Registering Race, Policing Citizenship: Delayed Birth Registration and the Virginia Racial Integrity Act, 1924-1975 more

Registering Race, Policing Citizenship: Delayed Birth Registration and the Virginia Racial Integrity Act, 1924-1975 Shane Landrum, Department of History, Brandeis University* In the early 1940s, millions of people who had been born on American soil scrambled to prove that they were, in fact, United States citizens. An estimated one-third of working-age Americans claimed birthright citizenship but had no birth certificate. The states where they were born didn’t register births adequately until sometime between 1915 and 1933, meaning that most native-born Americans over the age of 30— people who’d taken their own citizenship for granted— suddenly found themselves unable to satisfy wartime defense factories’ requirements for citizenship proof.1 These problems were particularly acute for some people born in Virginia. The state had not recorded births at all between 1896 and 1912, and its earlier birth records were extremely partial. Like people born in most other states, Virginians could register their own births by presenting affidavits and other written evidence. This process was called delayed birth registration. These systems functioned well, if slowly, for Virginia-born Americans whose legal race * Paper for presentation at the 2010 Policy History Conference, June 3-6, 2010, Columbus, Ohio. My thanks to the Institute for Political History’s Hugh Davis Graham Fund, which supported the research from which this paper is drawn. This is an excerpt from a work in progress. Please contact me at srl@cliotropic.org before quoting or citing in a print-published work. If you wish to circulate this work, please ask your colleagues to download it from http://brandeis.academia.edu/ShaneLandrum/Talks so that I can have an accurate count of its circulation. Thanks. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ 3.0/ for the terms of this license. Landrum, “Registering Race, Policing Citizenship” was “white,” but the state’s officials used the same procedures to deny birth certificates to people with racially mixed ancestry, particularly Virginians who called themselves “Indians.”2 By examining how Virginians acquired and used birth certificates—or failed to do so—during the middle of the 20th century, scholars can understand the profound effects that state-level identitydocumentation policies have had on ordinary Americans’ abilities to claim the benefits of citizenship.3 The Virginia law which allowed for delayed birth registration declared its 2 own purpose differently; its formal title was “An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity,” and it went into effect in 1924. As part of a larger system of racial marriage restriction, it allowed individuals to record their own ancestry by filing a so-called “certificate of racial composition.”4 In practice, however, it was a birth registration law, and it touched any Virginian born before 1912 who needed a birth certificate for any reason. Significance The Racial Integrity Act’s most notorious features have been welldocumented by a host of historians, most recently Peggy Pascoe, Gregory Dorr, and Renee Romano.5 It set up a strict, formalist, bureaucratic system for categorizing each Virginian by “race;” the only people who were legally “white” were those with “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian,” unless they had “one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and... no other non-Caucasic blood.” The Racial Integrity Act used these categories to Landrum, “Registering Race, Policing Citizenship” 3 strengthen existing racial marriage restriction laws; these restrictions lasted until 1967, when the Supreme Court struck them down in Loving v. Virginia.6 However, the racial documentation system the act created persisted until 1972, when the state legislature acted to make some of the system’s most pernicious records confidential. The use of the Racial Integrity Act as a law of personal identification is significant because it shows that the law had a wider impact on Virginia-born people other than the moments when they sought a marriage license. It reveals that the Racial Integrity Act not only constrained Virginians’ abilities to claim the benefits of legal marriage; it also constrained their abilities to pass racially in a wider range of circumstances, even outside the state of Virginia. Moreover, the act made it a felony to falsify one’s race on a birth certificate or marriage license application. Finally, the Racial Integrity Act subsumed the indigenous identities of Virginia Indians into the category of “race,” and then denied them the ability to record their race as “Indian;” in effect, it erased nearly all explicit traces of indigenous Virginians from the