Physician. Eugenicist. White Supremacist. A rabid believer in white supremacy and eugenics, he used his position as state registrar of vital statistics to erase Virginia's Indigenous people as well as increased oppression for Black Americans. He helped craft the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which recognized only white and Black races. It made marriage between white persons and non-white persons a felony and reclassified most citizens claiming Indian identity as Black. Virginia Indian tribes had difficulty documenting their heritage because official records wiped out their cultural identity. Due in part to Plecker’s “paper genocide,” no Virginia tribe received federal recognition until 2018.
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From Wikipedia
Walter Ashby Plecker (April 2, 1861 – August 2, 1947) was an American physician and public health advocate who was the first registrar of Virginia's Bureau of Vital Statistics, serving from 1912 to 1946. He was a leader of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, a white supremacist organization founded in Richmond, Virginia, in 1922. A eugenicist and proponent of scientific racism, Plecker drafted and lobbied for the passage of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 by the Virginia legislature; it institutionalized the one-drop rule.

Early Life And Education
Plecker was born in Augusta County, Virginia in April 1861, shortly before Virginia seceded from the Union and the beginning of the American Civil War. His father was a slave owner who fought in the Confederate States Army.[1] After being sent to Staunton as a boy, he graduated from Hoover Military Academy in 1880 and obtained a medical degree from the University of Maryland in 1885.[2] He was a devout Presbyterian, and throughout his life, he supported the denomination's fundamentalist southern branch, funding missionaries who believed, as he later would, that God had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah as punishment for racial intermixing.[3]

Career
Plecker settled in Hampton, Virginia, in 1892, and before his mother's death in 1915, he worked with women of all races and became known for his active interest in obstetrics and public health issues. Plecker educated midwives, invented a home incubator, and prescribed home remedies for infants.[3] Plecker became the public health officer for Elizabeth City County in 1902.[4]

In 1912, Plecker became the first registrar of Virginia's newly created Bureau of Vital Statistics, a position he held until 1946. An avowed white supremacist and an advocate of eugenics, he became a leader of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America in 1922.[5] He wanted to prevent miscegenation, or marriage between races, and he also thought that a decreasing number of mulattoes, as classified in the census, meant that more of them were passing as white.[5][6]

With the help of John Powell and Earnest Sevier Cox, Plecker drafted and the state legislature passed the "Racial Integrity Act of 1924".[4] It recognized only two races, "white" and "colored" (black). It essentially incorporated the one-drop rule, classifying any individual with any amount of African ancestry as "colored". This went beyond existing laws, which had classified persons who had one-sixteenth (equivalent to one great-great-grandparent) or less black ancestry as white.[5] In 1967, the United States Supreme Court invalidated the law in Loving v. Virginia.[7]

In particular, Plecker resented African Americans who passed as Native Americans, and he came to firmly believe that the state's Native Americans had been "mongrelized" with its African American population. In fact, since shortly after the Civil War, Native Americans from all over the country had been brought to the Hampton area to be educated alongside blacks, at times inter-marrying, although Hampton's Indian schools had closed down as racial discrimination against Native Americans and the eugenics movement both grew in the state.

Plecker refused to recognize the fact that many mixed-race Virginia Indians had maintained their culture and identity as Native Americans over the centuries despite economic assimilation.[8] Plecker ordered state agencies to reclassify most citizens who claimed American Indian identity as "colored", although many Virginian Native Americans continued to live in their communities and maintained their tribal practices. Church records, for instance, continued to identify them as Native Americans. Specifically, Plecker ordered state agencies to reclassify certain families whom he identified by surname, because he decided that they were trying to pass and evade segregation. This remained legal in the South until, in the 1960s, it was overturned by federal legislation.[8]

In addition, Plecker lobbied the US Census Bureau to drop the category "mulatto" in the 1930 and later censuses. This deprived mixed-race people of recognition of their identity and it also contributed to a binary culture of hypodescent, in which mixed-race persons were often classified as part of the group with lower social status.[5]

Plecker sympathized with Nazi eugenics efforts. In 1935, a decade after the passage of Virginia's eugenics laws, he wrote to Walter Gross, director of Nazi Germany's Office for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare. Plecker described Virginia's racial purity laws and requested to be put on Gross' mailing list. Following the Third Reich's sterilization of 600 Rhineland bastards, children in the Rhineland who were born of German women by Black French colonial fathers,

Plecker commented: "I hope this work is complete and not one has been missed. I sometimes regret that we have not the authority to put some measures in practice in Virginia." In 1943, Plecker remarked, "Our own indexed birth and marriage records, showing race, reach back to 1853. Such a study has probably never been made before. Your staff member is probably correct in his surmise that Hitler’s genealogical study of the Jews is not more complete."[1][9]

Death
On August 2, 1947, Plecker was struck by a car while crossing a Richmond street, killing him, less than a year after his retirement. He was buried in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery[7] beside his wife, who had died more than a decade earlier. They had no children.[10]

For years Plecker never sought out friends, and he described his hobbies as "books and birds", and he gained a reputation for never smiling.[3] His obituary in the Richmond Afro-American newspaper was headlined: "Dr. Plecker, 86, Rabid Racist, Killed by Auto".[1]

