The popularity of the Lost Colony and Virginia Dare in the 19th and early 20th centuries coincided with American controversies about rising numbers of Catholic and non-British immigrants, as well as the treatment of African Americans and Native Americans. Both the colony and the adult Virginia character were embraced as symbols of white nationalism. Even when Virginia Dare was invoked in the name of women's suffrage in the 1920s, it was to persuade North Carolina legislators that granting "white" women the vote would assure white supremacy. By the 1930s this racist connotation apparently subsided, although the VDARE organisation, founded in 1999, has been denounced for promoting white supremacists.