One-drop rule
The one-drop rule was a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of Black African ancestry is considered black. It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.
This concept became codified into the law of some U.S. states in the early 20th century. It was associated with the principle of "invisible blackness" that developed after the long history of racial interaction in the South, which had included the hardening of slavery as a racial caste system and later segregation. Before the rule was outlawed by the Supreme Court in the Loving v. Virginia decision of 1967, it was used to prevent interracial marriages and in general to deny rights and equal opportunities and uphold white supremacy.
Antebellum conditions
Before the American Civil War, free individuals of mixed race were considered legally white if they had less than either one-eighth or one-quarter African ancestry. Many mixed-race people were absorbed into the majority culture based simply on appearance, associations and carrying out community responsibilities. These and community acceptance were the more important factors if such a person's racial status were questioned, not their documented ancestry.Based on late 20th-century DNA analysis and a preponderance of historical evidence, US president Thomas Jefferson is widely believed to have fathered the six mixed-race children with his slave Sally Hemings, who was herself three-quarters white and a paternal half-sister of his wife Martha Wayles Jefferson. Four of them survived to adulthood. Under Virginia law of the time, while their seven-eighths European ancestry would have made them legally white if they'd been free, being born to an enslaved mother made them automatically enslaved from birth. Jefferson allowed the two oldest to escape in 1822 ; the two youngest he freed in his 1826 will. Three of the four entered white society as adults. Subsequently, their descendants identified as white.
Although racial segregation was adopted legally by southern states of the former Confederacy in the late 19th century, legislators resisted defining race by law as part of preventing interracial marriages. In 1895, in South Carolina during discussion, George D. Tillman said,
It is a scientific fact that there is not one full-blooded Caucasian on the floor of this convention. Every member has in him a certain mixture of ... colored blood .... It would be a cruel injustice and the source of endless litigation, of scandal, horror, feud, and bloodshed to undertake to annul or forbid marriage for a remote, perhaps obsolete trace of Negro blood. The doors would be open to scandal, malice, and greed.
The one-drop rule was not formally codified as law until the 20th century, from 1910 in Tennessee to 1930 as one of Virginia's "racial integrity laws", with similar laws in several other states in between.
Native Americans
Prior to colonization, and still in traditional communities, the idea of determining belonging by degree of "blood" was, and is, unheard of. Native American tribes did not use blood quantum law until the U.S. government introduced the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, instead determining tribal status on the basis of kinship, lineage and family ties. However, many land cession treaties, particularly during Indian removal in the 19th century, contained provisions for "mixed-blood" descendants of European and native ancestry to receive either parcels of land ceded in the treaty, or a share in a lump sum of money, with specifications as to the degree of tribal ancestry required to qualify. Though these did not typically apply a one-drop rule, determining the ancestry of individual claimants was not straightforward, and the process was often rife with fraud.Among patrilineal tribes, such as the Omaha, historically a child born to an Omaha mother and a white father could belong officially to the Omaha tribe only if the child were formally adopted into it by a male citizen. In contemporary practice, tribal laws around citizenship and parentage can vary widely between nations.
Between 1904 and 1919, tribal members with any amount of African ancestry were disenrolled from the Chitimacha tribe of Louisiana, and their descendants have since then been denied tribal membership.
20th century and contemporary times
In 20th-century America, the concept of the one-drop rule has been primarily applied by European Americans to those of native African ancestry, when some Whites were trying to maintain some degree of overt or covert white supremacy. The poet Langston Hughes wrote in his 1940 memoir:This rule meant many mixed-race people, of diverse ancestry, were simply seen as African-American, and their more diverse ancestors forgotten and erased, making it difficult to accurately trace ancestry in the present day.
Many descendants of those who were enslaved native Africans and trafficked by Europeans and Americans have assumed they have Native American ancestry. Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s 2006 PBS documentary on the genetic makeup of African Americans, African American Lives, focused on these stories of Native American heritage in African-American communities. DNA test results showed, after African, primarily European ancestors for all but two of the celebrities interviewed. However, many critics point to the limitations of DNA testing for ancestry, especially for minority populations.
During World War II, Colonel Karl Bendetsen stated that anyone with "one drop of Japanese blood" was liable for forced internment in camps.
Today there are no enforceable laws in the U.S. in which the one-drop rule is applicable. Sociologically, however, while the concept has in recent years become less acceptable within the Black community, with more people identifying as biracial, research has found that in White society, it is still common to associate biracial children primarily with the individual's non-White ancestry.
Legislation and practice
Both before and after the American Civil War, many people of mixed ancestry who "looked white" and were of mostly white ancestry were legally absorbed into the white majority. State laws established differing standards. For instance, an 1822 Virginia law stated that to be defined as mulatto, a person had to have at least one-quarter African ancestry. Social acceptance and identity were historically the keys to racial identity. Virginia's one-fourth standard remained in place until 1910, when the standard was changed to one sixteenth. In 1930, even the one sixteenth standard was abandoned in favor of a more stringent standard. The act defined a person as legally "colored" for classification and legal purposes if the individual had any African ancestry.Although the Virginia legislature increased restrictions on free blacks following the Nat Turner's Rebellion of 1831, it refrained from establishing a one-drop rule. When a proposal was made by Travis H. Eppes and debated in 1853, representatives realized that such a rule could adversely affect whites, as they were aware of generations of interracial relationships. During the debate, a person wrote to the Charlottesville newspaper:
The state legislators agreed. No such law was passed until 1924, assisted by the fading recollection of such mixed familial histories. In the 21st century, such interracial family histories are being revealed as individuals undergo DNA genetic analysis.
