White Supremacist's Name Removed from Virginia College Building

Change comes very slowly in Virginia and the state's less than illustrious history of racism and social backwardness at times is like a vampire which needs a truckload of wooden stakes to put and end to the sanitizing of the past. As noted below, Adolf Hitler copied some of Virginia's legal framework for eugenics as a model for the Nazi sterilization law. Fortunately, Radford University has taken the belated move of stripping the name of John Powell (at right), an influential white supremacist in Virginia, from one of it's buildings. Frankly, it's shocking that a little more due diligence had not been done back in 1967 when this bigot's name was first applied to the building. It is likewise shocking that the views of John Powell are still alive and well in organizations like The Family Foundation and other Virginia based Christianist organization. These groups may be more discrete in their statements than Powell was, but if you follow their web sites, the latent racism and bigotry is there to be seen. The Virginian Pilot has a story that looks at the building renaming by Radford University. (The Roanoke Times also has coverage) It is important to understand that people like Powell are still all too plentiful in the Commonwealth and that their bigotry needs to be exposed to the bright light of day. Here are some story highlights:
*
Powell Hall is no more. The name of one of Radford University's arts and music buildings was stripped Friday by a unanimous vote of the school's board of visitors. The vote came five years after Radford history professor Richard Straw and his class discovered that the namesake of the building, John Powell, was an influential white supremacist in Virginia.
*
Powell, as founder of the Richmond chapter of the Anglo-Saxon Club of America, was deeply involved in the drafting and passage of the act [Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 which was much in the news in 1967 when it was invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling] and was an ally of an infamous Virginia state registrar of vital statistics and eugenics advocate, Walter Plecker.
*
Both men were leaders in Virginia's drive to "purify" society of the "polluting" influence of blacks, Virginia Indians and others deemed "undesirable," "feebleminded," or "mongrel," according to attitudes prevalent at the time.
*
Using the act, Plecker worked diligently to reclassify all members of Virginia Indian tribes as "colored" to exclude them, as well as blacks, from public schools and other institutions. "Some of these mongrels, finding that they have been able to sneak in their birth certificates unchallenged as Indians, are now making a rush to register as white," Plecker was quoted as saying at the time.
*
Adolf Hitler used Virginia's legal framework for eugenics as a model for the Nazi sterilization law and efforts to purge Jews and other "undesirables" from German society. Hundreds of thousands were sterilized in the years leading up to the Holocaust.

*

Virginia has some very shameful history. One would think leaders in state government would want to distance the state from past bigotry. Instead, individuals like Taliban Bob McDonnell and Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli seem determined to continue this toxic heritage, with gays being a favored target.