March 22, 1926 – Virginia Passes Public Assemblage Act Requiring Racial Segregation at All Public Events

Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) is a private historically black university in Hampton, Virginia. In 1925, Walter Copeland, the editor of the Newport News Daily Press took his wife there to see a dance recital. As they arrived late, they were seated near a black couple, and Mrs. Copeland became distraught. Her husband later wrote an editorial about the incident accusing Hampton of practicing “social equality between the white and negro races” and warned of “the amalgamation of the races that would eventually lead to the destruction of the Anglo Saxon race.”

Hampton University

Hampton’s (white) president, Dr. James Edward Gregg, denied the school had a policy of encouraging racial intermixing. But Copeland was not satisfied with his response.

Copeland put action behind his words; he joined forces with the white supremacist John Powell to start a Hampton post of the Anglo-Saxon Club on May 2, 1925. Powell had been a founder of the first post of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs, dedicated to maintaining white supremacy, in 1922.

The attacks on Hampton Institute came to the attention of the weekly Norfolk Journal and Guide, Norfolk’s black-owned newspaper. Its editor, P. B. Young, had emerged as a spokesperson for blacks in Virginia and the surrounding states. He pointed out something blacks knew well but whites refused to acknowledge: “White men who are always crying out against amalgamation are solely responsible for all the amalgamation that has taken place.”

Amazing how often whites refused to acknowledge this easily observable fact.

W.E.B Du Bois, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, also joined the battle in the June, 1925 issue of Crisis magazine:

He noted that in the fifty- seven years of Hampton’s existence, not once had there been an incident of intermarriage or a mulatto child, yet ‘the result of racial segregation in the state of Virginia was officially reported at 164,171 mulattos in 1920.’”

Or as Du Bois opined in a 1929 speech, “if Nordics believe themselves to be superior, and do not want to mingle their blood with that of other races, who is forcing them? They can keep to themselves if they wish”:

They have been responsible for more intermixture of races than any other people, ancient and modern, and they have inflicted this miscegenation on helpless unwilling slaves by force, fraud and insult; and this is the folk that today has the impudence to turn on the darker races, when they demand a share of civilization, and cry: “You shall not marry our daughters!”

The blunt, crude reply is: Who in Hell asked to marry your daughters?”

William Edward Burghardt “W.E.B.” Du Bois (Feb. 23, 1868 – Aug. 27, 1963)

Tensions flared again in November when an all-white glee club from the University of North Carolina performed at Ogden Hall and no segregated seating was established. A couple weeks later, Virginia’s most virulent white supremacists called on their congressional delegate to propose legislation that would “prohibit the mixing of audiences at public assemblages.” On March 22, 1926, the Public Assemblages Act became law. It required the racial segregation of all public events in Virginia. The act was one of three so-called racial integrity laws passed between 1924 and 1930. You can read the text of the law here.