general! This book has been called a “must read” by major scholars spanning the fields of legal history and African American Studies. It is written with the sensitivity of a novelist from the perspective of a legal scholar and provides a fascinating account of how laws and court decisions help shape racial attitudes.

Running Time: 01:17:37

Impurely Raced // Purely Erased: Toward a Rhetorical Theory of (Bi)Racial Passing

University of Southern California
May 2009
348 pages

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMMUNICATION)

This dissertation develops a theory about the interrelations between mixed race identification and passing as they pertain to the field of rhetoric and to United States slavery and segregation settings. I introduce the concept of (bi)racial passing to argue that passing is a form of rhetoric that identifies and represents passers intersectionally via synecdoche. In Chapter One I introduce the rhetorical, cultural, and conceptual significances of passing based on a review of the literature. I introduce the central argument of the project by proposing a theory of (bi)racial passing that considers the problems and possibilities of mixed race representation and mobility as a bridge between Platonic episteme and Sophistic doxa as well as between the material and symbolic components of biracial categorization. Chapter Two considers the historical narrative of Ellen Craft at the intersection of synecdoche and irony to highlight and transgress real and imagined borders that stretch beyond a simple consideration of race. Taking up the issue of appropriation through a detailed critique of the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, my third chapter considers passing as an antecedent form of identity theft and as a form of resistance. In contrast to the cases examined in these chapters, my fourth chapter explores Harper’s Iola Leroy, as a fictional account of passing that ties synecdoche to eloquence, articulating the tension between the threat of passing contained in the Plessy ruling and its relation to contemporary attempts at measuring discrimination at the intersection of race, class, and gender.

My fifth chapter takes a turn by exploring the literary and cinematic versions of The Human Stain, as contemporary narratives of passing based on tragedy and synecdoche in the context of minstrel performance and Jim and Jane Crow segregation. My last chapter fleshes out the theory introduced in the first, working toward a theory of (bi)racial passing that rethinks inadequate dichotomies of episteme vs. doxa as well as white vs. black. Then, blending the critical race theory of intersectionality with rhetorical personae I explain the significances of synecdoche, metonymy, irony, appropriation, eloquence, and tragedy in the various instances of passing explored. At a theoretical level, I rethink the inadequate dichotomies of episteme vs. doxa as well as white vs. black. I conclude with a rhetorical theory of passing based on the fourth persona and six original passwords that present opportunities for future research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• Chapter One: Running Along the Color Line: Racial Passing and the Problem of Mixed Race Identity
• Chapter One References
• Chapter Two: The “Craft” of Passing: Rhetorical Irony, Intersectionality and the Case of Ellen Craft
• Chapter Two References
• Chapter Three: “Membership Has Its Privileges:” Plessy’s Passing and the Threat of Identity Theft
• Chapter Three References
• Chapter Four: “She Was Above All Sincere:” (Bi)racial Passing and Rhetorical Eloquence in Iola Leroy
• Chapter Four References
• Chapter Five: “A Crow that Doesn’t Know How to Be a Crow:” Reading The Human Stain and Racial Passing from Text to Film
• Chapter Five References
• Chapter Six: Things Said in Passing: Toward a Rhetorical: Theory of (Bi)Racial Passing
• Chapter Six References
• Bibliography

LIST OF FIGURES

• Figure 1: Rev. Rafael Matos Sr
• Figure 2: “The New Eve”
• Figure 3: Dramatic Theater of Passing
• Figure 4: Ellen Craft in Plain Clothes
• Figure 5: Ellen Craft as Mr. Johnson
• Figure 6: D. F. Desdunes
• Figure 7: Homer A. Plessy
• Figure 8: Hopkins as Elder Silk
• Figure 9: Miller as Younger Silk
• Figure 10: Rhetorical Intersections of Passing
• Figure 11: Dramatic Theater of Passing as Rhetorical and Intersectional
• Figure 12: Layers of Meaning: The Dramatic and Tropological Roots of (Bi)racial Passing
• Figure 13: Neoclassical Elements of Passing
• Figure 14: The Truths of (Bi)racial Passing
• Figure 15: (Bi)racial Passing as Material and Symbolic

Read the entire dissertation here.

Black or White?

The New York Times
2011-05-14

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

Daniel J. Sharfstein is the author of “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.”

In February 1861, just weeks after Louisiana seceded from the Union, Randall Lee Gibson enlisted as a private in a state army regiment. The son of a wealthy sugar planter and valedictorian of Yale’s Class of 1853, Gibson had long supported secession. Conflict was inevitable, he believed, not because of states’ rights or the propriety or necessity of slavery. Rather, a war would be fought over the inexorable gulf between whites and blacks, or what he called “the most enlightened race” and “the most degraded of all the races of men.” Because Northern abolitionists were forcing the South to recognize “the political, civil, and social equality of all the races of men,” Gibson wrote, the South was compelled to enjoy “independence out of the Union.” (Read Randall Lee Gibson’s article, “Our Federal Union.”)

