In 1922, Plecker, Ernest S. Cox, and also the noted pianist and composer John Powell founded in Richmond the Anglo-Saxon groups of America. Based on Powell, the group had been aimed at choosing the “fundamental and last solutions of y our racial dilemmas in basic, more than anything else of this Negro issue.” Race-mixing had been a priority concern of these males. Articles by Cox and Powell published within the Richmond Times-Dispatch on 22, 1923, wondered, “Is White America to Become a Negroid country? july”

In 1923, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs proposed that a fresh integrity that is racial be enacted, therefore the group’s motivation, to some extent, had been when it comes to legislation to meet up with exactly exactly how federal government officials such as for example Plecker had been currently behaving pertaining to battle.

Racial Integrity Act

The Racial Integrity Act had been introduced into the General Assembly as Senate Bill No. 219 on February 1, 1924, and House Bill No. 311 on February 15. In its original type, it needed that all Virginians fill in a certification of racial structure become authorized because of the Bureau of Vital Statistics. This certification will be necessary to be able to marry in Virginia, also it could be from the legislation for a white individual to marry anybody however a white individual. This was the first time that marriage between whites and Asians—or other people who were legally neither “colored” nor white—was prohibited although interracial marriage had been banned previously in Virginia.

The historian J. Douglas Smith has noted that the African US press “remained reasonably peaceful” concerning the bill. “Aimed at those mixed-race individuals who had been not any longer plainly recognizable as black colored,” he argued, “the statute that is proposed perhaps perhaps not influence straight almost all black colored Virginians who’d no need to pass because white.” In reality, in a page towards the Richmond Information Leader, posted on February 23, 1924, Gordon Blaine Hancock, a teacher at Virginia Union University , had written, “The negro is certainly not demanding amalgamation … in which he resents an implication which he is.”

Only a few whites had been happy with the bill, either. Senator Holman Willis , of Roanoke, called it an “insult towards the white individuals of the state,” mainly as a result of its requirement that most Virginians enroll their competition. The Senate ultimately amended the balance which will make such certificates voluntary for several individuals created before June 14, 1912, or as soon as the Bureau of Vital Statistics ended up being founded. The latest variation additionally permitted white visitors to have up to one-sixteenth “Indian blood.” Finally, the duty of evidence about the veracity of an individual’s racial certification had been put maybe not on the continuing state but in the person.

The Senate passed the modified bill on February 27 by way of a vote of 23 to 4. (the long run governor, Harry F. Byrd Sr., and twelve other senators abstained.) After voting along the earlier in the day variation on February 21, your house observed the Senate’s lead, approving the bill on March 8 by way of a vote of 72 to 9. Governor E. Lee Trinkle finalized the Racial Integrity Act into legislation on March 20.

Johns and Sorrells Situations

In September 1924, James Conner and Dorothy Johns sent applications for a wedding permit in Rockbridge County . The clerk, A. T. Shields, determined that Connor had been white but that Johns, as well as being component white, has also been component Indian and African United states. Citing the Racial Integrity Act, he declined to issue a permit and Johns instantly sued when you look at the Circuit Court of Rockbridge County. Testifying before Judge Henry W. Holt , Walter Plecker offered delivery documents showing Johns’s “colored” ancestry in Amherst County , and Silas Coleman, a resident of Amherst County, offered corroboration that is anecdotal. Johns’s lawyer argued that people loved ones known as “colored” had been, in reality, Indian, an ambiguity common to nineteenth-century record maintaining.

Judge Holt declined to issue the permit, finding enough proof that Johns is at part that is least African United states. He did, nonetheless, note the real ways that the outcome proposed difficulties with the Racial Integrity Act. For starters, there clearly was no constant concept of “Indian” in Virginia legislation, rendering it hard to utilize historic records to find out ancestry. For the next, he foresaw dilemmas linked to the duty of evidence presented because of the law. Wouldn’t it continually be feasible for a lawfully white person to satisfactorily show that she or he had no non-white ancestors? He suspected perhaps not.

Revising the Racial Integrity Act

A revision of the Racial Integrity Act on January 14, 1926, Robert O. Norris Jr. , of Lancaster County, introduced in the House of Delegates. It redefined a white individual in Virginia as somebody “whose blood is completely white, having no understood, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture for the bloodstream of some other battle.” Put simply, it did away with all the Pocahontas that is so-called Exception managed to get impossible for individuals like Dorothy Johns and Atha Sorrells to argue effectively that they’re white. It taken care of immediately Judge Holt’s issues by simply making it easier for courts to cope with the uncertainties inherent in nineteenth-century documents.

Nevertheless, the issues which had resulted in the Pocahontas Exception when you look at the beginning had maybe maybe maybe not gone away. Some estimated that up to 20,000 white Virginians possessed lower amounts of “Indian bloodstream,” which will, under this modification, cause them to become legitimately “colored.” In reaction to these worries, on February 12 the home amended Norris’s proposed modification, enabling the meaning of the white person to add one-eighth or less “Indian blood”—as opposed to one-sixteenth into the 1924 act—as very long whilst the individual doesn’t have other “demonstrable admixture associated with the bloodstream of any non-white battle.”

On March 5, 1926, the home passed the amended modification associated with Racial Integrity Act by a vote of 52 to 18, but one week later on, the Senate voted 20 to 9 to indefinitely postpone its consideration.

Public Assemblages Act

Another controversy raged while the General Assembly considered the revised Racial Integrity Act. It started when Grace Copeland, a youth buddy of John Powell, went to a concert at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University), a personal school founded in 1868 to teach black colored instructors. Copeland, whom arrived belated, had been forced to stay close to African Us americans, a known undeniable fact that angered her spouse, Walter Scott Copeland, the editor associated with Newport News everyday Press. In a editorial posted on March 15, 1925, he accused Hampton of exercising “social equality involving the white and negro events.”