The "One-Drop" Rule

The original inhabitants of Virginia were different from the European immigrants, and the Africans brought here in colonial times were different from both Europeans and Native Americans. As modern society has come to appreciate diversity, it has also become more realistic to consider whether any community is of any pure race. There's a modern term, "triracial isolate," for communities whose racial origins are not clear and who may be a blend of white, black, and Indian ancestry.

Yet for centuries, Virginia law defined race in just a handful of categories - white, black, free people of color, Indian... In the most egregious example of racial stereotyping, Dr. Plecker sought to define "pure" whites. By his standards, codified by the General Assembly in the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, one drop of Negro blood would cause a person to be categorized as black. That was designed to stop light-skinned people with black ansestry from "passing" as white people and thus avoiding the Jim Crow discrimination laws.

Dr. Plecker sought to categorize many of the "Indians" in Virginia as black. He was forced to finesse the equivalent of one drop of Indian blood, however. Many of the so-called "First Families of Virginia" traced their ancestry back to the son of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, and were proud of their connection to what they considered to be Native American royalty.

As described in Recollections Grave and Gay by Mrs. Burton Harrison (1843-1920):

Of the Carys of Virginia, a noteworthy one was Colonel Archibald Cary, of Ampthill, near Richmond, on the James, known as "Old Iron" in the American Revolution. He married a Miss Randolph of the Curls branch of that numerous family. Through these Curls Randolphs we have received a dash of Pocahontas blood, and I have found no reason to decry this attenuated strain of descent from the long-gone little Indian princess whose high fidelity and noble unselfishness made its indelible mark upon colonial history.

As a result, Virginians whose ancestry was one-sixteenth Native American or less were declared to be "white" in the Racial Integrity Law of 1924. Whites could not have one drop of black blood, but they could have a Native American grandparent.

Links

References

"The Racial Integrity Fight," in Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries, by Helen Rountree

Population of Virginia
Geography of Virginia