Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 18, 1993 TAG: 9304180210
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by MARY BISHOP
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A DARK, UGLY LOOK AT VIRGINIA'S RECENT PAST
THE EUGENIC ASSAULT ON AMERICA: SCENES IN RED, WHITE AND BLACK. By J. David Smith. George Mason University Press. $17.95.We Virginians pride ourselves on our state being the birthplace of presidents. We are less likely to tout this distinction: This state produced some of the cruelest forms of social control in American history.
It is that disturbing portion of Virginia's past that is so well documented and interpreted in J. David Smith's new book.
Smith, a Roanoke native and longtime Lynchburg College education professor who recently moved to the University of South Carolina, lays out in chilling detail how Virginia officials and aristocrats campaigned for decades against the poor, the disfavored, the black and the Indian people of their state.
In the name of white "racial purity," these men interfered with people's most basic rights - their decisions on whom to marry and even where they could be buried.
Smith is a national authority on the eugenics movement, the crusade begun early in this century to sterilize people who some authorities believed would taint the human race.
In "Minds Made Feeble" and "The Sterilization of Carrie Buck," Smith showed that many of the 8,000 Virginians and more than 50,000 Americans forcibly sterilized were "normal" people who alienated proper society by their poverty, promiscuity or social problems, however briefly manifested. Virginia's eugenics movement stretched from the 1920s into the 1960s.
Virginia's sterilization law, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927, became the model for the act under which the Nazis sterilized an estimated 2 million Jews during World War II. (This historical tidbit won a mention in the Holocaust movie classic "Judgment at Nuremberg.")
Until disavowed by scientists in midcentury, a network of social policy makers around the country believed there were easily recognized and genetically determined grades of people within each race. White people, many believed, were more highly evolved than anyone.
It is this theme that Smith explores now, beginning with the 1923 book "White America" by Richmond real estate agent Earnest Sevier Cox. Cox argued that the greatest threat to the nation was the marriage of blacks and whites. Under his definition, whites were those people without a trace of anything but Caucasian genes.
Early in the 1920s, Cox and internationally known Richmond pianist John Powell formed a white supremacy organization called the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, a kind of upper-class Ku Klux Klan.
The Anglo-Saxon Clubs won passage of a Virginia "racial integrity" law to record a person's race at birth so that interracial marriages could be intercepted later.
A Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial endorsed the law shortly before passage in 1924: "Thousands of men and women who pass for white persons in this state have in their veins Negro blood. If they are allowed to intermarry with pure Caucasians, and they are doing it now, the way is being paved for a complete breakdown of the races. Negro blood in time will predominate."
The newspaper warned that the white man must be saved from contamination: "Once a drop of inferior blood gets in his veins, he descends lower and lower in the mongrel scale."
In 1926 and again urged on by the Anglo-Saxon Clubs, Virginia lawmakers prohibited the mingling of blacks and whites in theaters and other places of public assembly.
The clubs raised a controversy after a white Newport News newspaper editor's wife reported her discomfort sitting near black people at a dance concert at Hampton Institute, a black school. Later, a club member complained of seeing another woman there, "a beautiful white woman" sitting beside and chatting amicably with a black man during the performance. That member said the law was needed "to compel people of this type from helping to pollute others."
From the 1920s to the 1940s, Powell and his powerful cohort, Dr. Walter Plecker, Virginia's first registrar of vital statistics, spread their racial hatred. Snitches around the state informed them of white people who supported black educational advancement or socializing between blacks and whites. An enraged Plecker shot off letters chastising such liberal-thinking people and tattling on them to employers.
But he did far more harm to nonwhites, or people he believed to be nonwhites. Plecker wrote in 1925 that black Americans reached their "highest state of development" before the Civil War with the "faithfulness" they showed to their slave masters.
He kept files he contended bore the true racial identities of Virginia families who claimed to be white but who, he insisted, were tainted with the blood of black people. Many of Plecker's findings were unsubstantiated, Smith writes. He sometimes cast his nonwhite designation on families simply because of their last names.
Plecker was Virginia's self-appointed high sheriff of race. In 1923, he wrote a Lynchburg woman that he heard that the father of her child was black. "This is to give you warning," he wrote, "that this is a mulatto child and you cannot pass it off as white. . . . You will have to do something about this matter and see that this child is not allowed to mix with white children. It cannot go to white schools and can never marry a white person in Virginia. It is an awful thing."
He meddled endlessly in the private lives of people he never met. He kept them out of white schools, colleges and cemeteries. He blocked their marriages to whites and their right to vote.
When a woman had two illegitimate children believed to be of "mixed race," Plecker wrote welfare authorities that the "proper thing to do" was to speed her to a state colony for the feeble-minded and have her sterilized.
He was unrelenting when families challenged the authenticity of his racial designations. Even high-powered lawyers couldn't shake him. Plecker simply would get his friends in the General Assembly to tighten the laws.
Plecker insisted there was no such thing as a "pure-bred" Indian in Virginia. All but a few who came from other states were "mulattoes" trying to marry whites or qualify as whites so they could vote.
He was most cruel to the Monacan Indians of Amherst County. He denied them birth certificates and marriage licenses that identified them as Indians. He altered the official records of their ancestors, marking them all as "colored" or "Negro."
Plecker's merciless treatment reverberates among the Monacans today. Only now are they beginning to proudly celebrate their heritage.
Walter Plecker left the state registrar's office in 1946. He was 85. He had been in power for 34 years.
In a letter to Powell, Plecker admitted that he was mistaken about some people whose "whiteness" he questioned. He asked Powell to destroy his letters about them.
John Powell, 80, died in 1963. Virginia Gov. John Battle declared a "John Powell Day" in his honor.
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Virginia's Racial Integrity Act as unconstitutional in 1967.
J. David Smith has done the state and the nation an extraordinary service with this book. Though it's painful to confront what he has written, we must face it so we never repeat such vicious social policy, and we must ponder how remnants of that hatred live on today.
Mary Bishop, a staff writer for the Roanoke Times & World-News, has written about the eugenics movement in Virginia.