Something Was Very Wrong With Virginia’s Birth Certificates

In 1924 a woman in Lynchburg opened a letter from the state of Virginia telling her what her newborn son was. She had never met the man who wrote it. He had never seen the baby either. He had read a piece of paper, and from a desk a hundred miles away he decided what that child would be allowed to do for the rest of his life — which school he could attend, who he could marry, and which word would be written in one box on every document he was ever issued. His name was Walter Ashby Plecker, and for thirty-four years he ran the office that recorded every birth, every marriage and every death in Virginia. This is the story of how one state official used vital records, birth certificates and a list of ordinary American surnames to rewrite the ancestry of thousands of families — and how the paperwork he left behind was still being enforced long after he was dead. In this documentary we cover the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and the two boxes it put on every Virginia birth certificate; the felony penalty of one year in the penitentiary for writing the wrong word about yourself on a government form; and the strange one-sixteenth clause that let some of Virginia's wealthiest families keep their Native ancestry while Native families living in the state lost theirs on paper. We follow Atha Sorrells, a teenage girl refused a marriage licence in Rockbridge County in 1924, who sued the state and won — in front of a judge who compared Virginia's racial classification system to Alice in Wonderland, and whose ruling the state was too frightened to appeal. Nineteen years later her surname appeared on an official list posted to courthouses across Virginia. We look at how birth certificates that had already been issued were annotated, rejected and sent back to the midwives who filled them in; why Virginia Indian children could not get past the seventh grade in their own state and were sent by train to Bacone College in Oklahoma, to Haskell Institute in Kansas and to boarding schools in North Carolina; and what happened to three Rappahannock men from Caroline County who refused to be drafted as colored in 1943. We read the January 1943 circular in Plecker's own words, with its county-by-county list of surnames. We read the private letter in which he admitted he had been "doing a good deal of bluffing, knowing all the while that it could not be legally sustained." And we follow the arithmetic: the United States census counted 824 Native people in Virginia in 1920, 779 in 1930 with a federal footnote attached, and 198 in 1940. No epidemic. No war. Nobody moved. The story runs through Loving v. Virginia in 1967 — where Mildred Loving's own 1958 marriage licence records her as Indian while the Supreme Court opinion calls her a Negro woman — and ends with the cost that came due decades later, when six Virginia tribes could not produce the documented continuity federal recognition requires, and had to go to Congress instead. That law was signed in January 2018, ninety-four years after the Racial Integrity Act. If you have ever ordered a birth certificate, a marriage record or a census page and read what it said about your own family, this one is worth your time. Somebody filled that in, and they had their own ideas. CHAPTERS 0:00 A letter from Richmond 2:08 The man Virginia put in charge of its records 4:15 A pianist, a writer and a physician 5:58 Two boxes and a felony 8:18 The one-sixteenth exception 10:01 The girl who beat the state in court 13:06 What they did to certificates already issued 15:46 1930, and the reservation that decided who was real 17:44 No eighth grade in your own state 19:46 Drafted as colored 20:47 The list of surnames 25:06 "I have been doing a good deal of bluffing" 28:27 824 in 1920. 198 in 1940. 29:52 A hospital in Lynchburg, 1971 32:05 Ninety-four years to be recognised 35:31 Whoever holds the pen Tell me in the comments what your family's records say, which county they came from, and whether anyone has ever found a correction written on one. If you trace American ancestry, subscribe — new documentaries on migration, settlement and family history every week. Topics: American ancestry, family history research, genealogy records, Virginia history, American history documentary, birth certificates and vital records, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, Walter Plecker, Virginia Indian tribes, Monacan, Pamunkey, Chickahominy, Rappahannock, Nansemond, Upper Mattaponi, Loving v. Virginia, census records, Jim Crow era America, federal recognition, United States history explained. #AmericanHistory #Ancestry #Genealogy #FamilyHistory #VirginiaHistory #AmericanAncestry #History #Documentary #USHistory #FamilyTree #HistoryDocumentary #Heritage #Genealogia #NativeAmericanHistory