state’s modern vital records.7 At its most extreme, the law and its administrators held Virginians’ birth certificates— their basic documents of citizenship— hostage to the state’s biracial legal order. Birth Certificates and the Progressive-Era State This paper highlights some of the findings from my dissertation, which examines how different American governments deployed compulsory birth registration systems in the 19th and early 20th centuries, how Americans came to Landrum, “Registering Race, Policing Citizenship” 4 assume that everyone born here has (or should have) a birth certificate, and how this assumption changed American law from the 1930s to the present. For the purpose of this talk, it’s important to know that between about 1900 and 1935, increasing numbers of cities and states built systems for compulsory birth registration, and they started using birth certificates as identification documents, particularly for young people. In a time when reformers were focusing efforts on improving young people’s lives and health, government-issued birth certificates served as authoritative proof of age. They supported a number of reform-oriented policies, including statutes against child labor, for compulsory education, and against underage marriage and statutory rape.8 Although reformers may have debated about whether childhood ended at fourteen or fifteen or sixteen, states with welldeveloped birth registration had the government machinery to allow for such fine-grained distinctions. Birth certificates formed an infrastructure for knowing America’s youthful population; they supported a kind of locally-based, distributed government power that historian William Novak has identified as a particular strength of the American state.9 In the places where child-protective statutes were well-implemented and consistently enforced, birth certificates became the documentary cornerstones of young people’s social rights. Virginia wasn’t one of those places. Its modern birth registration system dated only from 1912. When the short-lived federal child-labor law called the Keating-Owen Act went into effect between 1916 and 1918, most young Virginians Landrum, “Registering Race, Policing Citizenship” who sought work permits proved their ages using insurance policies or family Bibles. The following year, the federal Census Bureau verified that Virginia was 5 registering about 90 percent of each year’s births, which was the federal standard for good birth registration. It was the first state in the former Confederacy to meet the voluntary federal standards for good birth registration, which involved registering 90 percent of each year’s births.10 By 1924, younger children (under the age of 12) increasingly could prove their ages using a government-issued record, but older teens and adults could not. The Racial Integrity Act offered a solution to this problem while strengthening the state’s centuries-old racial marriage restrictions. State registrar Walter Ashby Plecker presided over the the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics for almost 35 years, beginning with its establishment in 1912. In some ways, he was a model of the bureaucratic mindset; he took particular pride in the precision of his office’s genealogical records. Furthermore, Plecker was also an advocate of then-current “scientific” theories of “race” and of eugenics, and his goals of complete racial separation drove his administrative perfectionism.11 Because the Racial Integrity Act supported the recording of births before 1912, it tied Virginia-born people’s need for birth certificates neatly together with Walter Plecker’s desire to extend his office’s racial recordkeeping into the past.12 “Race” and the uses of birth certificates, 1924-1945 By the early 1940s, Walter Plecker and his staff had become well-practiced in genealogical recording of “race.” As late as 1943, he favorably compared his Landrum, “Registering Race, Policing Citizenship” 6 office’s work to that done in Germany, agreeing with a federal official’s statement “that Hitler’s genealogical study of the Jews is not more complete.”13 Plecker believed that anyone who claimed to be Indian was trying to sneak across the racial color line. His assistant Eva M. Kelley specialized in detailed genealogies of particular mixed-race families who commonly claimed to be “Indian” or white.14 She compiled a list of common family names in each Virginia county which were racially suspect, and Plecker distributed it widely across the state, hoping to forestall what he saw as racial passing.15 When “Miss Kelley” located an existing birth record for someone with mixed-race heritage who was registered as white, she affixed a densely-worded sheet to its reverse declaring that this certificate was for someone “believed to be incorrectly recorded as to