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 sub-Saharan African ancestry ("one drop" of "black blood")Davis, F. James. Frontline."Who's black. One nation's definition". Retrieved 27 February 2015.Dworkin, Shari L. The Society Pages. "Race, Sexuality, and the 'One Drop Rule': More Thoughts about Interracial Couples and Marriage". Retrieved 27 February 2015. is considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms). 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.Conrad P. Kottak, "What is hypodescent?" , Human Diversity and "Race", Cultural Anthropology, Online Learning, McGraw Hill. Retrieved 21 April 2010.
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 (free people of color) were considered legally white if they had less than either one-eighth or one-quarter African ancestry (only in Virginia).Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2003), p. 68. 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 (freeing them legally was a public action he elected to avoid because he would have had to gain permission from the state legislature); 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. In Virginia, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 classified people with one-sixteenth or less Native American ancestry and no other non-Caucasian ancestry as White. This policy enabled elite Virginians claiming descent from Pocahontas and John Rolfe to be classified as "white," although it did not require descent from Pocahontas specifically.
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 laws 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 citizenship.
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 (that is, multi-racial), a person had to have at least one-quarter (equivalent to one grandparent) 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" (black) 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." (This was the equivalent of one great-grandparent.) Additionally, the act outlawed fornication, as well as the intermarrying of white females with men of color. However, the act permitted the continuation of marriages between white persons and persons of color that were established before the law was enacted.Laws of the State of Florida, First Session of the Fourteenth General Assembly Under the Amended Constitution 1865–'6. Chapter 1, 468 Sec.(1)-(3).
The one-drop rule was not made law until the early 20th century. 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.