CHAPTER 9: Mongrelization
The U.S. Census Bureau would not cooperate with eugenics. No agency collected and compiled more information on individuals than the bureau. Its mission was clear: to count Americans and create a demographic portrait for policymakers. A fundamental principle of census taking is the confidentiality and sanctity of individual records. In the early twentieth century, American eugenics coveted this information.
For years, eugenic leaders tried -- with little result -- to convince the Census Bureau to change its ways. They targeted the 1920 census. In 1916, Alexander Graham Bell, representing the Eugenics Record Office, was among the first to formally suggest that the bureau add the father's name and the mother's maiden name to the data gathered on each individual.' The Census Bureau declined to make the addition.
But shortly after Bell's first entreaty, Laughlin proposed a survey of all those in state custodial and charitable facilities, as well as jails. The Census Bureau agreed, and soon thereafter its director of statistical research, Joseph A. Hill, granted Laughlin the assignment. Laughlin was credentialed as a "special agent of the Bureau of the Census." [2] This first joint program, however, would not lead to an alliance with the Census Bureau, but to a bureaucratic war.
Since the 1880s, the Census Bureau had compiled statistics on what it called "the defective, dependent and delinquent" population, referring to the insane as defective, the elderly and infirm as dependent, and prisoners as delinquent. Laughlin insisted on changing the Census Bureau's terminology to "the socially inadequate" and adding to its rolls large, stratified contingents of the unfit, especially along racial lines. Laughlin's concept of social inadequacy would encompass those who "entail a drag upon those members of the community who have sufficient insight, initiative, competence, physical strength and social instincts to enable them to live effective lives .... " [3]
The Census Bureau refused. It stubbornly claimed that Laughlin's newly concocted term, socially inadequate, if used publicly, would surely "call forth criticism and protest." Nor would it accept any of Laughlin's substitute categories, such as "submerged tenth" or "the sub-social classes." To adhere to the legal descriptions of the project -- and follow the most conservative line -- the Census Bureau insisted on its traditional appellations, "defective, dependent and delinquent." [4]
A war of nomenclature erupted, one Laughlin described as a "tempest in a teapot." It raged for more than two years. First, the Census Bureau polled its own stable of social science experts, who reacted with "caustic criticism." Unwilling to back down, Laughlin consulted his own bevy of experts, and then, disregarding any direction from the Census Bureau, employed the term socially inadequate anyway when he requested information from 576 state and federal institutions. To rub his point in the Census Bureau's face, Laughlin asked the institutions not only for data, but also for their opinions about his choice of terminology. All but three of the institutions endorsed his new term, and he eventually swayed those three as well, achieving unanimity. Laughlin saw this as more than vindication for his position. [5]
The Census Bureau did not. Although the outbreak of World War I interrupted the project, in May of 1919 the bureau finalized and then published Laughlin's work under the title it chose, Statistical Directory of State Institutions for the Defective, Dependent and Delinquent Classes. Determined to have the last word, Laughlin published a vituperative article in the Journal of Sociology, recounting the quarrel in detail. Quoting page after page of support for his position from prominent sociologists and officials he had worked with, Laughlin publicly castigated the Census Bureau for lack of leadership and scientific timidity. [6]
Following the irksome, years-long experience, the Census Bureau refused all but cosmetic cooperation with eugenicists. Laughlin, in his capacity as secretary of the Eugenics Research Association, wrote to Samuel Rogers, director of the census, in 1918, asking if the bureau planned to identify nine classes of "socially inadequate." Rogers formally replied that no such data would be gathered, except the names and addresses of the deaf and blind, as previously collected. [7]
At a 1919 conference, the ERA Executive Committee decided to try to convince the Census Bureau to conduct "an experimental genealogical survey of a selected community." Three days later, the ERA formally petitioned Census Bureau Director Rogers to add two additional columns titled Ancestry to the paper questionnaires or enumeration sheets. "In the interest of race betterment," the two new columns, to be situated between the existing columns eleven and twelve, would identify the mother, by maiden name, and the father. "Family ties would be established," explained the ERA request, "and thus all census enumeration records would become available for genealogical and family pedigree-studies." The ERA predicted that these records would "constitute the greatest and most valuable genealogical source in the world." Writing in the Journal of Heredity, Laughlin advocated the two additional columns so that any "individual could be located from census to census and generation to generation .... Such investigations would be of the greatest social and political value." [8]
