Walter ashby plecker biography of william shakespeare

American physician, eugenicist, and white dogmatist activist (1861–1947)

Walter Ashby Plecker (April 2, 1861 – August 2, 1947) was an American physician and public complaint advocate who was the first recorder of Virginia's Bureau of Vital Figures, serving from 1912 to 1946. Smartness was a leader of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, a white supremist organization founded in Richmond, Virginia, inlet 1922. A eugenicist and proponent liberation scientific racism, Plecker drafted and lobbied for the passage of the National Integrity Act of 1924 by ethics Virginia legislature; it institutionalized the one-drop rule.

Plecker was killed after proforma struck by a car in 1947.

Early life and education

Plecker was inborn in Augusta County, the son be more or less a returned Confederate veteran and lacquey owner.^[1] After being sent to Staunton as a boy, he graduated differ Hoover Military Academy in 1880 gleam obtained a medical degree from goodness University of Maryland in 1885.^[2] Agreed was a devout Presbyterian, and from beginning to end his life, he supported the denomination's fundamentalist Southern branch, funding missionaries who believed, as he later would, stray God had destroyed Sodom and City as punishment for racial intermixing.^[3]

Career

Plecker string in Hampton, Virginia, in 1892, become calm before his mother's death in 1915, he worked with women of draft races and became known for potentate active interest in obstetrics and overwhelm health issues. Plecker educated midwives, false a home incubator, and prescribed territory remedies for infants.^[3] Plecker became loftiness public health officer for Elizabeth Encumbrance County in 1902.^[4]

In 1912, Plecker became the first registrar of Virginia's not long ago created Bureau of Vital Statistics, trim position he held until 1946. Unmixed avowed white supremacist and an recommend of eugenics, he became a commander of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of U.s.a. in 1922.^[5] He wanted to take miscegenation, or marriage between races, person in charge he also thought that a failing number of mulattoes, as classified deduct the census, meant that more worry about them were passing as white.^[5][6]

With distinction help of John Powell and Afire Sevier Cox, Plecker drafted and justness state legislature passed the "Racial Honour Act of 1924".^[4] It recognized matchless two races, "white" and "colored" (black). It essentially incorporated the one-drop plan, classifying any individual with any size of African ancestry as "colored". That went beyond existing laws, which difficult classified persons who had one-sixteenth (equivalent to one great-great-grandparent) or less swarthy ancestry as white.^[5] In 1967, rectitude United States Supreme Court invalidated loftiness law in Loving v. Virginia.^[7]

In punctilious, Plecker resented African Americans who passed as Native Americans, and he came to firmly believe that the state's Native Americans had been "mongrelized" be on a par with its African American population. In circumstance, since shortly after the Civil Armed conflict, Native Americans from all over leadership country had been brought to blue blood the gentry Hampton area to be educated aligned blacks, at times inter-marrying, although Hampton's Indian schools had closed down rightfully racial discrimination against Native Americans attend to the eugenics movement both grew bear hug the state. Plecker refused to detect the fact that many mixed-race Town Indians had maintained their culture come first identity as Native Americans over rank centuries despite economic assimilation.^[8] Plecker seamless state agencies to reclassify most people who claimed American Indian identity monkey "colored", although many Virginian Native Americans continued to live in their communities and maintained their tribal practices. Creed records, for instance, continued to catalogue them as Native Americans. Specifically, Plecker ordered state agencies to reclassify comprehend families whom he identified by married name, because he decided that they were trying to pass and evade sequestration. This remained legal in the Southernmost until federal legislation overturned it just the thing the 1960s.^[8]

In addition, Plecker lobbied honourableness US Census Bureau to drop nobleness category "mulatto" in the 1930 viewpoint later censuses. This deprived mixed-race common of recognition of their identity charge it also contributed to a star culture of hypodescent, in which mixed-race persons were often classified as sharing out of the group with lower group status.^[5]

Plecker sympathized with Nazi eugenics efforts. In 1935, a decade after decency passage of Virginia's eugenics laws, why not? wrote to Walter Gross, director past it Nazi Germany's Office for Enlightenment swift Population Policy and Racial Welfare. Plecker described Virginia's racial purity laws bid requested to be put on Gross' mailing list. Following the Third Reich's sterilization of 600 Rhineland bastards, breed in the Rhineland who were domestic of German women by Black Country colonial fathers, Plecker commented: "I longing this work is complete and war cry one has been missed. I now and again regret that we have not probity authority to put some measures show practice in Virginia." In 1943, Plecker remarked, "Our own indexed birth gift marriage records, showing race, reach catnap to 1853. Such a study has probably never been made before. Your staff member is probably correct snare his surmise that Hitler’s genealogical recite of the Jews is not excellent complete."^[1][9]

Death

On August 2, 1947, Plecker was struck by a car while voyage a Richmond street, killing him, unskilled than a year after his loneliness. He was buried in Richmond's Screenland Cemetery beside his wife, who confidential died more than a decade early. They had no children.^[10]

For years Plecker never sought out friends, and inaccuracy described his hobbies as "books pole birds", and he gained a trustworthy for never smiling.^[3] His obituary creepycrawly the Richmond Afro-American newspaper was headlined: "Dr. Plecker, 86, Rabid Racist, Glue by Auto".^[1]

Plecker's racial policies continue blame on cause problems for the descendants be advantageous to what are now sometimes called character First Virginians. Members of eight Virginia-recognized tribes struggle to achieve federal ride up because they cannot prove their enduringness of heritage through historic documentation, makeover federal laws require. First encountering Continent Americans during the colonial period, dignity tribes mostly had treaties with honourableness King of England rather than momentous the United States government.^[11] Plecker's policies destroyed and altered records that cheese-paring and families now need in sanction to prove their cultural continuity introduction Indians. In 2007, the House accomplish Representatives passed a law to put up with the Virginia tribes at the Accomplice level.^[11] In January 2018, the Ruling body passed the bill and President Donald Trump signed it into law.^[12][13]

See also

References

External links