Plecker's racial policies continue to cause problems for the descendants of what are sometimes called the First Virginians. Members of eight Virginia-recognized tribes struggle to achieve federal recognition because they cannot prove their continuity of heritage through historic documentation, as federal laws require. First encountering European Americans during the colonial period, the tribes mostly had treaties with the King of England rather than with the United States government.[11]

Plecker's policies destroyed and altered records that individuals and families need in order to prove their cultural continuity as Indians. In 2007, the House of Representatives passed a law to recognize six Virginia tribes at the Federal level.[11] In January 2018, the Senate passed the bill and President Donald Trump signed it into law.[12][13]
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From Encyclopedia Virginia
Walter Ashby Plecker (1861–1947)
SUMMARY
Walter Ashby Plecker was a physician and the first Virginia state registrar of vital statistics, a position he served in from 1912 to 1946. He was a staunch promoter of eugenics, a discredited movement aimed at scientifically proving white racial superiority and thereby justifying the marginalizing of non-white people. Employing Virginia’s Act to Preserve Racial Integrity (1924), Plecker effectively separated Virginia citizens into two simplified racial categories: white and colored. The law, which remained in effect until 1967, when it was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Loving v. Virginia , required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth, while criminalizing marriages between whites and non-whites. Plecker’s policies used deceptive scientific evidence to deem Blacks a lesser class of human beings, but they also targeted poor whites and anyone he or other eugenicists considered “feebleminded.” Asserting that Virginia Indians were, in fact, “mixed-blooded negroes,” Plecker also pressured state agencies into reclassifying Indians as “colored.” The policy’s legacy was effectively to erase “Indian” as an identity and has made it difficult for Virginia Indians to gain state and federal recognition.

Contributor: Tori Talbot
Early Years
Walter Ashby Plecker was born in Augusta County, Virginia, on April 2, 1861, the son of a well-to-do merchant and enslaver. In 1880 Plecker graduated from Hoover Military Academy in Staunton and earned his medical degree from the University of Maryland Medical School in 1885. Plecker worked as a country doctor in western Virginia and the coalfields of Alabama before settling in Elizabeth City County, the area that is now Hampton, in 1892. In 1902 he became the public health officer for Elizabeth City County. He took a special interest in delivering babies; educating midwives; developing a simple, use-at-home incubator; and working to reduce by half the 5 percent birth–mortality rates among the poor. Plecker distributed silver nitrate to be administered to the eyes of newborns, a procedure that helped reduce incidences of syphilitic blindness. He also kept records to search for ways to improve birthing, a goal made more difficult by the fact that most people were born (and died) at home.

In 1912 Virginia lawmakers established the Bureau of Vital Statistics and designated Plecker to serve as its head. The bureau ensured that from 1912 onward, all babies born in Virginia received birth certificates and that the certificates included racial designations, usually supplied by the midwives who delivered the babies. Plecker’s goals as registrar were initially laudable: he kept midwives under close supervision to make sure their procedures were sanitary. When Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act in 1924, however, the focus of his scrutiny changed from hygiene to racial classification.

Eugenics and White Supremacy
During the 1920s, Plecker became an advocate of the pseudoscientific claims of eugenics. The word, coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, means “well born.” Eugenicists argued that racial and genetic purity resulted in a more stable society. The latter could be obtained by restricting the parental rights of the developmentally disabled, or “feebleminded,” as Virginia did when it sterilized Carrie Buck. (The U.S. Supreme Court allowed the state to proceed with the sterilization in its 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell .) To obtain the former, the state enacted strict segregation laws and a prohibition on intermarriage. At its height of popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, eugenics was used by Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany to justify the marginalization and, eventually, the killing of European Jews. In Virginia, it provided a scientific rationale for white supremacy, a movement that in part sought to restore the antebellum social order of white authority and Black subservience. To this end, eugenics conveniently “proved” that whites belonged to the master race and that race mixing would fatally undermine their authority.

Together with John Powell, a renowned pianist from Richmond who founded the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, and Earnest Sevier Cox, another white supremacist and author of White America (1923), Plecker successfully advocated for the Virginia General Assembly to pass the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The legislation prohibited whites from marrying non-whites, and explicitly defined racial classifications: “The term ‘white person’ shall apply only to such person as has no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian.” All others were “colored.” In addition, the law asked people to voluntarily register their racial identity with the Bureau of Vital Statistics, making the falsification of one’s racial identity, or “color,” on a marriage license or birth certificate a felony offense punishable by up to one year in prison.

As director of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics, Plecker was charged with enforcing the new law. He did so zealously, instructing clerks to “withhold the granting of the license until satisfactory proof is produced that both applicants are ‘white persons.'” Registration with the bureau was voluntary; it was necessary, however, in order to enroll in school, register for the draft, or marry. Birth certificates with a racial designation also became required.

