Several people added to their 20th-century lists the names of people whom they regarded as among the worst or having the most destructive influence.

The best known of those men was Walter Ashby Plecker, director of the state's bureau of vital statistics from the 1910s to the 1940s. A skilled statistician and white supremacist, Plecker believed that people of Anglo-Saxon heritage had to protect themselves from what he believed were culturally inferior peoples.

Plecker also believed that all Virginia Indians were descended from persons of African origin, too, and he engaged in an extended campaign of ethnic cleansing of the public records. He required that Indians be identified on marriage licenses, birth certificates, and other official documents as "colored." That meant that Virginia's Indians were discriminated against in the same manner as Virginia's black citizens.

Plecker's denial of the state's Indian heritage has been repeatedly referred to in recent years as the state's tribes seek federal recognition. Virginia's Indians point out that documentation of their existence was made more difficult by Plecker's alterations and falsifications. His name, among those adduced as of negative influence, is one of the best known now.

Plecker was widely known in his own time, too. "The racial policies of states such as Virginia," Karenne Wood and Deanna Beacham wrote, "were cited by war criminals at the Nuremburg Trials as models upon which the Nazi government had based its treatment of Jews."

Historian Sara Bearss pointed out that Plecker was but one of many white Virginians who pursued a white-supremacy agenda with remorseless energy. John Powell, an internationally known composer, and Ernest Sevier Cox, who wrote frequently about superior and inferior races, were founders of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America. Their influence led to the enactment of the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and to the passage of the most inflexible law in the country requiring racial segregation in public places.

The campaigns of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs complemented the work of such seemingly scientific racists as Walter Plecker. The joint efforts that they led produced much suffering for many hundreds of thousands of Virginians. Another Virginian singled out for his negative influence was James J. Kilpatrick, longtime editor of the old Richmond News Leader. In the 1950s, Kilpatrick helped fashion the justification for the Byrd Organization's reaction to the Supreme Court's ruling that mandatory racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. "Massive Resistence," as the policy became known, badly stained a period of the commonwealth's history, and the ink of its creation flowed from the pen of Kilpatrick.

James Hershmann, one of the leading historians of that episode, wrote that Kilpatrick "provided the ideological justification of Virginia's massive resistance in the critical years that followed the 1954 desegregation decision. With his great polemical skills, Kilpatrick helped bridge the differences between conservatives North and South in the late 1960s. His role was instrumental in the success of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy." Hershmann calculated Kilpatrick's great influence in the negative column.

One of Kilpatrick's successors at The News Leader and later at

The Times-Dispatch, Ross Mackenzie, agreed and listed "on the negatively great side of the ledger Kilpatrick as architect of Massive Resistance."

The long legacy of racial prejudice in Virginia cannot be avoided when looking back at the past, which is why some of the participants in this informal poll created their own "negative" category for the 20th century. That legacy should not be forgotten, and its injuries not repeated. -- B.T.