Professors Discuss Jim Crow and Colonialism in Virginia

Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 is part of a long history of dehumanizing legislation.

(W&L french professor Mohamed Kamara, left, and emeritus anthropology professor Harvey Markowitz, right | SOURCE: W&L Directory)

Washington and Lee Professor of French Mohamed Kamara was joined by Emeritus Professor of Anthropology Harvey Markowitz on November 11 in Northen Auditorium to discuss the relationship between Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and European colonialism.

Markowitz began by explaining the purpose of the legislation: it prohibited interracial marriages and required every newborn child’s birth certificate to include a racial designation. However, the law allowed for only two race classifications: white and non-white. In 1967, this act was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia, after decades on the books. 

The Racial Integrity Act was intended to preserve the “white integrity of the state,” said Markowitz. He also noted that this law was ratified in the same year as the Immigration Act of 1924, a law which used a quota system based on country of origin to limit immigration to the United States and completely prohibited immigration from Asia.

According to Markowitz, both acts were established to “protect the whiteness and the homogeneity of the country” and to “keep things stable for those who were in power."

Virginia native Walter Plecker, registrar of the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, was a major proponent of the law and “one-drop rule,” which stated that any amount of African ancestry designated a person as black or “colored.” 

Plecker’s adherence to the rule and Racial Integrity Act stripped Native Americans of their indigenous identities and simply classified them as black. This made it especially difficult for indigenous groups to apply for federal recognition of their tribes. 

The law made an exception to the one-drop rule for descendants of Pocahontas and John Rolfe. If they had less than one-sixteenth “colored” blood, then they could be considered white, contrary to the stipulations of the one-drop rule. Plecker strongly opposed this exception, though, since he feared that other colored people would attempt to use it to pass as white, according to Markowitz.

Markowitz said that its supporters cited “scientific racism” to justify the legislation. Markowitz defined this term as the “belief that humanity is divided into biologically distinct groupings called races and that objective and empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial discrimination, racial inferiority, and racial superiority.” Markowitz expounded on this idea, saying, “This definition also applies to ethnic and national groups.”

Markowitz then highlighted the role of Sir Frances Galton’s work in the advancement of scientific racism. Galton tracked the statistical distributions of human traits and compared them among the different races and ethnic groups, concluding that any racial differences in leadership, dexterity, artistic ability, knowledge, etc. were a result of biological differences rather than environmental factors.

Markowitz claimed that Galton’s late-eighteenth-century writings planted the seed which eventually served as the foundation for the eugenics movement. His “emphasis on nature, as opposed to nurture, and eugenics was made to justify the demands of nineteenth-century colonialism, industrialization, and the wealthy’s vested interests,” Markowitz said.

Professor Kamara, head of W&L’s romance languages department, then provided a brief summary of European history and colonization preceding the Racial Integrity Act. Beginning with the fifteenth century, he read excerpts from Pope Nicholas V’s 1455 papal bull proclaiming the need to spread Christianity throughout Africa. 

In 1685, The Code Noir, a black code, was instituted in the French colonial empire to regulate slavery. The first article of the code declared Jewish people “enemies of Christianity” and instructed officers to evict them within three months of the code’s passage. The second article referred to enslaved people, requiring their baptism and instruction in Catholicism or else a discretionary fine would be issued upon the slaveowner.

Concluding his outline of historical influences with the Enlightenment, Kamara shared several pieces authored by Voltaire that expressed the inferiority of black people based on their physical characteristics. Kamara then elaborated on how dehumanizing language facilitated Virginia’s legislation and genocides.

After examining the historical context of the Racial Integrity Act, Markowitz shifted the conversation’s focus to its influence in subsequent decades. He explained that following its passage, sterilization of the “feeble-minded” and colored people became common throughout the country. From 1924 through 1979, the practice harmed 8,000 people in Virginia alone. Surviving victims are able to claim up to $25,000 in reparations today.

Not only were there detrimental consequences in the United States, but Kamara explained that Adolf Hitler enacted similar laws in Germany. Hitler admired that “America had gone down from one million [natives] to a few hundred thousand,” said Kamara. He elaborated that Hitler also praised America for its “racial conception of citizenship” by excluding certain races from naturalization. 

Given how they took place in the not-so-distant past, Kamara emphasized the importance of including these human rights violations in school curriculum to prevent similar occurrences. 

“After literary conquest, the best way to guarantee the governance of a people is through indoctrination,” he said. Kamara cautioned against the use of dehumanizing language, such as that disseminated by Plecker and Virginia’s legislation, arguing such language had been an antecedent to all mass genocides. 

Markowitz concluded the discussion by labeling race as a “social construct … an example of misplaced concreteness, where you suddenly make a construct [have] a reality of its own and from then on people accept it as somehow written in nature.”