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That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia

2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 103; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jaw364

1945-2314

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Few Virginians have negatively affected the Old Dominion more than Walter Ashby Plecker. In his role as registrar of Virginia's Bureau of Vital Statistics, a position he held from 1912 to 1946, Plecker oversaw a campaign to preserve the racial “purity” of Virginia's white population and divide African Americans, Native Americans, and Caucasians along a black-white binary. To that end, Plecker was not only evangelical in his calls for the separation of the races but was also one of the founding members of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America and, with John Powell and Earnest Sevier Cox, played a pivotal role in writing and championing Virginia's infamous Racial Integrity Act of 1924. In That the Blood Stay Pure Arica L. Coleman places Plecker's career as a physician and bureaucrat in the larger historical context of Virginia's tortured racial history. In seven well-researched chapters, Coleman takes an interdisciplinary approach to the history of race, reproduction, and identity in Virginia. Coleman's analysis combines legal history, institutional history, social history, and intellectual history in a style that is as accessible to novice readers as it is satisfying to professional scholars. Above all, Coleman's research lifts the veil on the “racial dictatorship” that has punctuated Virginia history since the colony's seventeenth-century founding (p. 41).