Racial Integrity Act of 1924

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The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 of Virginia, United States, was a law that had required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth, and prevented marriage between "white persons" and non-white persons. The law was the most famous ban on miscegenation in the United States, and was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in 1967, in Loving v. Virginia.

Wisconsin was the first State to enact legislation that required the medical certification of persons who applied for marriage licenses. The law that was enacted in 1913 generated attempts at similar legislation in other States. By 1924, 15 States had enacted similar legislation; however, unlike Virginia, many or most or all of those States failed to rigidly enforce their laws requiring specific qualities in all persons seeking to marry.

Senate bill 219 (SB 219) was approved on March 20, 1924. SB 219 is a separate law from SB 281, which was also approved on that day (along with other Acts). SB 281 is titled: An ACT to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of State institutions in certain cases. In some instances, those two bills have erroneously been regarded as being one law.

This law was subject to the "Pocahontas exception"—since many influential families claimed descendence from Pocahontas, the legislature declared that a person could be considered white with as much as one-sixteenth Indian ancestry.

An exacerbating amendment or series of statutes to the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was under consideration by the General Assembly in February, 1926. If adopted, the legislation would have brought the reclassification of thousands of "white" people. They would have become either "colored" or "nonwhite." Two former Governors would have been reclassified to being either "colored" or "nonwhite."

The origins of the Act were both in traditional concerns about "intermixture" but also had strong support from the "scientific racism" of the eugenics movement. In particular, New York eugenicist Madison Grant worked to ensure his model of the "one-drop rule" was implemented by the Virginia Registrar of Statistics, Walter Ashby Plecker, who developed the racial criteria behind the act.

The Racial Integrity Act began to crumble on June 12, 1967 when the United States Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia. The portion of the law which had prohibited marriages between "whites" and "nonwhites" was found to be contrary to the guarantees of the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution. In 1975, Virginia's General Assembly repealed the rest of the Racial Integrity Act. In 2001, a bill (HJ607ER) passed by a vote of 85-10 in the House and 40-0 in the Senate. The bill expressed the General Assembly's profound regret for its role in the eugenics movement. On May 2, 2002, Governor Mark Warner issued a statement also expressing "profound regret for the Commonwealth's role in the eugenics movement," specifically naming Virginia's 1924 compulsory sterilization legislation.[1]