Virginia Health Bulletin: The New Virginia Law To Preserve Racial Integrity, March 1924

In 1924, Virginia's General Assembly passed the Racial Integrity Act, which was designed to stop the “intermixture” of white and Black people. The act banned interracial marriage by requiring marriage applicants to identify their race as "white," "colored," or "mixed." The law defined a white person as one “with no trace of the blood of another race.” The law did stipulate that "persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian" would be considered white, an accommodation for elite white Virginians who proudly claimed to be descendants of Pocahontas. The act was amended in 1930, to delineate any person with "any negro blood" as "colored." The only exception was for Indigenous people who lived on Virginia's tribal reservations.  

As Virginia's first state registrar of vital statistics, Dr. Walter Plecker was a driving force behind the law along with members of the white supremacist Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America. Plecker oversaw the law's enforcement. After it was enacted, he sent this Virginia Health Bulletin to all the local governments in the state. It included specific instructions for clerks who issued marriage licenses, a copy of the law itself, as well as Plecker’s views on “intermixture,” and the harm to society caused “by such abhorrent deeds.”

Plecker’s focus on the separation of races was bolstered by the eugenics movement, a part of which adhered to white racial superiority over non-whites and depended on white genetic purity. He declared that “intermarriage of the white race with mixed stock must be made impossible.” He meticulously checked each birth certificate and marriage license in the state and wrote frequent letters to county clerks who failed to uphold the law to his standards. He even wrote to midwives, including this Aug. 15, 1924 letter to Mary Sorrels, in which he warned her against making "false statements" about the racial identity of newborn infants.

Plecker maintained that there were no Indians in Virginia who were not also descended from African Americans and were therefore "colored." He feared that people who claimed Indigenous ancestry were passing as white so they could attend white schools or marry white people. Many of his letters to county clerks focused on a group of families in Amherst and Rockbridge Counties, who he accused of trying to circumnavigate the law. Many of these families were of Indigenous descent (likely Monacan) whose ancestors had lived in the area for centuries.

The Racial Integrity Act was not overturned until 1967 when the United States Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that prohibiting interracial marriage was unconstitutional. The Virginia General Assembly repealed the Racial Integrity Act along with other racially discriminatory laws in 2020.

Citation: Virginia Health Bulletin, 16 (March 1924): 1-4; and W. A. Plecker to Mary Sorrels, Aug. 15, 1925, Rockbridge County Clerk’s Correspondence [Walter Plecker to A.T. Shields], 1912-1943, Library of Virginia.

Related Document Bank entry:
Application for Marriage License Under the Racial Integrity Act, 1924

For more information about the Racial Integrity Act see the Library of Virginia's The UncommonWealth blog:
The Centennial of the Law to Preserve Racial Integrity
The Impact of the Act to Preserve Racial Integrity on Virginia's Indigenous Tribes

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Scan It: Scan one page of the document. Identify three or four phrases or sentences that stand out. What do you think was the purpose of the act? What reaction do you think it got from the general public?

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