The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was not the first time Virginians had attempted to regulate marriage across the racial divide. As early as 1691, the Virginia colony enacted the first law against intermarriage and sex. The law punished English white men or women who intermarried with “a negroe, mulatto, or Indian man or woman bond or free” to “be banished and removed from this dominion forever” within three months after the marriage. The purpose of this law was to prevent the “abominable mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may increase in this dominion.”
As the idea of prohibiting interracial sex and marriage gradually spread to other colonies and then to other states, anti-miscegenation laws were revised as well as the definition of each racial group. A 1705 Virginia statute, for example, defined “mulatto” as “any mixed- race Virginian with at least one-eighth African ancestry.”
Furthermore, the statute since 1866 declared, “every person having one-fourth or more of negro blood shall be deemed a colored person, and every person not a colored person having one-fourth or more of Indian blood shall be deemed an Indian,” but this would again change in 1910.
The 1910 statute says, “Every person having one-sixteenth or more of negro blood shall be deemed a colored person,” while the definition of Indian remained the same. Finally, the Virginia Legislature passed the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 with its very narrow definition of whiteness.
Walter Plecker's Attacks on Indians 