In 1924, the Virginia General Assembly enacted the Racial Integrity Act, which reinforced racial segregation by prohibiting interracial marriage and classifying as "White" a person "who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian".Brendan Wolfe, Racial Integrity Laws (1924–1930), Encyclopedia Virginia . The act, an outgrowth of the eugenicist and scientific racist ideology widespread in the United States, was pushed by Walter Plecker, a staunch advocate of White supremacist policies and eugenics who held the post of registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics.Michael Yudell, "A Short History of the Race Concept" in Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture (ed. Sheldon Krimsky & Kathleen Sloan: Columbia University Press, 1971). p. 19.

The Racial Integrity Act required that all birth certificates and marriage certificates in Virginia to include the person's race as either "white" or "colored". The Act classified all non-whites, including Native Americans, as "colored". The act was part of a series of "racial integrity laws" enacted in Virginia to reinforce racial hierarchies and prohibit the mixing of races; other statutes included the Public Assemblages Act of 1926 (which required the racial segregation of all public meeting areas) and a 1930 act that defined any person with even a trace of sub-Saharan African ancestry as black (thus codifying the so-called "one-drop rule").

In 1967, the Act was officially overturned by the United States Supreme Court in their ruling Loving v. Virginia. In 2001, the Virginia General Assembly passed a resolution that condemned the Act for its "use as a respectable, 'scientific' veneer to cover the activities of those who held blatantly racist views".

History leading to the laws' passage: 1676–1924 The history of anti-miscegenation laws in the United States far predates Virginia's Racial Integrity Act. By 1924, 29 other states had also passed anti-miscegenation laws. These laws outlined racial categories of "white" and "colored", with the latter indicating those with Black, Indigenous, or otherwise non-European ancestry.

The colony of Virginia enacted its first law banning all marriage between "white" and "colored" people in 1691. However, since settler arrival in the region, people had been raising families together across racial lines.

Bacon's Rebellion: 1676-1677 In 1676, White settler Nathaniel Bacon led an uprising against Governor William Berkeley. He and others who rebelled were motivated by conquests for land when Berkeley refused to sign over all Native lands for settlers' taking. Bacon's campaign proclaimed the objective to "ruin and extirpate all Indians in general", and he led a massacre of nearly fifty Pamunkey in what is referred to as Bacon's Rebellion. Following this racially-driven coup, he passed Bacon's law, which sanctioned the enslavement of any Native person taken captive.

18th- and 19th-century racialization and detribalization In his writings from the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson expressed highly racist views on Black people, arguing against the admixture of the Black and White races. Although Jefferson did not believe Indigenous blood was genetically inferior in the same way, he contended that Black and Indigenous intermarriage depleted the indigeneity of Virginia's tribes. Jefferson's theories laid the foundation for both the eugenics movement and the 20th-century arguments that Virginia's first peoples were not "real Indians" because they lacked so-called racial purity.

Although Black and Indigenous populations have intermarried since colonial inception, these relationships grew increasingly risky to Virginia's Native groups. Whites pointed to the admixture of Blackness in Native communities as a way of delegitimizing their ethnic authenticity and land rights. Beginning in 1784, the Virginia General Assembly received several petitions demanding the dissolution of the nearly seven-hundred acre reservation belonging to the Gingaskin Tribe of Virginia's eastern shore. Their justification centered on the claim that only six real Indians remained on the reservation, with the land being used in reality as "an asylum for free negroes and other disorderly persons". In 1812, the petition went through. The Gingaskin Tribe was declared no longer Indian and instead classified as "free Negroes", dispossessing them of all of their reservation land. In the eyes of the General Assembly and White Virginians, the presence of Black blood negated any Indigenous identity, thereby removing their right to tribal lands and placing it in the hands of Whites.

Walter Plecker and the eugenics movement In the 1920s, Virginia's registrar of statistics, Walter Ashby Plecker, was allied with the newly founded Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America in persuading the Virginia General Assembly to pass the Racial Integrity Law of 1924."Modern Indians A.D. 1800-Present", First People: The Early Indians of Virginia, Dept. of Historic Resources, State of Virginia, accessed April 14, 2010 The club was founded in Virginia by John Powell of Richmond in the fall of 1922; within a year the club for white males had more than 400 members and 31 posts in the state.David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region, Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983, pp. 240–242, accessed April 14, 2010

In 1923, the Anglo-Saxon Club founded two posts in Charlottesville, one for the town and one for students at the University of Virginia. A major goal was to end "amalgamation" by interracial marriage. Members also claimed to support Anglo-Saxon ideas of fair play. Later that fall, a state convention of club members was to be held in Richmond."Anglo-Saxon Club Founds Two Posts in Community", The Cavalier Daily (UVA), October 5, 1923, accessed April 14, 2010