The notion that war turned on a question of black and white as opposed to slavery and freedom was hardly an intuitive position for Gibson or for the South. Although Southern society was premised on slavery, the line between black and white had always been permeable. Since the 17th century, people descended from African slaves had been assimilating into white communities. It was a great migration that was covered up even as it was happening, its reach extending into the most unlikely corners of the South: although Randall Gibson was committed to a hardline ideology of racial difference, this secret narrative of the American experience was his family’s story.

Gibson’s siblings proudly traced their ancestry to a prosperous farmer in the South Carolina backcountry named Gideon Gibson. What they didn’t know was that when he first arrived in the colony in the 1730s, he was a free man of color. At the time the legislature thought he had come there to plot a slave revolt. The governor demanded a personal audience with him and learned that he was a skilled tradesman, had a white wife and had owned land and slaves in Virginia and North Carolina. Declaring the Gibsons to be “not Negroes nor Slaves but Free people,” the governor granted them hundreds of acres of land. The Gibsons soon married into their Welsh and Scots-Irish community along the frontier separating South Carolina’s coastal plantations from Indian country. It did not matter if the Gibsons were black or white—they were planters…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

The campaign for racial purity and the erosion of paternalism in Virginia, 1922-1930: “nominally white, biologically mixed, and legally Negro”.

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 68, Number 1 (February 2002)
pages 65-106

J. Douglas Smith

In September 1922 John Powell, a Richmond native and world-renowned pianist and composer, and Earnest Sevier Cox, a self-proclaimed explorer and ethnographer, organized Post No. 1 of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America. By the following June the organization claimed four hundred members in Richmond alone and had added new groups throughout the state, all dedicated to “the preservation and maintenance of Anglo-Saxon ideals and civilization.” For the next ten years Powell and his supporters dominated racial discourse in the Old Dominion; successfully challenged the legislature to redefine blacks, whites, and Indians; used the power of a state agency to enforce the law with impunity fundamentally altered the lives of hundreds of mixed-race Virginians; and threatened the essence of the state’s devotion to paternalistic race relations.

The racial extremism and histrionics of the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs have attracted the attention of both legal scholars and southern historians, particularly those interested in the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, the major legislative achievement of the organization, and Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed three centuries of miscegenation statutes in the United States. Historian Richard B. Sherman, for instance, has focused on the organization’s leaders, “a small but determined group of racial zealots who rejected the contention of most southern whites in the 1920s that the “race question was settled.” Sherman, who has written the most detailed account of the legislative efforts of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs, has argued in the pages of the Journal of Southern History that the leaders of the organization constituted a “dedicated coterie of extremists who played effectively on the fears and prejudices of many whites.” Convinced that increasing numbers of persons with traces of black blood were passing as white, they made a “Last Stand” against racial amalgamation.

While Sherman is certainly correct that the Anglo-Saxon Clubs owed their success to the commitment of their leaders, their views and policies resonated with a much broader swath of the white population. The Anglo-Saxon Clubs did not merely manipulate the racial fears and prejudices of whites but also tapped into the same assumptions that undergirded the entire foundation of white supremacy and championed segregation as a system of racial hierarchy and control. The call for racial integrity appealed especially to elite whites in Virginia who were obsessed with genealogy and their pristine bloodlines. Lady Astor, for instance, reportedly informed her English friends that they lacked the purity of the white inhabitants of the Virginia Piedmont. “We are undiluted,” she proclaimed. Author Emily Clark satirized this prevailing view in Richmond when one of her characters remarked, “for here alone, in all America, flourished the Anglo-Saxon race, untainted, pure, and perfect.” White elites across Virginia gave their support to the Anglo-Saxon Clubs and allowed Powell’s message a hearing: state senators and delegates approved legislation; governors publicly advocated the aims of the organization; some of the most socially prominent women in Richmond joined the ladies auxiliary; and influential newspapers offered editorial support and provided a public platform for the dissemination of the organization’s extreme views…

…In addition to exposing a fundamental weakness in the system of managed race relations, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs unintentionally revealed the absurdity of the basic assumption that underlay their mission: it proved impossible to divide the state, or the nation for that matter, into readily identifiable races. The longer they waged their campaign, the more apparent it became that they could not divine the precise amount of nonwhite blood in a given individual. Furthermore, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs met a great deal of resistance from individuals and communities who rejected the clubs’ particular construction of racial identity. Communities across the state revealed a variability in race relations that confounded those most committed to a discrete, binary definition of race…

