Walter Ashby Plecker (2 April 1861–1947) was a physician and public health advocate who was the first registrar of Virginia's Bureau of Vital Statistics, serving from 1912-1946. He was a leader of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, a white supremacist organization founded in Richmond, Virginia in 1822. He drafted and lobbied for the passage of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 by the Virginia legislature; it institutionalized the one-drop rule.
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Plecker graduated from Hoover Military Academy in 1880 and obtained a medical degree from the University of Maryland in 1885.
Plecker settled in Hampton, Virginia in 1892, and became its public health officer in 1902. He took an active interest in obstetrics and public health issues, educating midwives, inventing a home incubator, and prescribing home remedies for infants. His efforts are credited with an almost 50% decline in birthing deaths for black mothers.[1]
From 1912 to 1946, Plecker served as the first registrar of Virginia's newly created Bureau of Vital Statistics. An avowed white supremacist and advocate of eugenics, he became a leader of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America in 1922.[2] He wanted to prevent miscegenation, or marriage between "races," and thought that a decreasing number of mulattoes, as classified in the census, meant that more of them were passing as white.[2]
Plecker further believed that the state's Native Americans had been "mongrelized" with its African American population. He did not recognize that many mixed-race Virginia Indians had maintained their culture and identity as Indians.[3]
Plecker drafted and helped gain passage for the "Racial Integrity Act of 1924" by the state legislature. It recognized only two races, "white" and "colored" (black). It essentially incorporated the one-drop rule, classifying as "colored" any individual with any African ancestry. This went beyond existing law, which had classified persons as white who had one-sixteenth (equivalent to one great-great-grandparent) or less black ancestry.[2]
In addition, he campaigned with the US Census Bureau to have the category of "mulatto" dropped in the 1930 and later censuses. This deprived mixed-race people of recognition of their identity. The action contributed to a binary culture of hypodescent, in which mixed-race persons were often classified as the group with lower social status.[2] It was not until the 21st century that the Census allowed individuals to indicate more than one race or ethnic group in self-identification.
Because Plecker believed there were few "real" Indians left, as they had intermarried over time with other ethnic groups, he thought "colored" people were attempting to pass as "Indian." He ordered state agencies to reclassify most citizens' claiming American Indian identity as "colored," although many groups of Virginia Indians had continued in their cultural identity, practices and communities. Their identities were often recorded as Indian in church records, for instance. Specifically, Plecker ordered state agencies to reclassify certain families whom he identified by surname, as he had decided they were trying to pass and evade segregation. This was legal in the South until federal legislation of the 1960s.[3]
Among other effects, Plecker's policy caused a contemporary problem: members of eight state-recognized Virginia tribes struggle to achieve federal recognition because they cannot prove their continuity of heritage through historic documentation, as required by federal laws. Encountering European Americans first during the colonial period, the tribes had treaties mostly with the King of England rather than the United States government.[4] Plecker's actions in the twentieth century altered records and for decades destroyed the evidence for many individuals and families of cultural continuity as Indians. In 2007, the House of Representatives passed a law to recognize the Virginia tribes at the Federal level, but it has not yet gained passage in the Senate.[4]