color or race.” It declared that “there are no descendants of Virginia Indians... who are unmixed with negro blood,” and that thus anyone who claimed to be “Indian” was more properly categorized as “negro or colored.”16 These racial disclaimer statements persisted in the state’s files for years thereafter. The thoroughness and precision of Walter Plecker and Eva Kelley’s work posed a significant threat to the legal survival of Virginia’s indigenous groups, but it also confronted individuals with difficult choices when they needed birth certificates. Plecker claimed that the Racial Integrity Act gave his office “the privilege of accepting or refusing registration,” and he took advantage of this privilege to deny birth certificates to those whom he identified as “negroid pseudo-Indians.”17 Applicants who claimed one or both parents as “Indian,” Landrum, “Registering Race, Policing Citizenship” “half-breed Indian,” “Red,” or other categories received threatening letters in 7 response, implying that they could be prosecuted for lying on their applications.18 Plecker told one applicant who was living in Detroit that he must “make out another certificate with the color of both parents given as colored, mulatto, or negro,” verified with the signature of a family member. “We will not accept red, Indian, or white,” the letter stated.19 One Indian chief protested formally to the governor, arguing that the state’s policy of “only two classes— white and negro” meant “death to what we so value in life— our Indian heritage, race, descent, and tribe.”20 Lacking effective ways to exert sovereignty or to create their own legallybinding birth records, Virginians of indigenous descent were vulnerable to the state’s attempts to document them out of existence.21 Many of the applicants who listed themselves as “Cherokee,” “American Indian,” or “Red” wrote from industrial centers outside the South, including Detroit, New York City, and New Jersey.22 In these places, they had chances to escape the harsh racial divisions of labor which applied to the Jim Crow South. However, birth certificate requirements ensured that Virginia’s official records would not reflect their claims to Indianness, and that the state’s strict one-drop rule of racial determination would follow them throughout their lives. Individual people who were targeted by Plecker’s anti-Indian schemes could secure their own birth certificates only by accepting a document which erased their indigenous heritage. Such double binds affected relatively few Americans, but Landrum, “Registering Race, Policing Citizenship” they illustrated the potential drawbacks of entrusting state-level governments with the responsibility for issuing national citizenship documents. Birth Certificates, Legal Identity, and Entitlements, 1945-1975 8 The justice implications of Plecker’s policies would have been stark enough if birth certificates had only been required for employment in war industries or for passports, but the growing American welfare state increasingly used birth certificates for many other purposes. At the state and local level, governments continued to use birth certificates as identity documents for young people, requiring them for school registration and for work permits. At the federal level, servicemen’s wives who applied for Emergency Maternity and Infant Care benefits needed to present not only a legal marriage certificate but also birth certificates for themselves and their children. Increasingly, thinking about birth certificates became a mother’s job, part of how she secured her children’s birthright as citizens.23 Just as an honorable military discharge enabled economic opportunities for veterans and their families, birth certificates became tools of social citizenship for the children of the Baby Boom.24 World War II proved to be a turning point in American identity documentation. The national security motive taught Americans to have and use birth certificates in unprecedented numbers, and the growing federal state taught them to use birth certificates to claim federal entitlements for themselves and their children. From the 1940s through the 1970s, newspaper advice columns helped would-be retirees understand how to prove their age; many needed to file Landrum, “Registering Race, Policing Citizenship” 9 a delayed birth certificate in order to demonstrate their eligibility for federal oldage benefits.25 These uses of birth certificates over a person’s lifetime affected state laws. In the 1930s and 1940s, legislatures began to allow for birth certificate amendments in cases of adoption and legal legitimation, to protect children and parents from social stigma of using these birth certificates. In 1967, the US Supreme Court acted to dismantle the racial order which was fundamental to Virginia’s definitions of individual