ARTICLE Birth Registration and the Administration of White Supremacy Susan J. Pearson Birth registration formed a key part of the administration of white supremacy between Reconstruction and World War II. In the allotment of Indigenous lands and the enforcement of de jure segregation by states, birth registration served an important ideological and administrative function. Because allotment policy combined property transmission with family reorganization, it made documentation of identity more important to the federal Indian Office. The Office imposed nuclear family structures on complex kin networks to establish access to land title, and it used doc- umentation to alter family relationships to fit with American property law. During the same years, southern states used birth registration to fix racial identity in order to determine access to school, marriage, and many other benefits. Racial classification through birth registration, in other words, worked less to record the truth than to help produce it. In 1936, after just one year of marriage, Cyril Sunseri sued to have his marriage to his wife, Verna Cassagne, annulled by a civil court in New Orleans. According to Sunseri, Cassagne was “a person of color,” and their marriage had been illegal under Louisiana’s miscegenation statute. By seeking annulment rather than divorce, Sunseri was asking the court to declare that his marriage to Cassagne had never been valid. The court thus had to determine whether Cassagne possessed even “a trace of negro blood.” Sunseri alleged that Cassagne’s great-great-grandmother, Fanny Ducre, was a “full-blooded negress,” while Cassagne insisted that she was an Indian. Both parties to the suit brought witnesses to testify in support of their claims, but Sunseri also adduced a trail of documentary evidence marking Ducre and her descendants as “colored.” These documents included Verna Cassagne’s own birth certifi- cate, which, despite the fact that she had been born on a “white” maternity ward, marked her as colored. In the end, the oral testimony of relatives and friends that Verna and her mother “have always been considered as being of the white race by their acquaintance in the City of New Orleans” could not win out over the documentary trail: Cassagne, the trial and appeals courts found, was Black, not white. The marriage was annulled. 1 Cassagne’s fate demonstrates the power of vital statistics documents in determining racial classification and administering the racial state. Although Sunseri v. Cassagne involved a great deal of testimony about the racial reputation of Verna Cassagne, her fate was ultimately determined by the bureaucratic document filed when she was born: her birth certificate. By the 1930s, the power of birth certificates to determine the facts of a person’s identity (name, par- entage, exact age, sex, and race) was well established. Though scholars have often portrayed the courtroom determination of racial identity as a matter of racial reputation and association, The author would like to thank the editors and staff of MAH, and the anonymous reviewers for their construc- tive feedback. 1 Sunseri v. Cassagne, 191 La. 209, 185 So. 1, 1938 La. LEXIS 1362 (1938); Sunseri v. Cassagne, 195 La. 19, 196 So. 7, 1940 La. LEXIS 1051 (1940). © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press Modern American History (2022), 5, 117–141 doi:10.1017/mah.2022.13 https://doi.org/10.1017/mah.2022.13 Published online by Cambridge University Press