Walter A. Plecker

A 1935 photograph shows Walter A. Plecker at his desk at the Bureau of Vital Statistics, a department created in 1912 by the Virginia General Assembly to oversee the registration of all births, 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, Plecker pressed for passage of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, a law 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.