The Black & White World of Walter Plecker
The obsessions of a state bureaucrat have Virginia’s Native Americans struggling for their identity.
by Warren Fiske
Walter Ashby Plecker was the first registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, which records births, marriages and deaths. He accepted the job in 1912. For the next 34 years, he led the effort to purify the white race in Virginia by forcing Indians and other nonwhites to classify themselves as blacks. It amounted to bureaucratic genocide.
He worked with a vengeance.
Plecker was a white supremacist and a zealous advocate of — a now discredited movement to preserve the integrity of white blood by preventing interracial breeding. “Unless this can be done,” he once wrote, “we have little to hope for, but may expect in the future decline or complete destruction of our civilization.”
I’m assuming Plecker never met many Hispanics. Too bad he wasn’t registrar of Texas. He would have been driven out of the state.