identity. Its decision in Loving v. Virginia declared that the racial categories embodied in the Racial Integrity Act were “directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment.”26 In the case’s aftermath, some states changed their policies about how (and whether) birth certificates recorded “race” at all. Five years later, in 1972, Virginia’s state legislature amended the laws on certified copies of birth certificates. It specifically required that the Bureau of Vital Statistics not reproduce the racial disclaimers which Walter Plecker, Eva Kelley, and their successors had added to some birth certificates.27 In doing so, it sought to ensure that the descendants of the families Plecker had targeted could prove their identities without also carrying a document that marked them out as racially suspect. The 1972 law undoubtedly had positive effects for the people whose birth certificates it affected, but the law’s underlying ideologies are worth noting. First, by ensuring that no Virginia-born person had to use a birth certificate which declared that its own information was probably incorrect, the law bolstered the Landrum, “Registering Race, Policing Citizenship” 10 idea that government birth certificates were capable of being accurate, complete records of individual identity. The racial disclaimers it eliminated had testified to government’s simultaneous incapacity to document the existence of “race” and to the state’s anxious efforts to pin down the facts anyway. Although the new law was clearly meant to rectify the documentary effects of the Racial Integrity Act, it provided no avenue of redress for Virginians of indigenous descent whose ancestors had registered— or avoided registering— as “colored” because the state would not record them as “Indian.” As a result, Walter Plecker’s work of Indian erasure persists, and Virginia’s indigenous groups today face significant obstacles in their quests for federal tribal recognition.28 Conclusion Particularly during and after World War II, the ordinary uses of birth certificates as documents of personal identity and citizenship magnified and widened the effects of each state’s particular system of birth registration— and particularly of each system’s deficiencies. In Virginia, where the Racial Integrity Act governed all adult birth registration for people born before 1912, people with racially mixed ancestry had to choose between having no birth certificate and being forcibly categorized as “colored.” Nationally speaking, Virginia was relatively atypical; of the states I’ve researched, only Louisiana had a similarly vigorous system of racial regulation using birth certificates.29 In these states, compulsory birth registration systems supported racialized policies and white supremacy. Landrum, “Registering Race, Policing Citizenship” Comparatively speaking, many more states have had 20th-century histories of not enforcing compulsory birth registration adequately. These problems have been most acute in the rural Southeast and Southwest, 11 particularly in communities of color and non-English-speaking communities; in the long run, this lack of enforcement has affected some Americans’ ability to prove their own citizenship or to claim government benefits.30 Today, an increasing number of states require proof of citizenship in order to access government services and benefits, but these policies cannot correct the historical incompleteness of the nation’s birth registration systems. Until policymakers make equally vigorous efforts to ensure that every person who’s entitled to birthright citizenship can prove that fact, these laws will inevitably exclude not only noncitizens but also some Americans—many of whom are poor, rural, and nonwhite—from the benefits of social citizenship. Notes 1. United States Senate, Certifications of Birth Records: Hearing before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs. on S. 2299. April 2, 1942 (Washington: GPO, 1942),4-6. Reported estimates varied from 43 to 54 million, probably because 9 to 10 million Americans under 20 and over 65 also lacked birth records; the higher figure included these groups. United States House of Representatives, Authorizing the Director of the Census to Issue Birth Certificates; Hearings before the United States House Committee on the Census, SeventySeventh Congress, Second Session, on June 4, 9, 10, 1942 (Washington: GPO, 1942); “Senate Bill Would 'Naturalize' 44,000,000 Native Americans,” Los Angeles Times, April 6, April 6, 1942, 10; “54 Million in U. S. Lack Birth Proof; Illinois is Laggard,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 30, May 30, 1942, 2. I focus here on birthright citizenship because historians of American immigration have already amply discussed the problems immigrants faced when asked to prove their