Walter Ashby Plecker
| Walter Plecker | |
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Walter Plecker at the Bureau of Vital Statistics in 1935
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| Registrar for the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics | |
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In office 1912–1947 |
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| Personal details | |
| Born |
April 2, 1861 Augusta County, Virginia, U.S. |
| Died | August 2, 1947 (aged 86) Richmond, Virginia, U.S. |
Walter Ashby Plecker (April 2, 1861 – August 2, 1947) was an American physician and public health advocate who was the first registrar of Virginia's Bureau of Vital Statistics, serving from 1912 to 1946. He was a leader of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, a white supremacist organization founded in Richmond, Virginia, in 1922. He drafted and lobbied for the passage of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 by the Virginia legislature; it institutionalized the one-drop rule.
Plecker was born in Augusta County, the son of a returned Confederate veteran. Sent to Staunton as a boy, he graduated from Hoover Military Academy in 1880 and obtained a medical degree from the University of Maryland in 1885. He was a devout Presbyterian, and throughout his life he supported the denomination's fundamentalist Southern branch, funding missionaries who believed, as he later would, that God had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah as punishment for racial intermixing.
Plecker settled in Hampton, Virginia, in 1892, and before his mother's death in 1915 (his black nanny closed her eyes), he worked with women of all races and became known for his active interest in obstetrics and public health issues. Plecker educated midwives, invented a home incubator, and prescribed home remedies for infants. His efforts are credited with an almost 50% decline in birthing deaths for black mothers. Plecker became the public health officer for Elizabeth City County in 1902.
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