SUMMARY
Walter Ashby Plecker was a physician and the first Virginia state registrar of vital statistics, a position he served in from 1912 to 1946. He was a staunch promoter of eugenics, a discredited movement aimed at scientifically proving white racial superiority and thereby justifying the marginalizing of non-white people. Employing Virginia’s Act to Preserve Racial Integrity (1924), Plecker effectively separated Virginia citizens into two simplified racial categories: white and colored. The law, which remained in effect until 1967, when it was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in the case of
Loving v. Virginia, required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth, while criminalizing marriages between whites and non-whites. Plecker’s policies used deceptive scientific evidence to deem blacks a lesser class of human beings, but they also targeted poor whites and anyone he or other eugenicists considered “feebleminded.” Asserting that Virg