When the legislative pen is weaponized to erase a lineage.
Witness the moment Dr. Plecker used his pen to “kill a name on paper,” reclassifying an Indigenous women from “Ind” to “2” (colored), effectively erasing her tribal identity from the state’s official memory.
In 1924, Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act, a law designed to encode “racial purity” through the recognition of two races only: “white” and “colored.” This legislation was the result of massive campaigning efforts by the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, spearheaded by eugenicists John Powell (1882 – 1963) and Earnest Sevior Cox (1880 – 1966), in partnership with the state registrar, Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker (1861 – 1947). Together, they revolutionized a “Paper Genocide” that systematically reclassified African American and Indigenous citizens on official state of Virginia birth and marriage records, creating the profound void in archives that Materialized Sovereignty works to combat today.
Founded in Richmond, Virginia in 1922 by Powell and Cox, this organizational club was committed to the “salvation of the white race” and further the preservation of “Anglo-Saxon blood integrity.” These Clubs utilized their political and social influences to lobby for legislation that would prevent “race-mixing” and the protection of white supremacy through the law and legal protection.
A noted classical pianist and composer who utilized his fame and recitals as means for raising awareness for his eugenicist cause, claiming that “white America” was in danger of becoming a “negroid nation.”
An advancer of racial purity and segregation who traveled globally to study racial relations and believed that Black and white people could not coexist in the United States.
As the state of Virginia’s first registrar of vital statistics (1912 – 1946), Plecker was a primary driving force behind the RIA’s enforcement. He drafted the first draft of the Act and utilized his position to “micromanage” racial classifications, obsessively reclassifying “Indian” on documents and replacing it with “colored” to ensure no person of mixed heritage could claim white status.
By understanding that the Archival Gap was an intentional creation by the Anglo-Saxon Clubs and Dr. Plecker, we see that material culture–the quilts of Faith Ringgold (1930 – 2024) and the dolls of Helen Cordero (1915 – 1994) –serves as the primary evidence of existence for communities whose paper histories were “killed” to maintain a false narrative of racial purity.
