The plea for racial integrity : a history of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America

On March 20, 1924 the Virginia General Assembly enacted the nation's most comprehensive legislation to insure racial integrity. Behind the bill's political passage lay the work of a white-supremacist organization called the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America. The leaders of these clubs saw themselves as spokesmen for a race-conscious generation that perceived the American Negro's inferiority in biological rather than social terms. Obsessed with the idea of maintaining white racial purity, they believed that the greatest threat facing America was the moral, intellectual, and physical degeneration of its citizens through the interbreeding of white and non-white races. The Racial Integrity Law, which forbade the intermarriage of whites and non-whites in Virginia, was the first step in their plan to prevent the mongrelization of American society. Between the year of the clubs' founding, 1922, and the probable time of their demise, 1930, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America exerted a sporadic but impressive influence on the history of Virginia race-relations. Their story, and an understanding of their leaders' racial creed, will explain Virginia's plea for racial integrity during the 1920's.

Digitization of this thesis was made possible by a generous grant from the Jefferson Trust, 2015.

Thesis originally deposited on 2016-03-14 in version 1.28 of Libra. This thesis was migrated to Libra2 on 2017-03-23 16:34:42.