When Walter A. Plecker died in August 1947, his “death was considered a gift by many,” writes historian Arica L. Coleman in her searing history, That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia. “It marked the end of one of the most virulent, bureaucratic, and racist regimes in the history of [Virginia] and the nation.”
Six decades later, however, Plecker’s ghost still sometimes shows his face—most recently in litigation about the rights of transgender Americans.
Plecker was Virginia’s registrar of vital statistics from 1912 to 1946. He played a leading role in creating and enforcing the grotesque racial dictatorship called segregation, which ruled the South from the 1890s until 1964—and whose heritage still divides and degrades the region today.
When Plecker took office, the birth certificate was a relative novelty—a Progressive-era reform pushed in part as a eugenics measure to protect old-stock white America from nonwhites and immigrants. Plecker’s article, “A Standard Certificate of Birth,”published in 1914, was one of the first to advocate for nationwide registration of a baby’s birthdate, age, sex, “legitimacy,” and race. It urged that the forms be worded simply enough to be understood by midwives—to suit “the infantile intellects of our host of grannies, who hold in their dirt-laden hands the lives of thousands of mothers and infants.”
Plecker would, I suspect, not be surprised to learn that in 2018, the birth certificate is being used as a weapon against transgender people. To him, the birth certificate always was a weapon; he deployed it in a nearly 40-year campaign of racial terrorism against Virginia’s black residents—and a disturbingly successful attempt at what Coleman calls “pencil genocide” against the state’s Native American population. It was particularly powerful in his hands because he was one of the architects of Virginia’s notorious Racial Integrity Act, passed in 1924 to prevent racially mixed marriages. Enforcing the Act required the state to maintain comprehensive records of its residents’ race. The race had to be recorded on the birth certificate, and Plecker policed that record-keeping ruthlessly. The birth certificate, he believed, was a key part of preserving the purity of the white race. Under the law, there were two and only two answers: “white” or “colored.” The notation was important: It would determine whom the individual could marry, where he or she could seek medical care, and even where he or she could be buried.