The Children of the Slaves
Racial tension in America has a long history, and it certainly did not end when the Civil War (or War between the States) was over in 1865. One powerful white supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan (or KKK), was started within a year of the end of the war, led by Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former Confederate general. The Klan grew for several years, but was suppressed by the Federal government after Congress passed the Force Bill in 1871, giving Federal troops authority to attack the Klan.
In 1877, Federal troops withdrew from the South, and in 1890 Southern states began passing laws that took away the voting rights of blacks. Blacks organized in many different ways to protect their gains. In 1881, Booker T. Washington organized a new school for blacks, Tuskegee Institute. In 1909, W.E.B. Du Bois, the first black to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, was among the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The following year, the National Urban League was founded to help blacks who were moving from rural to urban life.
In 1915, the Ku Klux Klan was re-organized, and it attracted over two million members. It opposed everything and everyone it considered un-American, including blacks, immigrants, Jews and Catholics. The KKK was strongest in the South, but had followers across the country. So the eugenics movement did not invent racism. However, it did strengthen it, and provided a pseudo-scientific basis for it.
The great push of the eugenics movement to stop marriages between blacks and whites drew from the racism of the time. In the 1920s, eugenicists passed laws in more than half of the states that prohibited such marriages.
The language of race
The English language has a variety of words that refer to children whose parents have different racial backgrounds. Creole refers to a person born in an area that was not native to his ancestors, like the descendants of French-Canadians in Louisiana or descendants of the Spanish in Jamaica. A mestizo is a person with one white (especially Spanish or Portuguese) parent and one Indian parent. Other terms that were used in years past included: mulatto, referring to a person with one white parent and one black parent; quadroon, referring to a person with one white and one mulatto parent; and octoroon, referring to a person with one white and one quadroon parent. (Today, when any such identification is thought necessary, the terms that people generally use are bi-racial or mixed-race.)
The eugenics movement drew some of its inspiration from the Greeks, who had discussed breeding horses, dogs and humans, and breeding horses remained a matter of interest. Harry Laughlin did research on thoroughbred horses. One of the mottoes used by the American Birth Control League was "breeding a race of thoroughbreds," referring to humans but using the language of stables and barnyards.
One of the stable-based terms formerly used to refer to a person with one white and one black parent was mulatto. The word was used before the eugenics movement developed. It is taken from the Spanish word for a young mule, mulato. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse (or mare). The progeny of a female donkey (or jennet) and a male horse (or stallion) is a hinny. Crossing the breeds is an old practice with familiar results; few breeders want hinnies, but many breeders produce mules, which combine the strength and hardiness of the parent species. Mules are usually sterile, because of the mixture of genes.
The use of the word mulatto to refer to humans with mixed parents brings up a series of questions. The word was used because the parents are different. But just how different are they? These are the questions that lead to racism: Are whites and blacks from different species? Will their offspring be an improvement over the parents like a mule, or a step down like a hinny?
Eugenicists understood that biracial people are not sterile like mules, but still they feared that if whites and blacks intermarried, both of them could disappear over time.
Lothrop Stoddard (author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy) stated his concern, and was characteristically blunt: if intermarriage continued unchecked, the whites would disappear. Recall that for Stoddard and many others, the most advanced species on earth was not mankind in general, but the white man.* In their understanding, wiping out or weakening the most advanced creature on the face of the earth would set back the clock of evolution -- not by a few centuries, but by ages. Progress -- which was God's great work, or was perhaps the real name of God -- could be defeated by inter-racial marriage.
The opponents of mixed marriages dispensed with fine distinctions; they opposed any mixing of races or genes, which they called miscegenation. And they wrote laws to ban the practice.
In all, 30 states passed anti-miscegenation laws that stayed on the books until the advent of the civil rights movement. Of these, 16 kept their laws on the books until the Supreme Court threw them out in 1967: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. Another 14 states passed anti-miscegenation laws, but repealed them in the 1950s or 1960s: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming.
For example, Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 made it "unlawful for any white person in this state to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian." In writing the statute, one of the challenges that the Virginia racists faced was their own proud history. According to a publication from the Registrar of the State Bureau of Vital Statistics, the law had to take account of "the desire of all to recognize as an integral and honored part of the white race the descendants of John Rolfe and Pocahontas." Because of the Pocahontas loophole, you could have a little Indian blood (one great-great-grandparent) and still be counted as white. But "every person in whom there is ascertainable any negro blood shall be deemed and taken to be a colored person."
The law automatically voided all marriages between whites and blacks. The law prohibited leaving the state to get married and then returning, and specified that the "fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage." The penalty was stiff: "If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years."
Virginia judges continued to defend anti-miscegenation laws for decades. In 1955, the State Supreme Court of Appeals decided that the laws served legitimate purposes, including: "to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens," and to prevent "the corruption of blood," "a mongrel breed of citizens," and "the obliteration of racial pride."
