Talk:Racial Integrity Act of 1924

Complete Revision
Cadwallader 15:30, 5 May 2007 (UTC)I completely revised this page because it was disjointed and lacked citations. The revision includes all of the information that was already there with citations added. I also expanded the information substantially, particularly relating to the Sterilization Law.

My revision treats the Racial Integrity Act along with the "Sterilization Act" (for lack of a shorter handle) as related laws that were passed together on the same day to accomplish a common purpose. This stems from the fact that both of these laws were implementations of Laughlin's model Eugenic code. I've tried to present a fair and balanced treatment of the subject matter. If anyone wants to write a pro-Eugenecist "Criticism" section, fire away.

The section on the American Indian Tribes and federal recognition is included because this is a political problem that resulted directly from the enforcement of these two acts, it is relevant and belongs in the article. It would be very helpful if there were some more direct and explicit source quotes pertaining to the sterilization of Indian women at the Eastern and Western State Hospitals and psychiatric institutions. If you know of any please insert them along with a reference to the source. Cadwallader 15:30, 5 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I reworded one of the sections, it being my opinion that "suffered under" and "cut out by a government scalpel" could be made a wee bit more neutral, and never mind my personal opposition to the concept of eugenics. InitHello (talk) 04:18, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Cleaned Up Talk Page
I cleaned up the Talk Page, removing discussions that were over two years old and evidently did not pertain to the current wording of the article. Moved the relevant discussions to the bottom of the talk page. Cadwallader 00:36, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Racial Integrity Act: Harsh or Benign?
These words are from the original author in 2004. Since involuntary sterilization was the harshest feature in the law, the law was a mild thing when compared to the earlier American laws governing slavery. There is no reason to examine the law in detail. It took the "kinder, gentler" approach towards eliminating people who were deemed to be "unfit." The laws covering slavery permitted the execution of rebellious slaves. In 1800, a Virginia slave named Gabriel and his followers were arrested after Virginia's Governor James Monroe issued an order. Gabriel and his followers were executed according to the law. Another Virginia slave named Nat Turner (c.1800-31) had claimed to hear voices and see visions. On August 13, 1831, an unusual event involving the sun took place. (Perhaps it was merely an eclipse of the sun). Nat Turner believed that he had seen a sign from God, so four or five conspirators and he killed five members of his master's family in their beds. After about one month, 55 whites had been killed. Negroes who had conspired with Nat Turner were killed. Other suspected Negroes were killed or mutilated. Nat Turner was captured on October 30th and hanged on November 11th. More stringent slave codes were passed in many states. Slavery was extended, not abolished. I am certain that the Racial Integrity Law of 1924 was of little significance when viewed in the light of various laws which had preceded it and laws which were in effect from 1880 to 2000 in many or most parts of the world. It is better to view the Integrity Law of 1924 as a single nail helping to attach a plank to a beam of a great ship. In the 20th century, Adolf Hitler was a Captain of that great ship.

More from another editor in 2004... Here are some descriptives which may serve to describe the law when it is compared with other severe laws.  [A] "piddling" [B] "small potatoes" [C] "peanuts" [D] "a  snort in a windstorm" [E] "not a big deal" [F] "a flash in the pan" [G]  "unremarkable" [H] "niggling" [I] "of little consequence" [J] "a peculiarity."

I know that there is at least one web site which contains the specifications of the law. Since about 8300 people were sterilized under the specifications, I will attempt to create a link to a suitable web site wherein interested individuals may peruse the  specifications. I have been unable to extract the specifications from the Commonweath of Virginia's archives. My web browser is not the most popular one, so it may be the reason why I cannot access their archives.

Dr. Walter A. Plecker (1861-1947) was a key figure in the promoting of the law. His father had been a slaveowner. Dr. Plecker became a dutiful civil servant (1912-46). In the wake of the War Between the States (The American Civil War {1861-65}), only one sort of people were capable of holding the United States together. White men became the functionaries or (in modern terminology)"bureaucrats" all across the United States. They served in leadership roles above white women and other white men who worked in subservient positions such as bookkeepers or typists. Dr Plecker was not a violent man. A great deal of information is available on the Internet.