The Melungeons are a group of multiracial families of mostly European and African ancestry whose ancestors were free in colonial Virginia. They migrated to the frontier in Kentucky and Tennessee. Their descendants have been documented over the decades as having tended to marry persons classified as "white". Their descendants became assimilated into the majority culture from the 19th to the 20th centuries.
Pursuant to Reconstruction later in the 19th century, southern states acted to impose racial segregation by law and restrict the liberties of blacks, specifically passing laws to exclude them from politics and voting. From 1890 to 1908, all of the former Confederate states passed such laws, and most preserved disfranchisement until after passage of federal civil rights laws in the 1960s. At the South Carolina constitutional convention in 1895, an anti-miscegenation law and changes that would disfranchise blacks were proposed. Delegates debated a proposal for a one-drop rule to include in these laws. George D. Tillman said the following in opposition:
In 1865, Florida passed an act that both outlawed miscegenation and defined the amount of black ancestry needed to be legally defined as a "person of color". The act stated that "every person who shall have one-eighth or more of negro blood shall be deemed and held to be a person of color." Additionally, the act outlawed fornication, as well as the intermarrying of white females with men of color.Citation needed However, the act permitted the continuation of marriages between white persons and persons of color that were established before the law was enacted.
The one-drop rule was not made law until the early 20th century.Citation needed This was decades after the Civil War, emancipation, and the Reconstruction era. It followed restoration of white supremacy in the South and the passage of Jim Crow racial segregation laws. In the 20th century, it was also associated with the rise of eugenics and ideas of racial purity. From the late 1870s on, white Democrats regained political power in the former Confederate states and passed racial segregation laws controlling public facilities, and laws and constitutions from 1890 to 1910 to achieve disfranchisement of most blacks. Many poor whites were also disfranchised in these years, by changes to voter registration rules that worked against them, such as literacy tests, longer residency requirements and poll taxes.
The first challenges to such state laws were overruled by Supreme Court decisions which upheld state constitutions that effectively disfranchised many. White Democratic-dominated legislatures proceeded with passing Jim Crow laws that instituted racial segregation in public places and accommodations, and passed other restrictive voting legislation. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court allowed racial segregation of public facilities, under the "separate but equal" doctrine.
Jim Crow laws reached their greatest influence during the decades from 1910 to 1930. Among them were hypodescent laws, defining as black anyone with any black ancestry, or 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, Alabama and Georgia in 1927, and Virginia in 1930. 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 to be equivalent to one-drop de facto.
Before 1930, individuals of visible mixed European and African ancestry were usually classed as mulatto, or sometimes as black and sometimes as white, depending on appearance. Previously, most states had limited trying to define ancestry before "the fourth degree". But, in 1930, due to lobbying by southern legislators, the Census Bureau stopped using the classification of mulatto. Documentation of the long social recognition of mixed-race people was lost, and they were classified only as black or white.
The binary world of the one-drop rule disregarded the self-identification both of people of mostly European ancestry who grew up in white communities, and of people who were of mixed race and identified as American Indian. In addition, Walter Plecker, Registrar of Statistics, ordered application of the 1924 Virginia law in such a way that vital records were changed or destroyed, family members were split on opposite sides of the color line, and there were losses of the documented continuity of people who identified as American Indian, as all people in Virginia had to be classified as white or black. Over the centuries, many Indian tribes in Virginia had absorbed people of other ethnicities through marriage or adoption, but maintained their cultures. Suspecting blacks of trying to "pass" as Indians, Plecker ordered records changed to classify people only as black or white, and ordered offices to reclassify certain family surnames from Indian to black.
Since the late 20th century, Virginia has officially recognized eight American Indian tribes and their members; the tribes are trying to gain federal recognition. They have had difficulty because decades of birth, marriage, and death records were misclassified under Plecker's application of the law. No one was classified as Indian, although many individuals and families identified that way and were preserving their cultures.
In the case of mixed-race American Indian and European descendants, the one-drop rule in Virginia was extended only so far as those with more than one-sixteenth Indian blood. This was due to what was known as the "Pocahontas exception". Since many influential First Families of Virginia claimed descent from the American Indian Pocahontas and her husband John Rolfe of the colonial era, the Virginia General Assembly declared that an individual could be considered white if having no more than one-sixteenth Indian "blood".
The eugenist Madison Grant of New York wrote in his book, The Passing of the Great Race : "The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew." As noted above, Native American tribes which had patrilineal descent and inheritance, such as the Omaha, classified children of white men and Native American women as white.