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 Anti-miscegenation Laws in the U.S.The word miscegenation comes from two Latin words—- miscere, which means “mix,” and genus, for “race.” Anti-miscegenation laws forbade interracial marriage. These laws were part of the American legal landscape as early as the 1600's, long before Francis Galton's new "science," eugenics, traveled across the Atlantic ocean from England in the late 1800's. Many of these laws, however, were re-written in the early years of the 20th century, based on the new "scientific" theories and data of the American eugenics movement. One of the most influential laws created during this period was Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924.
"...the true motive behind [the 1924 Act] was the maintenance of white supremacy and black economic and social inferiority--racism, pure and simple...Eugenical ideology...provided intellectual fuel to the racist fires."1
--Scholar Paul Lombardo
Eugenicists as Lobbyists
Like the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of the same year was passed due in large part to the lobbying efforts of eugenicists. The law was passed by a wide margin by state lawmakers on March 20, 1924 ( read excerpts from the Act). Two proponents of eugenics, John Powell and Walter Plecker, were key figures in lobbying for the law. Powell, a prominent musician, was also the founder of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America (ASCOA), a white supremicist group. Plecker was a physician and director of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics. Lothrop Stoddard, a lawyer and self-proclaimed eugenics expert, supported the law. He told Virginia lawmakers: "White race-purity is the cornerstone of our civilization. Its mongrelization with non-white blood, particularly with Negro blood, would spell the downfall of our civilization."2 Plecker was responsible for the enforcement of the law in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. He and his staff relied on birth certificates, marriage licenses, tax records, and gossip to decide who was white and who was not. Plecker "corrected" birth certificates if he thought a person was trying to "pass" as white. The pride Plecker took in his work is evident in a letter he wrote in 1943, during World War II: "Our own indexed birth and marriage records, showing race, reach back to 1853. Such a study has probably never been made before.... Hitler's geneological study of the Jews is not more complete."3 For information on the legacy of anti-miscegenation laws, including the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, which overturned Virginia's 1924 Racial Integrity Act, see the section Legacies and Judgments.
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Blood and Fractions: Race Defined Through Anti-miscegenation Laws
In the early 1900s in the U.S., as states re-wrote their anti-miscegenation laws, these laws varied greatly in the way they defined the "other." In a legal brief filed in Loving v. Virginia (see "Anti-miscegenation Laws: The Loving Case" in Section 6: Legacies and Judgments), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) commented on the inconsistencies in these laws:
In Mississippi, Mongolian-White marriages are illegal and void, while in North Carolina they are permitted...In Arkansas, a Negro is defined as any person who has in his or her veins "any Negro blood whatever"; in Florida, one ceases to be a Negro when he has less than "one-eighth of African or Negro blood," and in Oklahoma, anyone not of the "African descent" is miraculously transmuted into a member of the white race.
According to scholar Paul Lombardo, it is interesting to note that "the [Virginia] Bill originally included a provision exempting persons with less than one sixty-fourth of American Indian blood from the prohibition of marriage with whites. This fractional exception was increased to one-sixteenth as a means of honoring the descendants of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. Apparently, some of the 'first families' of Virginia took exception to the use of their distant Indian heritage to exclude them from the white race."4
These arbitrary "blood fractions" were the results of eugenicists' simplistic and flawed theories on race. Over the past decades, scientific discoveries in the field of genetics have disproven many of the basic theories and assumptions eugenicists had about race in the early 1900s.
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Facing History Resources
• Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts) 2002, Chapter 6, "Toward Civic Biology."
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Print and Video Resources
• "Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia" by Paul Lombardo from U.C. Davis Law Review (Vol. 21, No. 2) Winter, 1988.
• Video: Family Name (First Run/Icarus Films, New York) 1997. (Also available through Facing History and Ourselves regional offices)
• Video: An American Love Story (New Video Group, New York) 1999. (Also available through Facing History and Ourselves regional offices)
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Web Resources
• Cold Spring Harbor: American Eugenics Image Archive
(http://vector.cshl.org/eugenics/)
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1 "Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia" by Paul Lombardo from U.C. Davis Law Review (Vol. 21, No. 2) Winter, 1988, p. 425.
2 Richmond Times-Dispatch, Feb. 13, 1924, p. 1.
3 Letter from Walter Plecker to John Collier, Office of Indian Affairs, April 6, 1943
4 Lombardo, p. 434.
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