Cadwallader 00:36, 9 May 2007 (UTC)I will argue this point from a non-neutral point of view. (Though my contributions to the article itself were intended to be balanced, quoting the facts and statements of the people involved.)

While laws preventing marriage and enforcing sterilization may not seem harsh to a culture that has become desensitized to the value of future progeny, children have been treasured as the most valuable possible thing by most cultures and most generations in history. If you doubt it, try stealing one from its parents sometime and see what happens. The worst curse, short of the death penalty, in most cultures has been to be cut off from the tribe, or to have the children cut off from the tribe. Laws prohibiting marriage are severe because the children of an interacial couple would automatically be classified as illegitimate, which has historically been a severe impediment to upward mobility, William Jefferson Clinton, notwithstanding.

The Racial Integrity Act was also severe because Dr. Plecker's application of it legally erased the ethnic heritage of thousands of Virginia Indians to the point that six tribes recognized by Virginia today are unable to obtain Federal Recognition and therefore lost the legal right to self-rule that the other tribes in America have.

The Racial Integrity Act pales next to the sterilization law that came with it. Involuntary sterilization is certainly a violent act, akin to rape. Someone invades your body against your will and cuts out your ability to bear children. It is a mirror image of rape - in which someone invades your body against your will and implants semen. When practiced on a large scale, as it was in Virginia and California and still is practiced in China, this is genocide - cutting off the future progeny of a targeted ethnic group. The two laws were passed on one day to implement the Model Eugenical Code. Though the second law authorized state institutions to sterilize the feebleminded, the eugenic doctors in the psychiatric and regular state hospitals believed the brown races to be "feebleminded and primitive" with a genetically low IQ. Therefore the sterilization law was used disproportionately to sterilize Indians and Blacks, though some white folk were also sterilized. The doctors at the psychiatric hospital at UVA openly called for the sterilization of "mental defectives" - by which they meant some crazy white people and all minorities.

Dr. Plecker may not have been personally violent. Neither was Hitler. Hitler began with sterilization and progressed to deportation and then extermination. Is the promotion of state-sanctioned violence on a large scale less violent than personal agression? Its effects are certainly far worse.

Dr. Joseph DeJarnette, who directed the Western State Hospital in Staunton, Virginia, during the 1930's was a leading advocate of eugenics, and made it quite clear who he considered to be "feebleminded" and "inferior." DeJarnette was unsatisfied with the pace of Virginia's sterilization program. He wrote: "'Germany in six years has sterilized about 80,000 of her unfit while the United States-- with approximately twice the population-- has only sterilized about 27,869 in the past 20 years... The fact that there are 12,000,000 defectives in the U.S. should arouse our best endeavors to push this procedure to the maximum... The Germans are beating us at our own game.'"

The Eugenic movement in the United States did not get past sterilization, only because WWII made Nazi eugenicists the bad guys. Had Hitler not started invading his neighbors, it is very likely that the American Eugenic program would have kept pace with Germany's. The American eugenicists like DeJarnette clearly considered themselves to the the leaders of the global movement.

The German people for the most part did not see what was happening in hospitals and concentration camps. Virginians for the most part were not aware that the state hospitals were sterilizing Black and Indian women. It is only because the American troops liberated the concentration camps and found piles of emaciated corpses that were shown in magazines and on TV that the American people were shocked into abandoning the Eugenic agenda. It is very significant that the civil rights movement came within a decade of WWII.

Dr. Plecker and Dr. DeJarnette advocated the worst kind of violence - cutting off the future children of certain ethnic groups by medical castration.

While slaves could receive the death penalty for killing white people, white people of the Colonial Era also recieved the death penalty for killing white people, and in a few cases white people were put to death for murdering Indians or slaves. The total number of slaves that received the death penalty was fairly low, if for no other reason than that they were considered valuable property by their masters.

The fact that Virginia forcibly sterilized over 8,000 people, many of them because of their ethnicity, is a significant and substantial fascist horror, even if it pales in comparison to Adolph Hitler. Who wants to use Hitler as the standard of atrocity? "It isn't an atrocity unless it exceeds the work of Hitler... Virginia only maimed a few thousand people because of their ethnicity, that's nothing compared to Hitler."