citizenship status. Although the term “native-born” may seem awkward, I use it here to describe all descendants of colonists, forcibly imported slaves, and immigrants to the current United States since the 1500s. For clarity, I avoid the term “Native American,” preferring the terms Landrum, “Registering Race, Policing Citizenship” 12 “indigenous” or “of indigenous ancestry/descent” to refer to descendants of the preColumbian American peoples. In referring to individual people of indigenous descent, I use specific tribal names when possible. I also use the terms “Indian” or “American Indian” to reflect common usage during the 1940s and because this term continues to be used for selfdescription among many indigenous Americans today. 2. On state vital statistics offices and their gargantuan workload during this period, see “Birth Data Sought By 34,657 in Month,” New York Times, August 12, 1942, 16; “U.S. Strives to Make it Easier to Give Proof You Were Born,” Washington Post, July 28, July 28, 1941, 1; “Suggest Issuance of Birth Records,” New York Times, July 28, July 28, 1941, 8; “All States Urged to Issue Delayed Birth Certificates,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, July 28, 1941, 1A; Jerry Kluttz, “The Federal Diary; Census Statistics Vital to Defense,” Washington Post, August 24, 1941, 12. 3. My interest in government incapacity and failure draws from the inspiration of James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); James C. Scott et al., “The Production of Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 1 (Jan., 2002): 4-44.. No previous book-length work has described the history of birth certificates in the US; the closest existing works cover the histories of other kinds of identity documents. Jane Caplan and John C. Torpey, eds. Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 4. ”An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity,” Virginia Acts 1924 chapter 371. This act was better known as the racial marriage restriction law struck down by Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1966 (1967). On the legal construction of race as an enduring facet of American law, see Ian F. Haney-López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1992). 5. Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation's Science (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Renee Romano, Race mixing: Black-white marriage in postwar America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Peter Hardin, “'Documentary Genocide': Families' Surnames on Racial Hit List,” Richmond TimesDispatch, March 5, 2000, A1, A10, A11. 6. ”An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity,”section 1. Sections 1-3 of the act bear a strong resemblance to the state’s vital statistics code, Virginia Acts 1912 chapter 181, especially sections 12-19. 7. On the difficulties of defining Indianness by standards of blood quantum, see Eva Marie Garroutte, Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003),chapter 1; Ariela Julie Gross, What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008),chapters 1 and 5. 8. Caroline C Crockett, “Joint Letter to Health Chairmen of State Federations,” The General Federation Bulletin (December 1912): 140-41; Cressy L. Wilbur, “Hindrances To The Extension Of Uniform Methods For Vital Statistics In The United States,” American Journal of Public Health and the Nation's Health 3, no. 12 (December 1913),1261; Julia C. Lathrop, “Annual Report of the Chief of the Children's Bureau,” in Reports of the Department of Labor, 1917 (Washington: GPO, 1918),114. 9. William J. Novak, “The Myth of the 'Weak' American State,” The American Historical Review Landrum, “Registering Race, Policing Citizenship” 13 113, no. 3 (2008): 752-72. Novak, following Michael Mann, describes infrastructural power as “the actual power of state policies in action to have real effects on population” (763). 10. Kriste Lindenmeyer, A Right to Childhood: The U.S. Children's Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-46 (University of Illinois Press, 1997),120-26; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family: the Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987),57-60; “Virginia's Roll of Life and Death,” Virginia Health Bulletin 5, no. 11 (November 1913),178-80; Alice M. Hetzel, U.S. Vital Statistics System Major Activities and Developments, 1950-95 (Hyattsville, Maryland: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, 1997),59. 