Death of ‘a devil’: The white supremacist got hit by a car. His victims celebrated.Posted in Articles, History, Law, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States, Virginia on 2017-08-03 18:23Z by Steven |
Death of ‘a devil’: The white supremacist got hit by a car. His victims celebrated.
The Washington Post
2017-08-02
John Woodrow Cox, Reporter
 Walter A. Plecker, an avowed white supremacist who ran Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics for 34 years, in Richmond. (Richmond Times-Dispatch) |
He built his career on the systematic oppression of blacks and Native Americans, becoming one of the country’s most influential white supremacists. For more than three decades, from 1912 until 1946, Walter Ashby Plecker used his position as head of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics to champion policies designed to protect what he considered a master white race.
He was the father of the state’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which designated every person in the state as either white or “colored” and criminalized interracial marriage. Plecker insisted that any person with a single drop of “Negro” blood couldn’t be classified as white, and he refused to even acknowledge that Native Americans existed in the commonwealth, effectively erasing their legal identities.
Then, on Aug. 2, 1947 — one year after his retirement — Plecker stepped into a road in the Confederacy’s former capital and was hit by a car. Blacks and Indians had good reason to celebrate…
 A column on the death of Walter Plecker that appeared in the Richmond Afro-American on Aug. 23, 1947. |
Read the entire article here.