Compared to what is right and just, it is horrible that this happened in America. Seen in that light, this is one of the most significant set of racist laws in this nation's history. It deserves a full treatment.Cadwallader 00:36, 9 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Question: what was the relationship between the eugenicists in the US and the Nazis/Fascists in Europe?. I don't think it was a coincidence that they came to power at the same time.  Just saying that "WW2 made the Nazi eugenecists the bad guys" is putting in mildly.  There must have been more of a connection between the groups than that.  2001:558:6011:1:E406:4A65:5CD1:785C (talk) 22:22, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Darwin, Galton, Evolution and Racism, etc.
FastfissionI removed the section on Erasmus Darwin and Violetta Galton, etc. It has nothing to do with this law. At best it had to do with eugenics, one part of the law, but even then it had more to do with evolution in general and with the specific history of Francis Galton, both of which are better covered in their own articles. I suspect their initial role here was part of general attempts by Creationists to make everything unpleasant in the world point back to Darwin.

As I understand it, the Sterilization Act in Virginia and the Racial Integrity Act were two separate things, though both passed in 1924. I could be wrong about this, but I've never seen them claimed to be the same piece of legislation. They both had obvious eugenic components and eugenicists were involved in pushing both of them, but they should be confounded as being on and the same piece of legislation. --Fastfission 17:10, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Willmcw:The text of the legislation is here, and makes absolutley no mention of anything concerning sterilization. It mandates racial registration and bans intermarriage. -Willmcw 18:43, May 3, 2005 (UTC)

hie::There seems to be two acts here. The one on Wikisource bans interracial marriage and mandates registration by race. The second law that deals with eugenics is a different law; see the text of the 2001 apology law for both of these acts. - Thanks, Hoshie 07:18, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Cadwallader 12:07, 5 May 2007 (UTC)The Virginia Legislature in its resolution of apology for this law opens with the following two lines:

WHEREAS, the now-discredited pseudo-science of eugenics was based on theories first propounded in England by Francis Galton, the cousin and disciple of famed biologist Charles Darwin; and

WHEREAS, the goal of the "science" of eugenics was to improve the human race by eliminating what the movement's supporters considered hereditary disorders or flaws through selective breeding and social engineering; ... Regardless of what agenda some Creationists might have, it is a sad fact that the idea of Eugenics was a direct application of the logic of Darwin's "Survival of the Fittest" to human sociology, and that the first person to promote this application was Darwin's nephew. Furthermore, the full title of Darwin's famous book even suggests the Eugenic conclusion:"On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"  Since the Virginia General Assembly directly cited Galton and Darwin as the ideological fathers of this particular Virginia Law, it is historically relevant and worthy of mention in the article. Therefore, I have reinserted a line quoting the Resolution of Apology on that point.Cadwallader 12:07, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

You're a bit confused here. Darwin was a scientist, not a politician. He attempted to describe how things are, and how things work. He did not pronounce on how things should be, what people should do, or what laws should be passed. Darwinism is therefore a scientific theory, not a political platform. Manormadman (talk) 09:20, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Source for a debated Amendment in 1926
On February 9, 1926, an article appeared in the Washington Post which related the fact that the General Assembly at Richmond, Virginia was debating an amendment to the State integrity law which would classify  as "colored" or "nonwhite" any admixtured person who had any Indian or negro blood at  all except for two groups of persons: (A) descendants of Indian/White marriages which  had occurred prior to 1619, and (B) descendants of the Indians from Oklahoma and Texas  who were living in Virginia as citizens of Virginia. The Richmond News Leader reported that 20,000 of the most distinguished citizens would be classified as "colored" under the amendment. A marriage had occurred about 1644 and another one in 1684 between an Indian and a white person. The marriages had produced numerous progeny. I do not know whether or not the amendment was adopted. The newspaper article cannot be legally transmitted by any means whatsoever because it is under the protection of an October 27, 1998 law called Public Law 105-298 which extended the years of copyrights from 75 years to 95 years. The effect of the new law is to generate a wider blanket of protection which now extends backwards 95 years instead of 75 years, as before. Under the old law, newspaper articles written prior to 1929 would have entered the "public domain" in 2004. The Clinton Administration produced a large number of new laws, including this one which is also called "The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act." (Sonny Bono was a well-known former entertainer who was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1994 and re-elected in 1996. He was killed while skiing on January 5, 1998). I intend to seek more information in the public domain, hopefully from the State archives, which may be freely transmitted and reproduced.