11. For Plecker’s particular blend of administrative rigor and eugenically-driven fervor, see W. A. Plecker, “Preparing for the Operation of the Model Vital-Statistics Law in Virginia,” in Transactions of the Fifteenth International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, Washington, September 23-28, 1912 (Washington: GPO, 1913); W. A. Plecker, “Opportunities of Vital Statisticians,” American Journal of Public Health and the Nation's Health 12, no. 1 (1922): 30-33; W.A. Plecker, “A Standard Certificate of Birth,” American Journal of Public Health and the Nation's Health 5, no. 10 (1915): 1044-47; Walter Plecker, “Virginia's Attempt to Adjust the Color Problem,” American Journal of Public Health 15, no. 2 (1925): 111-15; Philip R. Reilly and Margery Shaw, “The Virginia Racial Integrity Act Revisited: The PleckerLaughlin Correspondence: 1928-1930,” American Journal of Medical Genetics 16, no. 4 (December 1983): 483-92. 12. On the durability of bureaucracy as a government form and its reliance on “the files,” see Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958). 13. W.A. Plecker to Hon. John Collier, April 6, 1943, Box 42, Folder 31, John Powell Papers, University of Virginia (collection hereafter referenced as JPP). For another comparison of Plecker’s work to Hitler’s (from one who opposed it), see Letah M. Branch to Governor Colgate W. Darden, February 20, 1945, Indian Problems folder, Box 66, Colgate W. Darden, Jr., Executive Papers, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia (hereafter LVA). 14. For Kelley’s work on the Branham and Johns families of Amherst County, see W.A. Plecker to John Powell, October 13, 1942, Box 42, Folder 50, JPP. The term “free issue” derived from a term on used on the state’s 19th-century censuses and tax rolls to denote free people of color; given Virginia’s history, it generally implied African ancestry. Amherst County’s “Win tribe” was the subject of a famous eugenic study purporting to show the innate inferiority of their racial heritage; Arthur H. Estabrook and Ivan E. McDougle, Mongrel Virginians; the Win tribe (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1926). Estabrook and McDougle used the records in Plecker’s office as part of their study. For more on these families, now recognized as members of the Monacan Indian nation, see Hardin, "'Documentary Genocide'." 15. ”Surnames, by Counties and Cities, of Mixed Negroid Virginia Families Striving to Pass as ‘Indian’ or White;” W.A. Plecker to “Local Registrars, Clerks, Legislators, and others responsible for… the prevention of racial intermixture,” December 1943; W.A. Plecker to W. W. Whitmore, December 9, 1943; all in Folder “Clerk’s Correspondence (W.A. Plecker-A.T. Shields), 1948”, Box 1, Clerk’s Records, Rockbridge County Court Records, LVA. On the imposition of surnames by United States officials as a way to supplant indigenous American naming practices, see Scott et al., "The Production of Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname,"18-25.. 16. For an example of the disclaimer, see “Warning— To be attached to the backs of birth or death certificates of those believed to be incorrectly recorded as to color or race, ” Folder "Indian Problems", Box 66, Colgate W. Darden Executive Papers, 1942-1946 (RG 3), LVA; for Landrum, “Registering Race, Policing Citizenship” its use, see W. A. Plecker to Aileen Hartless, March 9, 1944, Box 42, Folder 51, JPP. 14 17. W.A. Plecker to Selina B.G. Jerome, April 26, 1938, State Board of Health folder, Box 33, James E. Price Executive Papers, LVA; W.A. Plecker to Hon. John Collier, April 6, 1943, Box 42, Folder 31, JPP. On Plecker’s belief that all Virginians of indigenous ancestry also had African ancestry, see W.A. Plecker to Sallie E. Morris, October 5, 1938, State Board of Health folder, Box 33, Governor James H. Price Executive Papers, LVA. On the larger scope of Plecker’s work, see! Smith, Managing White Supremacy,76-106; Hardin, "'Documentary Genocide'."; Paul A. Lombardo, “Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia,” UC Davis Law Review 21, no. 2 (1988): 421-52; Richard B. Sherman, “"The Last Stand": The Fight for Racial Integrity in Virginia in the 1920s,” The Journal of Southern History 54, no. 1 (February 1988): 69–92. 18. W. A. Plecker to William E. Bradby, February 2, 1942, Folder 100, Box 41. JPP. On Bradby’s age, family of origin and Pamunkey community, see his listing as “Willie Bradby” in the 1930 United States Federal Census, West Point, King William County, Virginia, Enumeration District 7, page 3B (Roll 2448, image 498.0), republished by Ancestry.com (Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2002). Walter S. Bradby appears on the same page. For another Bradby who was required to file a delayed birth certificate as “colored,” see W.A. Plecker to Iola J. Bradby, March 4, 1943, JPP. 19. W. A. Plecker to Elmer Hunt, June 11, 1940, Box 41, Folder 78, JPP. 20. Chief Walter S. Bradby et al. to Colgate W. Darden, July 23, 1942, Indian Problems folder, Box 66, Colgate W. Darden, Jr., Executive Papers, LVA. For a similar protest from the Chickahominy tribal council, also concerning the assignment of Indian men to segregated African-American military units, see Chief O. Oliver Adkins et al. to Colgate W. Darden, August 28, 1942, Indian Problems folder, Box 66, Colgate W. Darden, Jr., Executive Papers, LVA. Governor Darden’s responses are in the same folder. For a Rappahannock, Oliver Fortune, who was court-martialed for refusing induction into the Army as “colored,” see Lloyd G. Carr to Colgate W. Darden, October 27, 1942, same folder. At least two other Virginia men of indigenous descent were similarly court-martialed. 