The proposals became more and more grandiose as the government's capacity for data retrieval and analysis increased. But any cooperation between the Census Bureau and American eugenics was for all practical purposes destroyed by Laughlin's dogmatic insistence on employing charged terminology more pejorative than the Census Bureau was willing to adopt. [9]
Despite a year-to-year cascade of petitions, letters, scientific articles and eugenic rationales urging the agency to create a massive registry of American citizens that could be marked as fit or unfit, the Census Bureau stands out as one federal organization that simply refused to join the movement. [10]
Rebuffed by the Census Bureau, Laughlin turned his attention to other government agencies, using his official bureau contacts with hundreds of state and federal institutions. His goal was to create further classifications that other bureaus and agencies of the federal government could adopt. An official 1922 booklet distributed by the U.S. House of Representatives to administrators of state institutions was entitled "Classification Standards to be Followed in Preparing Data for the Schedule 'Racial and Diagnostic Records of Inmates of State Institutions', prepared by Harry Laughlin." It listed sixty-five racial classifications. Classification #15 was German Jew, #16 was Polish Jew, #17 was Russian Jew, #25 was North Italian, #26 was South Italian, #30 was Polish ("Polack"), #61 was Mountain White, #62 was American Yankee, #63 was American Southerner and #64 was Middle West American. [11] If the Census Bureau would not adopt his eugenic classifications, Laughlin hoped the states would.
Virginia was eager, thanks to its registrar of vital statistics, Walter Ashby Plecker. Plecker considered himself a product of the Civil War, even though he was born in Virginia in 1861, just as the conflict began. Memories of his youth in Augusta County, Virginia, during the turbulent Reconstruction years, were influenced greatly by a beloved Negro family servant called Delia. In many ways, Delia represented the emotional strength of the whole family. As was common, she essentially raised Plecker as a young boy, exercising "extensive control" over his activities and earning his lasting gratitude. Plecker's sister sobbed at Delia's wedding at the thought of losing the connection, and Delia broke down as well. When Plecker's mother fell ill for the last time, she sent for Delia to nurse her back to health if possible. In his mother's final hour, it was Delia who comforted her at her deathbed, and when the moment came, it was Delia who tenderly placed her fingers on the woman's eyelids and shut them for the last time. No wonder Delia was remembered in the mother's will. No wonder that Plecker, as executor of his mother's estate, warmly wrote the first bequest check to Delia. From Plecker's point of view, Delia was family. [12]
Fond memories of Delia did not prevent Walter A. Plecker from becoming a fervent raceologist and eugenicist, however. He detested the notion of racial and social mixing in any form. His obsession with white racial purity would turn him into America's preeminent demographic hunter of Blacks, American Indians and other people of color. In the process, Plecker fortified Virginia as the nation's bastion of eugenic racial salvation. Plecker's fanaticism propelled him into a lifelong crusade to codify the existence of just two races: white and everything else.
Plecker began his career in medicine, receiving a degree from the University of Maryland at Baltimore, and then continuing in obstetrics at the New York Polyclinic. He opened a practice in Virginia and quickly became involved with family records, at one point serving as a pension examiner. Plecker moved his practice to Birmingham, Alabama, for several years, but soon returned to his beloved Virginia. He settled in Elizabeth City County, one of the eight original Virginia shires created in 1634. Elizabeth City County was intensely proud of its genealogical heritage. The historic county's citizens included many so-called First Families of Virginia, that is, Colonial settlers. Meticulous family records had been kept, but were in large part destroyed during the numerous battles and town burnings of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. After the Civil War, Elizabeth City County meticulously restored and reorganized its population records. [13]
In 1900, Elizabeth City County created a health department, along with a section of vital statistics to document births and death. A few years later, Plecker was hired as a county health officer, where he fastidiously recorded life cycle events. One triracial Hampton, Virginia, family that he first encountered in 1905 made quite an impact on him. After delivering their baby boy, Plecker at bedside registered the mother as "Indian and colored," and the husband as "Indian and white." Later, the woman's daughter ran off with a white man, marrying in another state. The young couple then returned to Hampton as a second-generation racially mixed marriage. [14] Plecker was appalled by the racial permissiveness of Virginia's system.