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Where is the material about the Racial Integrity Act of 1924? You know, what the article is supposed to be about?
The article is almost entirely about the Sterilization Act, with very little about what the title of the article says it is about. Why isn't the Sterilization Act a separate article, with this one just about the Racial Integrity Act? TechBear (talk) 14:28, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's such a problem. Except for the Carrie Buck discussion, the article is fairly evenly balanced between the two laws. All of the the material on American Indians is related to the Racial Integrity act, for example. They do appear to have been closely connected so there's a good reason to treat them together. ·:· Will Beback  ·:· 18:21, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I wholeheartedly concur with TechBear -- see comment below: 'Added "Multiple Issues" Template to Article (July 2013)'

Undue weight
I removed the lengthy poem by DeJarnette - while offensive, it is beside the point, as his attitude was already established. It would be helpful to have fewer primary quotes by such outspoken leaders and more data and assessments by valid historians about their programs and effects, more context from history, as well.--Parkwells (talk) 15:33, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Added "Multiple Issues" Template to Article (July 2013)
This article is perhaps the most ridiculously off-topic Wikipedia article I've ever encountered. It fundamentally errs twice -- first in combining the two acts (under the title of one of them), and then using the article as a platform for an unsupported personal political essay on a plot to exterminate all U.S. minorities through sterilization. This reaches it epitome with the flagrantly unreferenced claim:

 ' The statement "By '12 million defectives', DeJarnette was almost certainly referring to ethnic minorities, as there have never been 12 million mental patients in the United States. ' 

This is:


 * 1) An inaccurate personal supposition — there were more like 20 million minorities in the U.S. at this time (DeJarnette is probably referring to lower IQ scores, which as you know have never skewed by race in any IQ study ever conducted)
 * 2) An inaccurate personal supposition, about a personal opinion of DeJarnette, who is not the Virginia sterilization law
 * 3) An inaccurate personal supposition, about a personal opinion of DeJarnette, who is not the Virginia sterilization law... in an article about the Racial Integrity Act of 1924.

Now if you want to retitle the article the "Virginia Race and Sterilization Laws of 1924" then you can treat both together. But they're quite different. The sterilization law is not race-based, either in language or application -- white individuals were definitely sterilized, it had no impact on Virginia Indian identity, didn't have any segregating effect. In any case you still need to stick to the specifics of the actual Virginia sterilization law, and its actual (multiracial) application in Virginia. With a brief mention of, and links to, the sterilization laws of other states, and the general eugenics movement, which this article is most definitely not about.


 * There is no seperate Sterilization Act article because these two acts were Virginia's implementation of model eugenics legislation, which included the seperation of races, adjudication of "mixed" as inferior, and allowing sterilization of the "unfit" to uplift the race. (The unsigned edits of 10 July 2013 by IP User 98.180.3.178 added Multiple Issues template and this talk head; no edits by that IP since 10 July 2013.) --Naaman Brown (talk) 13:11, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
 * The two acts may make sense to describe together, but the article needs more clarification on whether the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 or the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 is being discussed.Waters.Justin (talk) 01:05, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Does anyone have any information on how Hispanics were treated under the Racial Integrity Act?
That's pretty much my question. Does anyone have any information on how Hispanics were treated under the Racial Integrity Act? There are a lot of factors here, of course. Hispanics can look like very white Europeans or look as if they have Native or Black ancestry in numerous combinations. Did treatment depend on appearance, wealth, or birthplace? Were they exempt. I know it's a relatively small population at the time in Virginia, but I have family that came over in the 60s and they were not the first Hispanics here. Ileanadu (talk) 19:35, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Proposed merge with The Pocahontas Clause
This is a CONTENTFORK of Racial Integrity Act of 1924. There's material/sources that can be used to expand the target, but it's not able to be transferred wholesale, in part because the forked section is more comprehensive. ~Hydronium~Hydroxide~(Talk)~ 06:35, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
 * ✅ ~Hydronium~Hydroxide~(Talk)~ 12:52, 14 November 2018 (UTC)