The trial that eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where anti-miscegenation laws were overturned, involved a Virginia couple, Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving. On January 6, 1959, they pleaded guilty to the charge of miscegenation, and were sentenced to a year in jail, which they could avoid by leaving Virginia and staying out for 25 years. The trial judge said:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.The Lovings left Virginia for awhile, but in 1963 they challenged the law in Federal court. When the anti-miscegenation laws were finally toppled in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court said (in Loving v. Virginia) that distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry was "odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality."
The Tuskegee Scandal
Racism and eugenics came together to produce odious laws, but also to create one of the worst scandals in the history of medicine. In 1929 researchers from New York decided to observe the course of a disease if it was not treated at all. They recruited hundreds of poor black men with syphilis, and watched them for 40 years -- without treating them. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease; untreated, it can lead to tumors, blindness, deafness, paralysis and death.
In 1925, there was a meeting of the Advisory Council of the Milbank Fund, a philanthropic group that worked "for the promotion of health, the lowering of the death rate, the increasing of the efficiency rate and the lengthening of the average American life." The council discussed care of the elderly, and the meeting was downbeat. According to a report in Birth Control Review (January 1925, p. 22), they were asking questions like, "Is it really worthwhile to live long?" and "How much are we willing to pay, in cash, for added years of existence?"
One participant, Dr. William H. Welch, Director of the School of Hygiene of Johns Hopkins University, asked, "Aren't we just keeping the unfit alive at the expense of the fit instead of letting nature do the weeding?" While that meeting was about care of the elderly, a few years later, the Milbank Fund put up cash for a callous study of "letting nature do the weeding." Starting in 1929, Milbank provided the funds to recruit the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, by offering to pay $50 apiece for their burial expenses. In 1932, the federal government took over the study, but Milbank continued to pay for the burials. After treatment for syphilis became available in 1936, the men were still not told they had syphilis, still not treated. They were told only that they had "bad blood."
The governmental body that took charge of the study was the U. S. Public Health Service, which is led by the U. S. Surgeon General. The Surgeon General at that time was Dr. Hugh S. Cumming, who had been a member of the Advisory Council of the American Eugenics Society in its early days and lent his prestige to the organizers of the Second International Congress of Eugenics.
The purpose of the Public Health Service is to protect the health of society. When an epidemic is spreading, it is the PHS that has responded, by necessary but inconvenient means like imposing quarantines on ships that may be carrying infected passengers. A quarantine -- isolating people who may be carrying a contagious disease -- makes sense when you are fighting smallpox. But there is a danger of abusing quarantines. For example, many eugenicists wanted to impose a quarantine of the "feeble-minded," in order to keep them from breeding. When Robert Yerkes ran his intelligence tests that were used to justify laws restricting immigration, he was working for the Public Health Service. And the anti-immigration laws were understood at least in part as a public health measure.
Apparently, it was easy for public health concerns to blur the differences between contagious diseases, mental problems, and even unwanted ethnic groups. And syphilis among blacks seemed to combine these issues.
Different Ways to Accommodate
Tuskegee was built by Booker T. Washington, a great man who became a controversial figure. Washington urged blacks to be accommodating, to work hard to excel in a predominantly white culture. This approach came under fire from more aggressive leaders, including W. E. B. DuBois, a founder of the NAACP.
But DuBois made a number of accommodations himself. He was a Harvard graduate, and had lived among people who considered themselves to be the natural leaders of the nation and world. At some point, he adopted the view that eugenics made sense. But obviously, his version of eugenics was not pure white supremacy like Lothrop Stoddard's. Instead, DuBois thought that each race had some desirable and some undesirable citizens. His view of eugenics was not explicitly racist, but was still useful to racists, who could argue that one race had many desirable citizens, and another race had many undesirables.
1. Explain the terms half-breed, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, miscegenation.
2. What is the KKK?
3. What was the purpose of anti-miscegenation laws?
4. What was the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and who ran it?
5. What is the Public Health Service, and how did they get involved in the Tuskegee experiment?
Discuss: Which of the following is a social disease, and why: syphilis, miscegenation, racism.
| Hugh S. Cumming was U.S. Surgeon General from 1920 to 1936, the period when the Tuskegee Syphilis Study began, under the U.S. Public Health Service. He was succeeded by Thomas Parran, who was Surgeon General during twelve years of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, from 1936 to 1948. In 1944, Parran wrote an extensive paper on how to reorganize the U.S. Public Health Service for the next ten years. Venereal disease takes only one page out of well over 500 pages; the subject was minor in the government's organizational scheme. But Parran was an expert on syphilis; he wrote two books about it. He was keenly aware of the devastation caused by the disease, and wrote about the need to treat patients at all stages. However, the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which hundreds of poor black men with syphilis were left untreated so that researchers could observe the course of the disease, went forward while he was running the Public Health Service, and reports about the progress of the study went to the PHS regularly. This cruel experiment is among the most outrageous abuses of trusting patients in medical history. |
