Racial Integrity Act of 1924

[1] The act reinforced racial segregation by prohibiting interracial marriage and classifying as "white" a person "who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian".

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".

[6] 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.

First enacted during the colonial era when slavery had become essentially a racial caste, such laws were in effect in Virginia and in much of the United States until the 1960s.

[8]While definitions of "Indian", "colored", and variations of these were established and altered throughout the 18th and 19th centuries,[12][13][14] this was the first direct case of whiteness itself being defined officially.

[17][citation not found] Plecker reacted strongly to the Pocahontas Clause with fierce concerns of the white race being "swallowed up by the quagmire of mongrelization",[18] 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.

[citation needed] The combined effect of these two laws adversely affected the continuity of Virginia's American Indian tribes.

[21] The intention to control or reduce ethnic minorities, especially Negroes, can be seen in writings by some leaders in the eugenics movement: In an 1893 "open letter" published in the Virginia Medical Monthly, Hunter Holmes McGuire, a Richmond physician and president of the American Medical Association, asked for "some scientific explanation of the sexual perversion in the Negro of the present day."

McGuire's correspondent, Chicago physician G. Frank Lydston, replied that African-American men raped white women because of "[h]ereditary influences descending from the uncivilized ancestors of our Negroes."

"[23] Despite lacking the statutory authority to sterilize black, mulatto, and American Indian children simply because they were "colored", a small number of Virginia eugenicists in key positions found other ways to achieve that goal.

According to historian Gregory M. Dorr, the University of Virginia School of Medicine (UVA) became "an epicenter of eugenical thought" that was "closely linked with the national movement."

"[26] The racial effects of the program in Virginia can be seen by the disproportionately high number of black and American Indian women who were given forced sterilizations after coming to a hospital for other reasons, such as childbirth.

[27] In the early 20th century, persons of color in everyday southern society feared to voice their opinions due to severe oppression.

Mr. Powell believed that the Racial Integrity Act was needed as "maintenance of the integrity of the white race to preserve its superior blood" and Cox believed in what he called "the great man concept" which means that if the races were to intersect that it would lower the rate of great white men in the world.

There are both sides to the question and to form an unbiased opinion either way requires a thorough study of the matter on both sides.Racial minorities were not the only people affected by these laws.

When Laughlin testified before the Virginia assembly in support of the Sterilization Act in 1924, he argued that the "shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South", created social problems for "normal" people.

To hide the act, on January 23, 1924, Carrie's foster parents committed the girl to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded on the grounds of feeblemindedness, incorrigible behavior, and promiscuity.

On September 10, 1924, Albert Sidney Priddy, superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and a eugenicist, filed a petition with his board of directors to sterilize Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old patient.

While the litigation was making its way through the court system, Priddy died and his successor, James Hendren Bell, came on the case.

When the directors issued an order for the sterilization of Buck, her guardian appealed the case to the Circuit Court of Amherst County.

It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence.

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.

The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.Holmes concluded his argument with the phrase: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough".

On June 12, 1967, the US Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that the portion of the Racial Integrity Act that criminalized marriages between "whites" and "nonwhites" was found to be contrary to the guarantees of equal protection of citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

On May 2, 2002, Governor Mark R. Warner issued a statement also expressing "profound regret for the commonwealth's role in the eugenics movement," specifically naming Virginia's 1924 compulsory sterilization legislation.