Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker and the Bureau of Vital Statistics

Walter A. Plecker sits at his desk in 1935 at the Bureau of Vital Statistics, a department created in 1912 by the Virginia General Assembly to oversee the registration of all birth, deaths, and marriages in the state. Plecker was the first registrar of the bureau and continued in that post until 1946. A white supremacist who feared the mixing of the races, he ardently promoted the 1924 "Act to Preserve Racial Purity" that required the registration of all Virginians in order to establish their race as either "white" or "non-white," and thereby prevent interracial marriage and the so-called "mongrelization" of the white race.