…Although Powell and Cox initially placed their efforts within the broader nativist context of the national debate over federal immigration policy, they soon ceased to mention immigration at all. (11) Instead, they focused their energies toward “achieving a final solution” to the “negro problem.” Their ultimate concern, as they suggested in lengthy articles in the Times-Dispatch, was to prevent “White America” from devolving into a “Negroid Nation.” Writing in July 1923, Powell argued that the passage of Jim Crow laws and the disfranchisement of blacks had “diverted the minds of our people from the most serious and fundamental peril, that is, the danger of racial amalgamation.” “It is not enough to segregate the Negro on railway trains and street cars, in schools and theaters,” the pianist declared; “it is not enough to restrict his exercise of the franchise, so long as the possibility remains of the absorption of Negro blood into our white population.” Powell acknowledged that Virginia’s laws already prevented the intermarriage of blacks and whites but warned that such laws did not necessarily “prevent intermixture.” He and his colleagues in the Anglo-Saxon Clubs also believed that a 1910 Virginia statute that defined a black person as having at least one-sixteenth black blood no longer protected the integrity of the white race. Pointing to census figures that showed a decrease in the number of mulattoes in Virginia from 222,910 in 1910 to 164,171 in 1920, they argued that an increasing number of people with some black blood must be passing as white. Consequently, a new, “absolute” color line offered the only “possibility, if not the probability, of achieving a final solution.”

Powell’s analysis of census data, however, points to the absurdity of his campaign to define race in absolute terms. While Powell interpreted the steep drop in mulattoes as proof of increased passing, historian Joel Williamson argues that by the early twentieth century the only significant “mixing” occurred between lighter-skinned blacks and darker-skinned blacks. Even census officials warned in 1920 that “considerable uncertainty necessarily attaches to the classification of Negroes as black and mulatto, since the accuracy of the distinction depends largely upon the judgment and care employed by the enumerators.” Mulattoes in Virginia did not become white between 1910 and 1920 but rather became black. In fact, the census bureau did away with mulatto as a category for the 1930 enumeration…

…Although Powell was the Anglo-Saxon Clubs’ leading spokesman, Walter Plecker, as director of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, was without a doubt the group’s primary enforcer. From 1924 until his retirement twenty-two years later, Plecker waged a campaign of threats and intimidation aimed at classifying all Virginians by race and identifying even the smallest traces of black blood in the state’s citizens. In short, the statistician operated on the belief that a person was guilty of being black until he or she could prove otherwise.

Plecker considered it his mission to encourage as many Virginians as possible to register with the state. Between ten and twenty thousand near-white Virginians, he noted, “possess an intermixture of colored blood, in some cases to a slight extent, it is true, but still enough to prevent them from being white.” Such people previously had been considered white, which had allowed them to demand “admittance of their children to white schools” and “in not a few cases” to marry whites. Although such people were “scarcely distinguished as colored,” they “are not white in reality.” Registration, he argued, would enable the Bureau of Vital Statistics to head off such trouble…

…Linking racial integrity and segregated schools assumed a level of critical importance as the General Assembly prepared to meet in January 1930. Revelations that a number of mixed-race children attended white schools in Essex County provided advocates of a stricter racial-definition law the means of persuasion that they had lacked in 1926 and 1928 when they were seen as unnecessarily harassing the state’s Indians. The situation in Essex County first developed in 1928 as local school officials took steps to remove from the white schools children considered mixed. One family resisted, hired a lawyer, and filed suit. In the Circuit Court of Essex County, school officials acknowledged that the children in question had less than one-sixteenth black blood. Consequently, Judge Joseph W. Chinn ruled that the children could not be kept out of white schools.

Chinn based his ruling on what racial integrity advocates had long understood as a loophole in the original legislation. The 1924 Racial Integrity Act defined a white person as an individual with “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian,” making an exception only for certain Indians, and failed to define a black person. Furthermore, the act specifically prohibited the intermarriage of a white person with a nonwhite person, but it made no mention of the schools. Powell later testified that he had assumed that all persons not deemed white would be automatically classified black. But since the 1924 statute did not amend the 1910 act which termed blacks as persons with one-sixteenth or more black blood, an individual with less than one-sixteenth black blood could not be considered black, and therefore he or she could not be prevented from attending white schools.

A reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch concluded that under Chinn’s ruling “any child having less than one-sixteenth Negro blood, not only can attend a white school, but must attend it, and is by law prevented from attending a colored school.” The judge’s opinion, moreover, opened the door for persons with less than one-sixteenth black blood to attend any of Virginia’s colleges or universities. In the wake of Chinn’s decision, local officials understood that their only avenue of relief lay with the state legislature passing a stricter law; consequently, sponsors introduced a measure that defined as black “any person in whom there is ascertainable any Negro Blood”—the so-called one-drop rule…