To promote the new law, Plecker published pamphlets and journal articles, gave speeches to the American Public Health Association and Southern Medical Association, and presented lectures—all praising Virginia for taking the lead in preserving racial purity. He described the Racial Integrity Act as “the most perfect expression of the white ideal, and the most important eugenical effort that has been made in 4,000 years.” Concerned that some mixed-race Virginians would attempt to “pass” as white, Plecker personally communicated warnings to some new mothers. For example, in 1924 he informed a new white mother that her child’s father was, in fact, “negro” and not white:

This is to give you warning that this is a mulatto child and you cannot pass it off as white. A new law passed by the last legislature says that if a child has one drop of negro blood in it, it cannot be counted as white. You will have to do something about this matter and see that the 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.

The language of the law gave Plecker wide discretion in determining a person’s race. A white person, according to the General Assembly, was someone with “no trace whatever” of non-white blood; a “trace” could be determined by anything from physical features to family names.

Virginia Indians
The Racial Integrity Act allowed for one exception to the definition of “white person.” Because many eminent white Virginians believed themselves to be descendants of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, the law allowed for those who had “one sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood [to] be deemed to be white persons.” Plecker feared that this loophole encouraged mixed-race Virginians who had an interest in passing as white to claim they were Indians. He, therefore, determined that “there are no native born Virginia Indians free from negro intermixture.” According to Plecker, and through him the Commonwealth of Virginia, all Indians were now “colored.”

This put Virginia Indians in a bind. “Perhaps owing to a recognition of the oppressed status of blacks, Indians did not want to be classified as colored,” the scholar J. Douglas Smith wrote. “They did not want to be white, but they wanted access to the privileges of whites.” Indians were now forced to attend all-Black schools, whose substandard quality the U.S. Supreme Court recognized years later in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), a decision that desegregated public education.

In 1930 the General Assembly updated the Racial Integrity Act to define a white person using the “one-drop” rule. Now, a “colored” person was anyone “in whom there is ascertainable any Negro blood.” Already believing that all Virginia Indians were in part African American, Plecker now had the go-ahead to officially classify Indians as “colored” and, in effect, define them out of existence. He applied to this process the smooth polish of scientific rationalism. In the Washington Post on January 6, 1945, he described his efforts at “tracing very carefully the ethnology of the so-called Indians in Virginia. We have been able to trace many of the persons now asserting themselves as Indians back to census records of 1830, where their ancestors were listed as free Negroes.” He went on to assert that “there are no descendants of Virginia Indians claiming or reputed to be Indians who are unmixed with Negro blood.”

Birth certificates prior to 1924 allowed “Indian” to be used as a racial classification. To address this potential loophole in the law, Plecker initially emended “Indian” certificates by handwriting “colored” on the back. Later he formalized the process, typing messages that included warnings to anyone who would claim a racial identity other than the one hereby assigned by the state.

Later Years
In 1943 Plecker continued to worry about the effects of race mixing and intermarriage. In a January letter to local registrars, he warned against “mongrel” families (elsewhere he described them as “rats”) who were passing as white and using falsified birth certificates “as an aid to intermarriage into the white race and to attend white schools.” He accused these people of refusing to register for the draft—a serious charge during wartime—and cited the case of three Caroline County men who declared that their willingness to obey the draft law was contingent upon the state reclassifying them from “Negro” to “Indian.”

Concerned that midwives and registrars were not vigilant enough in identifying the families behind the “organized propagation of this racial falsehood,” Plecker announced “a list of their surnames by counties and cities, as complete as possible at this time,” that could be used to identify those he asserted were decedents of “free negros.” He wrote, “This list should be preserved by all, even by those in counties and cities not included, as these people are moving around over the State and changing race at the new place.” He sent instructions to clerks of courts, hospital personnel, school administrators, and others informing them that persons with these names were not to associate with white people.

That such practices seemed to mimic Adolf Hitler’s treatment of European Jews was not lost on Plecker, who thought that Virginia compared favorably to Germany in terms of its record keeping. In a 1943 letter to John Collier, the U.S. commissioner of Indian affairs, he bragged that the state’s records trace racial ties back to 1853: “Your staff member is probably correct in his surmise that Hitler’s genealogical study of the Jews is not more complete.”

Plecker retired from the Bureau of Vital Statistics in 1946 after thirty-six years as its director; he died in Richmond on August 2, 1947, after being hit by a car. He was buried in Hollywood Cemetery.

In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, ruled the Racial Integrity Act unconstitutional and lifted Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage. Plecker’s insistence on classifying Indians as “colored,” however, complicated Virginia Indians’ efforts to gain state and federal recognition, along with the accompanying levels of sovereignty and self-governance. In 1997 Virginia governor George Allen simplified the process of correcting birth certificates, but Plecker’s legacy is a bitter one for many. “He came very close to committing statistical genocide on Native Americans in Virginia,” Chief William P. Miles of the Pamunkey tribe told the Richmond Times-Dispatch in March 2000.
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Read more about Plecker's white supremist work here:
“She is supposed to be his daughter”: Making Historical Connections in Albemarle County
April 25, 2025
https://uncommonwealth.lva.virginia.gov/blog/2025/04/25/supposed-to-be-his-daughter/