The Virginia assembly's 21st-century explanation for the laws summarizes their development: The now-discredited pseudoscience of eugenics was based on theories first propounded in England by Francis Galton, the cousin and disciple of famed biologist Charles Darwin. The goal of the "science" of eugenics was to improve the human race by eliminating what the movement's supporters considered hereditary disorders or flaws through selective breeding and social engineering. The eugenics movement proved popular in the United States, with Indiana enacting the nation's first eugenics-based sterilization law in 1907.HJ607ER, Paragraphs 1–3

The Racial Integrity Act proclaimed to preserve the purity of Whiteness by keeping so-called "colored blood" out of the "White" gene pool. Given that the three major proponents of the Racial Integrity Act—Walter Plecker, John Powell, and Earnest Cox—were spurred on by non-reservation groups (including the Chickahominy and Rappahannock) organizing to assert their identities, it can be noted that racialization became a tool for dispossession. Eugenics served as a racist cloak for material drivers.

Implementation and consequences: 1924–1979 The combined effect of these laws adversely affected the continuity of Virginia's American Indian tribes. The Racial Integrity Act called for only two racial categories to be recorded on birth certificates, rather than the traditional six: "white" and "colored" (which now included Indian and all discernible mixed-race persons).Fiske, Part 1 The effects were quickly seen. In 1930, the US census for Virginia recorded 779 Indians; by 1940, that number had been reduced to 198. In effect, Indians were being erased as a group from official records.

In addition, as Plecker admitted, he enforced the Racial Integrity Act extending far beyond his jurisdiction in the segregated society.Fiske, Part 2 For instance, he pressured school superintendents to exclude mixed-race (then called mulatto) children from white schools. Plecker ordered the exhumation of dead people of "questionable ancestry" from white cemeteries to be reinterred elsewhere.

Indians reclassified as colored As registrar, Plecker directed the reclassification of nearly all Virginia Indians as colored on their birth and marriage certificates. Consequently, two or three generations of Virginia Indians had their ethnic identity altered on these public documents. Fiske reported that Plecker's tampering with the vital records of the Virginia Indian tribes made it impossible for descendants of six of the eight tribes recognized by the state to gain federal recognition, because they could no longer prove their American Indian ancestry by documented historical continuity. The RIA prohibited midwives as labeling anyone as Indian on their birth certificate, and prevented anyone from marrying as an Indian on their marriage license. Thus, those classified as White people could only marry other "White people, and those classified as colored, including Indigenous Virginians, could only marry within that identification.

The Pocahontas exception

The Racial Integrity Act was subject to the Pocahontas Clause (or Pocahontas Exception), which allowed people with claims of no more than 1/16 American Indian ancestry to still be considered white, despite the otherwise unyielding climate of one-drop rule politics. The exception regarding the American Indian blood quantum was included as an amendment to the original Act in response to concerns of Virginia elites, including many of the First Families of Virginia, who had always claimed descent from Pocahontas with pride, but now worried that the new legislation would jeopardize their status. The exception stated:

It shall thereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. For the purpose of this act, the term "white person" shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons.

While definitions of "Indian", "colored", and variations of these were established and altered throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, this was the first direct case of whiteness itself being defined officially.

Enforcement Once these laws were passed, Plecker was in the position to enforce them. Governor E. Lee Trinkle, a year after signing the act, asked Plecker to ease up on the Indians and not "embarrass them any more than possible". Plecker responded, "I am unable to see how it is working any injustice upon them or humiliation for our office to take a firm stand against their intermarriage with white people, or to the preliminary steps of recognition as Indians with permission to attend white schools and to ride in white coaches."Warren Fiske, "The Black and White World of Ashby Plecker: Part 2" , The Virginian-Pilot, August 18, 2004, on the Weyanoke Association Website

Unsatisfied with the "Pocahontas Exception", eugenicists introduced an amendment to narrow loopholes to the Racial Integrity Act. This was considered by the Virginia General Assembly in February 1926, but it failed to pass.The Washington Post, February 9, 1926 If adopted, the amendment would have reclassified thousands of "white" people as "colored" by more strictly implementing the "one-drop rule" of ancestry as applied to American Indian ancestry.The Richmond News Leader, February 1926, ?

Plecker reacted strongly to the Pocahontas Clause with fierce concerns of the white race being "swallowed up by the quagmire of mongrelization", particularly after marriage cases like that of the Johns and Sorrels, in which the women of these couples argued that the family members listed as "colored" had actually been Native American because of historically unclear categorizing.

Involuntary sterilization