Beginning in the eighteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth, there were laws throughout the United States regarding race. Depending on the state, a person could be legally white if three grandparents or seven great-grandparents were white. It wasn’t until after the Civil War, when slavery was no longer available to keep white and Black separate, that the “one drop rule,” a principle meant to address “invisible Blackness,” began to be adopted in law. In 1924, the Racial Integrity Act in the state of Virginia defined a person as legally Black if they had any African ancestry.
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