Some of the leading families of Virginia, who took pride in claiming descent from John Rolfe and Pocahontas, took umbrage at being classified as inferior non-whites. |
Political considerations forced [John Leslie] Powell and [Walter Ashby] Plecker to amend their iron-clad, white-supremacy law [The Racial Integrity Act of 1924] that defined as white only a person with no trace of non-white blood. Some of the leading families of Virginia, who took pride in claiming descent from John Rolfe and Pocahontas, took umbrage at being classified as inferior non-whites. This concern led to the creation of the “Pocahontas clause” which classified as white those individuals with no other non-caucasic blood than one-sixteenth or less the blood of the American Indian. Following this amendment, the bill sailed through the legislature. Thus, once all “historically-white”, upper-class Virginians were protected, the law gained tremendous support. Racism, science, and social control interacted to mediate the law’s provisions. The law would remain in effect, unchanged, for 43 years. Throughout that time it would be enforced by vigilant county court clerks and local vital statistics registrars. As late as 1945, Plecker lobbied a lawyer to push for a conviction under the miscegenation statute: “We attach great importance to this case, and we hope that you will fight it to a finish in the effort to secure an annulment for miscegenation, not for desertion or any other cause.” Plecker sought validation of the law through strict racial classification and a mass of successful precedent-setting prosecutions.
Gregory Michael Dorr, “Principled Expediency: Eugenics, Naim v. Naim, and the Supreme Court,” The American Journal of Legal History (Volume 42, Number 2, April, 1998), 127-128.
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