It gets a bit frustrating when some of my riders tune out as I work to pump a little knowledge of history into their heads. I am amazed that anyone can be bored with history. Properly taught, history is simply old reality. Old reality is the key to understanding current reality.
Here is a little bit of my current reality. I was seven years old when the United States Supreme Court took away any potential question as to whether, under Virginia law, I was a full fledged human being equal in every civil right to every other Virginian.
Let me make this very clear. I have absolutely no indication that Dr. Plecker hunted any member of my family the way that he hunted so many others who were Virginia Indians or had close ancestors who were. Such people were declared by the Commonwealth of Virginia to be "colored" and as such were legally barred from using white public accommodations, attending white schools, and marrying white people.
Dr. Plecker headed up our state's equivalent of a bureau of vital statistics and made it his life's work to keep track in his card system the location of every person of Indian descent in Virginia in order to make sure that they were not able to 'pass'. If such a person moved to a new locality Plecker would promptly notify the authorities in that jurisdiction in order to make sure that the full force of Jim Crow laws were applied and such people were kept legally segregated from pure whites. He scoured the wedding announcements of Virginia newspapers to make sure that no one in his card system was engaged to a white person. He congratulated the Nazis for their forced sterilization of children that resulted from unions of African soldiers that fought for the French during the first World War and the German women who married those soldiers.
It was a felony for one of Plecker's prey to marry a white person. A felonious marriage is treated by the law as void. As a matter of law, all children born of such marriages were illegitimate. For a long period of time every marriage in my family of my relatives who descended closely from the Pamunkey/Mattaponi/Chicohominy from which we came was an illegal marital union and the products of some of those marriages would have been barred from all the rights and privileges given whites under Virginia law at the time.
Some Indians flew under Plecker's radar. They went under assumed names and followed a range of other strategies to keep official Virginia from knowing why they tanned so well in the summer.
I do not know if my people were Pamunkey, or Mattaponi, or Chicahominy. I do not know the last name of my Indian relatives. Such information was once dangerous to know and was not preserved. I was in law school before I realized why it was that everything else about my dead relatives was remembered by the old people, but nothing was known of the Indians. Now I understand why. They were making survival adjustments to a wicked society that deemed the superiority of whites to be obvious,proper, and worst of all, intended by God.
In 1967, in the case of Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court struck down the felony convictions of Richard Loving and his wife, a women of Rappahannock and African descent. They had been given a one year suspended jail sentence and banned from living in Virginia because they had committed the crime of falling in love and getting married.
I do not at all begrudge those who proudly announce that they are part Indian. If asked directly I explain my lineage. My reticence is certainly not because I am in any way ashamed of that lineage. It is because being a descendant of the people of the land of Tsennacomacah, the people of the Powhatan, the people of Pocahontas, the people of who were among the first Americans to defend our shores against foreign invaders in 1608, has cost me absolutely nothing.
I was not hunted by Plecker. He died years before I was born. I have no hint that any of my relatives were victims either of Plecker or suffered under the laws of the Commonwealth.
But this is not ancient history. I have known people that were hunted by Plecker. I have known Indians that were harassed by the Ku Klux Klan. They suffered for the offense of having been born alive. I was born after it became cool to be part Indian.
This is not ancient history. Mildred Loving died in 2008.