Later, when Plecker observed a local Negro death rate twice that of whites, he began to investigate, pursuing a goal of "near 100% registration of births and deaths." Population statistics and registration became more than a fascination; they became his mission. His proficiency at registering citizens made Plecker a natural pick in 1912 to help draft the state's new law creating the Bureau of Vital Statistics. At age fifty-one, Plecker was invited to head the new agency as registrar and to set his own salary. He was so dedicated to population registration that he magnanimously asked "for little more than subsistence." Virginia's 1912 statute established registration of the state's citizens by race -- without clear definitions. Yet for three hundred years Virginia had produced racially mixed citizens by virtue of the state's original Colonial settlement, its indigenous Indian population, a thriving slave system, and waves of European immigration. [15]
But a desire for general population registration was not what drove Plecker. He was hardly devoted to the statistical sciences or demographics. He was simply a racist. Plecker's passion was for keeping the white race pure from any possible mixture with Black, American Indian or Asian blood. The only real goal of bureaucratic registration was to prevent racially mixed marriages and social mixing -- to biologically barricade the white race in Virginia.
In an official Virginia State Health Bureau pamphlet, Plecker declared: "The white race in this land, is the foundation upon which rests its civilization, and is responsible for the leading position which we occupy amongst the nations of the world. Is it not, therefore, just and right that this race decide for itself what its composition shall be, and attempt, as Virginia has, to maintain its purity?" [16]
Plecker was no authority on eugenics, however. He was a proud member of the American Eugenics Society, but that required no real scientific expertise for membership. Nor did Plecker really comprehend the tenets of Mendelian genetics or heredity. Years after he became a leading exponent of eugenic raceology, Plecker wrote to Laughlin for advice on race mixing formulas, and confided, "I am not satisfied with the accuracy of my own knowledge as to the result of racial intermixture with repeated white crossings." He added that he just didn't understand Davenport's complex protoplasmic discussion of skin color, explaining, "I have never felt justified in believing that ... children of mulattoes are really white under Mendel's Law." [17]
Although he cloaked his crusade under the mantle of eugenic science, Plecker did not mind confessing his real motive to Laughlin. "While we are interested in the eugenical records of our citizens," Plecker wrote the ERa, "we are attempting to list only the mixed breeds who are endeavoring to pass into the white race." [18] In other words, Plecker could not be distracted with complex formulas and eugenic charts tracing a spectrum of racial and subraciallineages. In Virginia, you were either ancestrally white or you weren't.
Plecker introduced new techniques in registering births and deaths. In July of 1921, for instance, the Bureau of Vital Statistics mailed a special warning to each of Virginia's 2,500 undertakers. Plecker reminded them that under the law, death certificates could not simply be mailed, but must be delivered in person for verity's sake. Nor could a body be removed or buried without a proper burial permit. An extra permit was needed to ship a body. Moreover, Plecker demanded that coffin dealers provide monthly reports of "all sales of which there is any doubt, giving the address of purchaser, or head of the family, and name of deceased with place and date." [19] Under Plecker's rule, no one was permitted to die in Virginia without leaving a long racial paper trail.
Plecker would enforce similar regimens with midwives and obstetricians, town clerks and church clerics -- anyone who could attest to the racial makeup of those who lived and died in Virginia. Over the next several years, he created a cross-indexed system that recorded more than a million Virginia births and deaths since 1912. He also catalogued thousands of annual marriages, each filed under both husband's and wife's name. The data quickly became too voluminous for index cards. Plecker created a complicated but unique system to store the massive troves of information. Clerks would type all the names "on to sheets of the best linen paper, using unfading carbon ribbons," Plecker once explained in a flourish of braggadocio, adding, "We make these in triplicate and bind them in books. These [names] can be quickly referred to as easily as you can find a word in the dictionary." Eventually, Plecker hoped to secure state funding to reconstruct as many records as possible going back to 1630 and then "indexing these by our system." [20]
Plecker planned to add the names of all epileptics, insane, feebleminded and criminals, which would be gathered from the state's hospitals, prisons, city bureaus and county clerks, bestowing on Virginia a massive eugenical database that would reach back to the first white footfalls on Virginia soil. "The purpose will be to list degenerates and criminals," he assured. [21] Of course the ERO was also assembling hundreds of thousands of names, but its extensive rolls only amounted to a patchwork of lineages from counties speckled around the country. Plecker's vision would deliver America's first statewide eugenic registry -- a real one.
