The Virginia General Assembly approved two laws influenced by white concerns related to eugenics; The Eugenical Sterilization Law and The Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 “prohibited interracial marriage and ushered in a long period of discriminatory racial designation administered by the government.”1 This new law broke up race into two categories, white and colored. This posed an issue for anyone who fits into this “colored” category because they were essentially stripped of their ethnicity. Blacks, Native Americans, or anyone who wasn’t white was grouped together. Another important part of this act was the “one drop rule”. This rule said that just one drop of non-white ancestry would mean that the individual with this one drop was not white and would be put into the colored category. The Racial Integrity Act also allowed the enforcement of racial separation. This meant that after this law was passed you would see a lot more just colored or just white neighborhoods.
How is Eugenics involved? Eugenics is the idea of a master race and in this case, it is white individuals. Unlike in the case of Carrie Buck, they could not go around sterilizing every colored person. However, if they enforce their separation that decreases the likelihood of interracial procreation which would promote the creation of a “pure” white race.
- Caitlin Snook, “The Racial Integrity Act, 1924: An Attack on Indigenous Identity (U.S. National Park Service),” www.nps.gov, November 20, 2024, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/racial-integrity-act.htm. ↩︎