21. For an overview of the role of sovereignty in Anglo-American colonization and law, see Joanne Barker, “For Whom Sovereignty Matters,” in Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination, ed. Joanne Barker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). 22. W. A. Plecker to Beatrice Pettway, March 4, 1943, Box 42, Folder 12; W. A. Plecker to Nannette Yleta Dickerson, February 9, 1943, Box 42, Folder 7; W. A. Plecker to Henry King, July 13, 1940, Box 41, Folder 84; all in JPP. On the dispersion of indigenous Americans away from their communities of origin and the camouflaging of Native identities as a survival strategy, see Colin G. Calloway, “Introduction: Surviving the Dark Ages,” in After King Philip's War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, ed. Colin G. Calloway (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997). 23. “Corporal Kelly and His Son: The Emergency Maternity and Infant Care Program,” The American Journal of Nursing 44, no. 4 (Apr., 1944): 366-70; Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce and Children's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, Child health day, May 1, 1945; May day is birth registration day; A handbook for communities (Washington: GPO, 1945). (It’s worth noting that states with racial marriage restrictions ensured that those benefits would be off-limits to mothers of biracial children.) For WW2-era examples of the feminization of household paperwork, see Bess M. Wilson, “New Pupils Must Now Have Birth Documents,” Los Angeles Times, January 6, January 6, 1943, A5.“School Rules Listed for Newcomers; Entering Pupils Must Have Birth and Vaccination Certificates,” Washington Post, August 29, August 29, 1942, B1. 24. On social citizenship, see T. H. Marshall and Tom Bottomore, Citizenship and Social Class Landrum, “Registering Race, Policing Citizenship” 15 (Concord, MA: Pluto Perspectives, 1992). For a similar argument about the impact of dishonorable discharges on military veterans accused of homosexual behavior, see Margot Canaday, “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I. Bill,” Journal of American History 90, no. 3 (2003): 235-57. 25. “Investors' Guide: Social Security Age Proof,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 12, 1947, 36;Ware H. Pendleton, “Your Social Security,” Chicago Tribune, December 30, 1963; “Want Proof of Age? $4 Will Get It,” Chicago Tribune, March 20, 1966, A1; Mabel Kingston Green, “The Problems of Widowhood: Nearing 65? You'll Need Proof of Age,” Chicago Tribune, January 21, 1968, F5. 26. Loving v. Virginia, 12. 27. Virginia Acts 1972 ch. 500. 28. Hardin, "'Documentary Genocide'." For an account authored by Chickahominy Indians which contains more detailed stories of about the effects of Plecker’s actions on their people, see Elaine and Ray Adkins, Chickahominy Indians-Eastern Division: A Brief Ethnohistory ([Philadelphia:] XLibris Books, 2007), 114-127. 29. James O'Byrne, “Many Feared Naomi Drake and Powerful Racial Whim,” The New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 16, August 16, 1993, A7. 30. A 1940 nationwide test of the completeness of birth registration found that annual birth registration rates for rural non-whites lagged behind those for whites. The registration rate in many Southwest border states was particularly low, with the lowest being New Mexico (34.8 percent.) Hetzel, U.S. Vital Statistics System Major Activities and Developments, 1950-95,59; "Registration Area, December 1, 1919," Folder Box ; Robert D Grove, “Studies in the Completeness of Birth Registration; Part I, Completeness of Birth Registration in the United States, December 1, 1939, to March 31, 1940,” Vital Statistics Special Reports 17, no. 18 (April 20, 1943),228. On the contemporary implications of not having a usable birth certificate, see Robert Pear, “Lacking Papers, Citizens Are Cut From Medicaid,” New York Times, March 12, 2007; Bob Sullivan, “Katrina Victims Face Identity Crisis,” MSNBC, http:/ /www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9316512/ (accessed July 13, 2007) ; Kevin Sieff, “Born in the U.S.A,” Brownsville (Texas) Herald, http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/ state_90416___article.html/ortiz_department.html (accessed September 30, 2008.