It is important to understand that while carrying the banner of eugenics, Plecker's true passion never varied. It was always about preserving the purity of the white race. Millions of inscribed linen pages and thousands of leather-bound volumes could be filled, but Plecker would never achieve his real goal without dramatic legislative changes. Existing state laws outlawing mixed-race marriages, including Virginia's, were simply too permissive. In the first place, most states varied on what exactly constituted a Negro or colored person. At least six states forbade whites from marrying half-Negroes or mulattoes. Nearly a dozen states prohibited whites from marrying those of one-quarter or even one-eighth Negro ancestry. Others were simply vague. Virginia's own blurred statutes had allowed extensive intermarriage through the generations: between whites and light-skinned Negroes, White-Indian- Negro triracials, mulattoes, and others. Plecker and the ERO called this process the "mongrelization" of Virginia's white race. [22]
To halt mongrelization, a coalition of Virginia's most powerful whites organized a campaign to create the nation's stiffest marriage restriction law. It would ban marriage between a certified white person and anyone with even "one drop" of non-Caucasian blood. The key would be mandatory statewide registration of all persons, under Plecker's purview as registrar of the Bureau of Vital Statistics. Leading the charge for the new legislation were Plecker and two friends, the musician John Powell and the journalist Earnest S. Cox. [23]
Powell was one of Virginia's most esteemed composers and concert pianists. Ironically, he built his musical reputation on performing his Rhapsodie Negre, which wove Negro themes and spirituals into a popular sonata form. Later, as Powell became more race conscious, he claimed that Negroes had stolen their music from the "compositions of white men." Powell decried the American melting pot as a "witch's cauldron." [24]
Cox led the White America Society, and authored the popular racist tome, White America (1923), which warned of the mongrelization of the nation. "[The] real problems when dealing with colored races," trumpeted Cox, "[is] the sub-normal whites who transgress the color line in practice and the super-normal whites who [only] oppose the color line in theory." Eugenical News effusively reviewed Cox's book, stating, "America is still worth saving for the white race and it can be done. If Mr. E.S. Cox can bring it about, he will be a greater savior of his country than George Washington. We wish him, his book and his 'White America Society' god-speed." Plecker, Cox and Powell created a small but potent white supremacist league known as the Anglo-Saxon Clubs, which would become pivotal in the registration crusade. [25]
Despite their virulent racism, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs claimed they harbored no ill will toward Negroes. Why? Because now it was just science -- eugenic science. The Anglo-Saxon Clubs could boast, "'One drop of negro blood makes the negro' is no longer a theory based on race pride or color prejudice, but a logically induced, scientific fact." As such, even the group's constitution proclaimed its desire "for the supremacy of the white race in the United States of America, without racial prejudice or hatred." [26] This was the powerful redefining nature of eugenics-in action.
The Anglo-Saxon Clubs and their loose confederation of local branches successfully petitioned the Virginia General Assembly and quickly brought about Senate Bill #219 and House Bill #311, each captioned "An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity." The legislation would require all Virginians to register their race and defined whites as those with "no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian." As one Norfolk editorialist described the proposal, "Each person, not already booked in the Vital Statistics Bureau will be required to take out a sort of passport correctly setting forth his racial composition .... " This passport or certificate would be required before any marriage license could be granted. Pure whites could only marry pure whites. All other race combinations would be allowed to intermarry freely. [27]
The Anglo-Saxon Clubs found a powerful ally in their campaign. The state's leading newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, allowed its pages to become a megaphone for the legislation. In July of 1923, for example, Cox and Powell published side-by-side articles entitled "Is White America to Become a Negroid Nation?" The men claimed their proposed legislation was based on sound Mendelian eugenics that now conclusively proved that when two human varieties mixed, "the more primitive ... always dominates in the hybrid offspring." The Richmond Times-Dispatch supported the idea in an editorial. [28]
On February 12, 1924, Powell enthralled a packed Virginia House of Delegates with his call to stop Negro blood from further mongrelizing the state's white population. "POWELL ASKS LAW GUARDING RACIAL PURITY" proclaimed the Richmond Times-Dispatch's page one headline. Subheads read "Rigid Registration System is Needed" and "Bill Would Cut Short Marriage of Whites with Non-Whites." The newspaper's lead paragraph called the address "historic." Leaving little to doubt, the article made clear that a "rigid system of registration" would halt the race mixing and mongrelization arising from centuries of procreation by whites with Negro slaves and their descendants. Such preeminent eugenic raceologists as Madison Grant were quoted extensively to reaffirm the scientific necessity underpinning the legislative effort. Lothrop Stoddard, a member of Margaret Sanger's board of advisors, was also quoted, declaring, "I consider such legislation ... to be of the highest value and greatest necessity in order that the purity of the white race be safeguarded from possibility of contamination with nonwhite blood .... This is a matter of both national and racial life and death." [29]
