With Good Reason

Passed at the height of the eugenics movement, the Racial Integrity Act proclaimed the existence of only two racial categories in Virginia—”colored” and white.  The law stripped Native Americans, and members of other groups with dark skin, of their land, voting rights, and legal identity.  David Smith (Longwood University) and anthropologist Helen Rountree (Old Dominion [...]

When the British planted a cross and their flag on territory previously unclaimed by European nations, they were, Chief Justice John Marshall would later say, exercising a right of discovery that extended back to the 15th-century colonization by Spain and Portugal of non-Christian lands.  Historian Robert J. Miller and Karenne Wood (Virginia Foundation for the [...]