100 years ago this week, Virginia passed an infamous piece of legislation called “The Racial Integrity Act.” It required all babies born in the state to have their race recorded as either “white” or “non-white.” All those classified as non-white were referred to as “colored.” This binary method of racial identification was extremely rigid as described in the following quote from the act, “the term ‘white person’ shall apply only to such person as has no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian.” This was commonly known as the “one drop rule” and was the strictest measure of racial identity in the nation. It became a felony to mis-represent one’s race on legal documents including birth certificates and marriage licenses. Based on this standard, racial intermarriage was a crime and would remain so in Virginia until the famous Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision in 1967.
As the system of legal racial segregation known as Jim Crow became increasingly hardened in the early 20th century, this legislation codified both the racial injustices in all aspects of life in Virginia society as well as supporting the pseudo-science of eugenics that has since been totally discredited. Within this harsh and punitive act, there was one ironic exception to the one drop rule. Those who had one sixteenth or less of American Indian blood and no other non-caucasian blood were permitted to identify as white. This was the “Pocahontas Exception” that was meant for the benefit of some aristocratic families of Virginia who traced their ancestry back to Pocahontas and John Rolfe.
100 years later, it is hard to imagine lawmakers ever came up with such hateful and misguided legislation. Yet it is not surprising that this was the legacy of over two hundred years of enslavement and over fifty years of racial segregation after the Civil War. Although Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act is now a sorry part of our past, its legacy is still with us in terms of realities such as racial disparities in health care, housing, education, the wealth gap, and mass incarceration. This infamous anniversary of The Racial Integrity Act can be a time for us to learn more about the depth of racial injustice in our history so that we can address the depth of its legacy in our nation today. This is essential for any of us who believe that all people are made in the image of God.
The two videos posted below provide a summary of The Racial Integrity Act.