Virginia's legislature, in Richmond, was soon scheduled to debate what was now dubbed the "Racial Integrity Act." It was the same 1924 session of the legislature that had enacted the law for mandatory sterilization of mental defectives that was successfully applied to Carrie Buck. On February 18, 1924, with the forthcoming debate in mind, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published a rousing editorial page endorsement that legislators were sure to read. Employing eugenic catchphrases, the newspaper reminded readers that when "amalgamation" between races occurred, "one race will absorb the other. And history shows that the more highly developed strain always is the one to go. America is headed toward mongrelism; only ... measures to retain racial integrity can stop the country from becoming negroid in population .... Thousands of men and women who pass for white persons in this state have in their veins negro blood ... it will sound the death knell of the white man. Once a drop of inferior blood gets in his veins, he descends lower and lower in the mongrel scale." [30]
Despite the bill's popular appeal, legislators were unwilling to ratify the measure without two adjustments. First, the notion of mandatory registration was considered an "insult to the white people of the state," as one irritated senator phrased it. Plecker confided to a minister, "The legislature was about to vote the whole measure down when we offered it making registration optional." Mandatory registration was deleted from the bill. Second, a racial loophole was permitted (over Plecker's objection), this to accommodate the oldest and most revered Virginia families who proudly boasted of descending from pre-Colonial Indians, including Pocahontas. Plecker's original proposal only allowed those with one-sixty-fourth Indian blood or less to be registered as white. This was broadened by the senators to one-sixteenth Indian blood, with the understanding that many of Virginia's finest lineages included eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indian ancestors. [31]
Virginia's Racial Integrity Act was ratified on March 8, 1924, and became effective on June 15. Falsely registering one's race was defined as a felony, punishable by a year in prison. [32]
As soon as the law was enacted, Plecker began circulating special bulletins. The first went out in March of 1924, even before the effective date of the law. Under the insignia of the Virginia Department of Health, a special "Health Bulletin," labeled "Extra #1" and entitled "To Preserve Racial Integrity," laid out strict instructions to all local registrars and other government officials throughout the state. "As color is the most important feature of this form of registration," the instructions read, "the local registrar must be sure that there is no trace of colored blood in anyone offering to register as a white person. The penalty for willfully making a false claim as to color is one year in the penitentiary .... The Clerk must also decide the question of color before he can issue a marriage license .... You should warn any person of mixed or doubtful color as to the risk of making a claim as to his color, if it is afterwards found to be false." Health Bulletin Extra #1 defined various levels of white-Negro mixtures, such as mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, colored and mixed. Along with the bulletin, Plecker distributed the first 65,000 copies of State Form 59, printed on March 17, "Registration of Birth and Color -- Virginia." [33]
Health Bulletin #2 was mailed several days later and warned, "It is estimated that there are in the state from 10,000 to 20,000, possibly more, near white people, who are known to possess an intermixture of colored blood, in some cases to a slight extent, it is true, but still enough to prevent them from being white. In the past, it has been possible for these people to declare themselves as white .... Then they have demanded the admittance of their children into the white schools, and in not a few cases have intermarried with white people .... Our Bureau has kept a watchful eye upon the situation." Bulletin #2 reminded everyone that a year of jail time awaited anyone who violated the act. [34]
Plecker quickly began using his office, letterhead and the public's uncertainty about the implications of the new law to his advantage. His letters and bulletins informed and sometimes hounded new parents, newlyweds, rnidwives, physicians, funeral directors, ministers, and anyone else the Bureau of Vital Statistics suspected of being or abetting the unwhite. [35]
April 30, 1924 Mrs. Robert H. Cheatham Lynchburg, Virginia
We have a report of the birth of your child, July 30th, 1923, signed by Mary Gildon, midwife. She says that you are white and that the father of the child is white. We have a correction to this certificate sent to us from the City Health Department at Lynchburg, in which they say that the father of this child is a negro. This is to give you warning that this is a mulatto child and you cannot pass it off as white. A new law passed by the last legislature says that if a child has one drop of negro blood in it, it cannot be counted as white. You will have to do something about this matter and see that this child is not allowed to mix with white children. It cannot go to white schools and can never marry a white person in Virginia.
