The Birth Certificate by Susan J. Pearson

Author:Susan J. Pearson [Pearson, Susan J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781469665689
Publisher: UNC Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nowhere were the ideological links between vital registration and administration of the racial state made more apparent than in Virginia. In 1912 the state reformed its floundering registration system by creating a state board of health. The board included a Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS) and a state registrar to enforce a new vital statistics registration law. The job of enforcement was given to Assistant Registrar Walter Plecker. Plecker became state registrar in 1914 and served in the post until 1946. During those years he used his position not only to collect and broadcast racial statistics but also to engage in racial purification through racial classification. Plecker and his efforts to police interracial marriages and to deny recognition to Virginia’s Indigenous peoples are notorious. Yet the foundational role of vital documents and birth certificates in his machinations is less well understood. In Walter Plecker’s hands, racial purity was the product of properly recorded births.

Plecker made common cause with fellow Virginians John Powell and Ernest Cox, founders of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, to urge his state to pass the antimiscegenation Racial Integrity Act (RIA), which it did in 1924. The act defined “white,” “Negro,” and “Indian” not only for purposes of marriage but also for “school attendance and for all other purposes.” In the original version of the RIA, Powell and Plecker included a provision that would have required every Virginian to have a racial registration document. This provision was stripped from the final bill, but the final act forbade marriages between whites and nonwhites except those possessing “one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and … no other non-Caucasic blood.” In 1930, the act was amended to “define a colored person as one with any ascertainable negro blood.” This was the so-called one-drop rule. The RIA also directed the state registrar to prepare “registration certificates” to record the racial history of any person born in Virginia before 1912 who lacked a birth certificate. Writing in favor of the act, Plecker argued that though his office was already the “greatest force in the state today combating this condition [racially mixed marriages],” it would have the power to act with greater clarity and force under the terms of the RIA.27

Like Virginia, Georgia reformed its vital statistics laws in the 1910s, and it soon linked improvements in registration to improved racial classification in the service of racial purity. In 1927, Georgia’s legislature adopted a racial integrity act that was very similar to Virginia’s. In the run-up to the bill’s passage, its sponsor, Assemblyman James C. Davis, explained that his bill included a racial registration provision so that the many Georgians who did not have their births registered could “apply to the local registrar … and present satisfactory proof, and be registered under the terms of the act.” Such registration would fix both the applicant’s age and race. Other supporters of the bill were pleased that it would substitute a one-drop definition of Blackness for the current standard, which defined as white anyone with one-eighth or less of “negro blood.

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