Norton was born enslaved about 1840 in Williamsburg of mixed-race ancestry. He was a younger brother by about a decade of F. S. Norton, who was also a member of the House of Delegates (1869–1871), and an elder brother of Daniel M. Norton, who was a member of the Convention of 1867–1868 and of the Senate of Virginia (1871–1873, 1877–1887). They may have been sons of an enslaved woman and her owner. The identities of their parents are not known for certain, and Robert Norton provided different names for his mother on each of his two marriage records: Richard and Elizabeth without surnames in one instance, and Charlotte E. Norton in another.
John H Robinson (1857–1932) – Encyclopedia Virginia
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Southern Claims Commission in Virginia, The – Encyclopedia Virginia
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SUMMARY
Walter Ashby Plecker was a physician and the first Virginia state registrar of vital statistics, a position he served in from 1912 to 1946. He was a staunch promoter of eugenics, a discredited movement aimed at scientifically proving white racial superiority and thereby justifying the marginalizing of non-white people. Employing Virginia’s Act to Preserve Racial Integrity (1924), Plecker effectively separated Virginia citizens into two simplified racial categories: white and colored. The law, which remained in effect until 1967, when it was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in the case of
Loving v. Virginia, required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth, while criminalizing marriages between whites and non-whites. Plecker’s policies used deceptive scientific evidence to deem blacks a lesser class of human beings, but they also targeted poor whites and anyone he or other eugenicists considered “feebleminded.” Asserting that Virg