It is an awful thing.
Yours very truly, WA. Plecker STATE REGISTRAR [36]
Plecker followed this with a short note to the midwife, Mary Gildon.
This is to notify you that it is a penitentiary offense to willfully state that a child is white when it is colored. You have made yourself liable to very serious trouble by doing this thing. What have you got to say about it?
Yours very truly, WA. Plecker STATE REGISTRAR [37]
Plecker's friend Powell of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs was copied on both letters. A small handwritten notation at the top left read, "Dear Mr. Powell: This is a specimen of our daily troubles and how we are handling them." [38]
Plecker acted on rumor, consulted arcane tax and real estate documents, and of course whatever records were available from various eugenic sources. On July 29,1924, Plecker wrote to W H. Clark, who lived at Irish Creek in Rockbridge County. "I do not know you personally and have no positive assurance as to your racial standing, but I do know that an investigation made some time ago by the Carnegie Foundation of the people of mixed descent in Amherst County found the Clark family one of those known to be thus mixed. We learned also that members of this family and of other mixed families have crossed over from Amherst County and are now living on Irish Creek." After informing Clark that his ancestors included "three Indians who mixed with white and negro people," Plecker asserted that the man was now one of five hundred individuals who would be removed from the list of white people. [39]
Adding a threat of prosecution, Plecker warned, "We do not expect to be easy upon anyone who makes a misstatement and we expect soon to be in possession of facts which we can take into court if necessary." Plecker seemed to enjoy taunting the racially suspect. He sardonically added that he looked forward to tarring even more of Clark's extended family. "I will be glad to hear what you have to say," quipped Plecker, "and particularly to have the dates and places of the births and marriages of yourself, your parents and grandparents." [40]
Plecker was equally ruthless with his own registrars. One was Pal S. Beverly, a registrar in Pera, Virginia. Beverly had bitterly complained that registration of his own family as white had been overruled by Plecker. Records unearthed by Plecker showed Beverly to be a so-called "Free Issue" egro, that is, a class of freed slave. "Because of your constant agitation," Plecker wrote him on October 12, 1929, "of the question that you are a white man and not a member of the 'Free Issue' group of Amherst, as you and your ancestors have been rated, we wrote to you recently asking for the names of your father and of his father and your grandfather's mother." [41]
Plecker had probed Beverly's family tree for generations. The registrar laid it out for him in stunning and damning detail. "The certificate of death of your mother Leeanna (or Leander) Francis Beverly, Nov. 5, 1923, states that she was the wife of Adolphus Beverly," informed Plecker. "This certificate was signed by you when you were our local registrar." Plecker then checked Adolphus Beverly's 1881 marriage license and discovered that Beverly's father was listed as colored. Plecker then investigated Adolphus Beverly's father, Frederick. In the Personal Property Tax Book for the years 1846 through 1851, Frederick was listed as a freed slave. Frederick was born in 1805 and was recorded in the census along with his older brother, Samuel -- and on and on. [42]
"I am notifying you finally," Plecker informed Beverly, "that you can have no other rating in our office under the Act of 1924 than that of a mulatto or colored man, regardless of your personal appearance, voting list, or statements which any persons may make to petitions in your behalf .... I want to notify you further that any effort that you make to register yourself or your family in our office as white is, under the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, a felony making you liable to a penalty of one year in the penitentiary." For extra measure, he added that the bureau had identified numerous other mixed-race individuals in the county named Beverly. [43]
As promised, Plecker began decertifying the extended family members of Pal Beverly. Among them was Mascott Hamilton of Glasgow, in Rockbridge County, Virginia. After Plecker's ruling, Hamilton's children were thrown out of the white school they attended. When Hamilton threatened to sue, Plecker gleefully replied, "I am glad to learn from you the fact that your children are kept out of the white schools .... " He presented the point-by-point documentation: "You and your wife belong to the group of people known as 'free issues' who are classed in Amherst County where they started as of free Negro stock, the name they were called by before the War Between the States to distinguish them from slave Negroes .... Your wife's mother married Price Beverly, a grandson of Frederick Beverly, who was a son of Bettie Buck or (Beverly) who was a slave and set free and sent to Amherst by her owner Peter Rose of Buckingham County, together with her sons Frederick and Samuel. Your wife's grandmother, Aurora Wood married Richard, a son of the freed negro, Frederick Beverly." [44]