Paper Genocide,
Pinnacle, NC.
Pictured: Monacan Indian Children at Recess
How Jim Crow Practiced Paper Genocide Against Native American Indians.
Jim Crow laws were a set of oppressive laws that reclassified Native American Indians into the category of Colored.
Jim Crow reached their greatest influence during the decades of 1910, 1920, and 1930.
Among them were hypodescent laws, defining as black anyone with suspected black ancestry, or even those with a very small portion of black ancestry. Tennessee adopted such a “one-drop” statute in 1910, and Louisiana soon followed. Then Texas and Arkansas in 1911, Mississippi in 1917, North Carolina in 1923.
Fact: the State of North Carolina vital records began using the one drop rule law in labeling Indians Colored BEFORE Walter Plecker initiated it in Virginia.
Birth records were also “delayed” in states enforcing the one drop rule, they were filed late to make these oppressive racial changes. The Virginia law which allowed for delayed birth registration declared its own purpose differently; its formal title was “An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity,”and it went into effect in 1924, this also occurred in North Carolina as well as in other states. Virginia began the one drop rule in 1924, Alabama and Georgia in 1927, and Oklahoma in 1931.
During this same period, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Utah retained their old “blood fraction” statutes de jure, but amended these fractions (one-sixteenth, one-thirty-second) to be equivalent to one-drop de facto.
The one drop rule was overturned in 1967 by the U.S. Supreme Court, the one drop rule is illegal.
But before this time many Native American Indians were not allowed by law to claim a legal status as Indian due to white vital records officials and census takers enforcing the one drop rule and through government records suppressed an Indians Native blood ancestry on official documents. So when people ask why didn’t Natives have records changed back to Indian?
A law prevented this from being done, and any Indian born before 1967 who wasn’t living on a government regulated Indian reservation, or in a community with a massive Indian population was forcefully listed as Colored by vital records offices.
We are not Black We are not White We Are Not Latino
