Dr. Walter Plecker and VA Eugenics, In Black and White 

By Jack R. Johnson 10.2022

His title sounded harmless enough: the state registrar of vital statistics in Virginia from 1912 to 1946. Yet, as innocuous as it sounds, Dr. Walter Plecker’s daily work managed to stigmatize every Afro-American in the state of Virginia, remove every trace of Virginia Indians from state records (a kind of paper genocide), and finally provide a tidy template for Hitler’s own genocidal work with the Jews.

To give some sense of Dr. Plecker’s world view, in a 1924 speech before the American Public Health Association, he claimed that when the English, Dutch and Scottish landed on the shores of North America, they came “to found a civilization of the highest type, not to mix their blood with the savages of the land, not to originate a mongrel population.” The fatal error, Plecker said, was made in 1619 when the Dutch introduced African slaves to North America. “The problem was not slavery,” he explained, “but the presence of the negro in what should be a white man’s land.”

A taciturn fellow who reportedly never smiled, Plecker worked with the white-supremacist Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America to persuade the Virginia state legislature to pass the now infamous 1924 Racial Integrity Act.

"Let us turn a deaf ear to those who would interpret Christian brotherhood as racial equality," Plecker wrote in an essay supporting the act. This was the white man’s land.

The Racial Integrity Act not only forbade marriage between any white person and any “colored” person, but also defined a person as white only if they had “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.” It required that every birth in the state be recorded by race with the only options being “White” or “Colored.” The law also made it a felony to falsely register a person’s race on a birth, death or marriage certificate. For nearly a half-century, it was the law of the land in Virginia.

According to the Washington Post, “The act didn’t just make blacks in Virginia second-class citizens — it also erased any acknowledgment of Indians, whom Plecker claimed no longer truly existed in the commonwealth.” They were all to be classified as ‘colored.’ With a stroke of a pen, Virginia eliminated the identity of the Pamunkey, the Mattaponi, the Chickahominy, the Monacan, the Rappahannock, the Nansemond and the rest of Virginia’s tribes.

Like many white supremacists groups of his time, and of today, there was a fear that “amalgamation” or so called “race mixing” would lead to the “destruction” of Anglo-Saxon civilization. In this, we can hear echoes of the tiki torch laden chants from Charlottesville, circa 2017: “You will not replace us!” White Americans had to be on guard, Plecker explained, because the “mongrel” offspring of racial intermixture would nefariously try to pass themselves off as white. Towards this end, Plecker identified several Virginia counties with large Indian populations that he believed were home to large “mixed bloods” and assembled a list of surnames. He instructed that anyone with those names must be classified and treated as "colored."

Today, the Indians call it Plecker's hit list. 

Virginia’s use of birth certificates to police racial purity had severe consequences. At the time, being re-classed from white to “colored” effectively transformed them into second-class citizens. “It forbade giving your child an Indian name,” Steve Adkins, the 69-year-old chief of the Chickahominy tribe said, “And it caused people like my mom and dad to have to go to Washington, D.C., to be married as Indians. …It caused separations of families. It was devastating.”

Yet, Plecker was apparently proud of his efforts, “Public records in the office of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, and in the State Library, indicate that there does not exist today a descendant of the Virginia ancestors claiming to be an Indian who is unmixed with negro blood,” he wrote. In other words, he had succeeded in eliminating Virginia Indians, at least on paper. They were all now classified as ‘colored.’

In 1932, Plecker gave a keynote speech at the Third International Conference on Eugenics in New York. Among those in attendance was Ernst Rudin of Germany who, 11 months later, would help write Hitler's eugenics law.

In 1935, Plecker wrote to Walter Gross, the director of Germany's Bureau of Human Betterment and Eugenics. He outlined Virginia's racial purity laws and asked to be put on a mailing list for bulletins from Gross' department. Plecker complimented the Third Reich for sterilizing 600 children in Algeria who were born to German women and black men. "I hope this work is complete and not one has been missed," he wrote. "I sometimes regret that we have not the authority to put some measures in practice in Virginia."

Virginia actually came close with its own sterilization law, the Eugenical Sterilization Act, enacted the same year as the Racial Integrity Act, that allowed the state to sterilize 7,000 people “afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy.” but it was never applied as widely nor as viciously as the Nazis. 

Maybe the only good story about Pecker era came near his end, from the Washington Post. On Aug. 2, 1947, a year after retiring, Plecker stepped into a Richmond street without looking and was hit and killed by a passing city bus. He was 86 years old.

“That was good for us,” said Steve Adkins, chief of the Chickahominy tribe, when he talked about Plecker’s death. Said another member of the tribe, “I know it’s kind of cruel to say this, but I hope the last thing he saw was an Indian -- driving that bus.”

Considering the historical context, that would seem only fair.