Ultimately, segregation's science contained the seeds of biological determinism's undoing, realized through the civil, women's, Native American, and welfare rights movements.
Although white elites were the first to champion eugenics, by the 1910s African American Virginians were advancing their own hereditarian ideas, creating an effective counter-narrative to white scientific racism.
The enforcement of these laws victimized men and women labeled "feebleminded," African Americans, and Native Americans for over forty years.However, this is much more than the story of majority agents dominating minority subjects. The resulting theories, taught to generations of Virginia high school, college, and medical students, became social policy as Virginia legislators passed eugenic marriage and sterilization statutes. By the early twentieth century, proponents of eugenics-the "science" of racial improvement-melded evolutionary biology and incipient genetics with long-standing cultural racism. Famously articulated by Thomas Jefferson, ideas about biological inequalities among groups evolved throughout the nineteenth century. Contact me if you want to buy or use them.Blending social, intellectual, legal, medical, gender, and cultural history, Segregation's Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia examines how eugenic theory and practice bolstered Virginia's various cultures of segregation-rich from poor, sick from well, able from disabled, male from female, and black from white and Native American. It's a sad, eerie place and only a sign saying it was under surveillance kept Anita from driving up the road to explore further!Ĭan't they see it's why my brain says “rage”īut they think this saves us from our hellĭO NOT use my pictures without my written permission, these images are under copyright.
Despite closing the sanitarium and reopening as a children's hospital the building would never recover from this tarnished reputation and there is discussion to tear it down (the children's hospital moved out in 1996 and it has remained vacant since then). A large percentage of victims were poor and African American or Native American. DeJarnette was a respected doctor among the white Virginia elite at the time, but his career would ultimately be defined by his strong support for eugenics, specifically the forced sterilization of the mentally ill and others he deemed “defective.” The so-called “unfit” included people with mental disabilities and epileptics, as well as those considered to be alcoholics or even promiscuous. This abandoned mental hospital formerly known as the DeJarnette Sanitarium languishes empty and deteriorating on a hill in Staunton, Virginia.
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