1 Fighting Fire with Fire: African Americans and Hereditarian Thinking, 1900-1942 Gregory Michael Dorr, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor University of Alabama In the past three years, the American public has rediscovered our nations eugenic past. Recently, the states of California, Oregon, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia have all confronted the legacy of their compulsory sterilization programs efforts undertaken to purify the white race by eliminating antisocial genetic traits from the population. Media coverage of these events revolves around racist white elites abusing populations they deemed to be unfitspecifically the mentally retarded, lower class women, and racial and ethnic minorities. The medias interpretation follows from the bulk of scholarship on the eugenics movement. Historians have traditionally focused on prominent white scientists, psychologists, and eugenics propagandists. More recently, attention has turned to second tier white eugenicists, and state-level studies of the proeugenics rank and file, illustrating the pervasive nature of eugenic ideology in American culture. While this work has recovered a sense of the political, social, and cultural
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heterogeneity of the eugenics movement, it remains a whites only history. Relatively little work has been done to show how hereditarian ideas influenced the AfricanAmerican community. Most studies merely position African Americans as the targets of eugenic control and repression, or as vocalif disempowered and ignoredcritics of eugenics. These accounts strip black historical actors of their agency, and fail to reveal the full complexity of the American eugenics movement. This paper outlines an untold chapter in the history of American eugenics by comparing the hereditarian beliefs of three African Americans: W.E.B. Dubois, Thomas

1 Foremost among these are Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Nancy L. Gallagher, Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999); Steven Selden, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999); and Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

Wyatt Turner, and Marcus Garvey. Building on the work of Kevin Gaines, Marouf
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Hasian, and Michele Mitchell, Im going to argue that hereditarianism and eugenics held strong appeal for various segments of the African American community. Some African Americans, like W.E.B. DuBois and Thomas Turner, believed that relatively fit and unfit human beings existed, and that society as a whole could be improved by assuring the propagation of the fitthe best and brightest individuals, regardless of race. What emerged from this school of thought was integrationist or accomodationist eugenics, which assumed the essential biological similarity of all human races. Even as Turner and DuBois developed integrationist eugenics to batter down the racism of mainline white eugenicists, however, Marcus Garvey used eugenics to argue for racial separatism and black racial purity. On the surface, Garvey represents the black analog to white mainline eugenicists. Garvey, however, generally eschewed notions of racial superiority that many white eugenicists associated with the ideology of racial purity. Ultimately, the careers of these men reveal how both whites and blacks could contest the racial divide using the theories of eugenics. Moreover, both integrationist and separatist eugenics say as much about their expositors politics as they do about biological reality, revealing much about the nexus of science and society. From the moment Sir Francis Galton coined the word eugenics in 1883, the notion of scientifically improving humanity through better breeding captivated modern scientists. Whether advocating increased procreation among the "fit"so-called positive eugenics or demanding negative eugenic interventions like immigration and marriage
2 I omit consideration of William Hannibal Thomas, the so-called Black Judas who accepted white arguments for black biological inferiority for a number of reasons. First, the publication of his book The American Negro (1901) and the bulk of his public career occurred at the dawn of the modern age of genetics. Second, he believed in a more Lamarckian view of heredity that did not comport with the more astringent particulate ideas espoused by later eugenicists and geneticists. Third, his career and beliefs were so aberrant, that he represented a committee of one. Finally, his career is exhaustively detailed in John David Smith, Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). In contrast, Garvey, DuBois, and Turner all worked during the heyday of the American eugenics movement, and they all adhered to notions of particulate heredity.

restriction, sterilization, and segregation to reduce the propagation of the "unfit," scientists remained convinced that eugenics promised a millennial advance in human society. A host of social problems, like alcoholism, criminality, pauperism, prostitution, tuberculosis, venereal disease, and the catch-all category of "feeblemindedness," might be eradicated by preventing the birth of those genetically destined to fill these categories. That fitness and unfitness generally mapped to native-born, white Americans' racial, class, and ethnic prejudices merely underscored the overlapping scientific and cultural imperatives embodied in the eugenics movement. Despite affinities between eugenics
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and white supremacy, black folk saw promise in the new science, too. Any discussion of DuBois, Turner, and Garveys eugenic beliefs must be placed within the broader context of African-American support for "popular eugenics"the general belief in "fit" and "unfit" babies with "good" or "bad" characteristicsthat swept American society during the 1910s and 1920s. Americans, black and white, understood human heredity by analogy to domestic animals, an analogy fostered by direct experience stockbreeding. (Remember, its not until the 1920 census that America becomes an urban country; until the Great Migration, 90% of African Americans lived in rural farm
3 Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), ix and Chapter 1. The traditional standard scholarly works on the history of eugenics, in addition to Kevles's fine book, include: Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944); Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963); Kenneth M. Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); and Alan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). A new wave of scholars has produced a series of important reinterpretations of the American eugenics movement, the most significant of which include: Gallagher, Breeding Better Vermonters; Steven Selden, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999); Diane B. Paul, The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998); Paul, Controlling Human Heredity (1995); Nicole Hahn Rafter, Creating Born Criminals (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Hasian, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought; Martin Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of "Defective" Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

settings.) For this reason, as Michele Mitchell has shown, eugenic "Fitter Families" and better babies contests were popular among both black and white folk. Like their white
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counterparts, many African Americans knew that "fit" and "unfit" individuals existed; just looking around they saw evidence of this in their neighbors who were mentally slow, physically disfigured, or morally lax. As a result, many African Americans became interested in finding a fit mate and having fit children. Thus, by emphasizing the
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basic premises of hereditary determinism and genetic improvement, DuBois, Turner, and Garvey capitalized on the conventional wisdom among the black populace. These men then constructed "scientific" counter-narratives to combat the "scientific" racism of mainline white eugenicists. For DuBois, Turner, and Garvey, eugenic intervention would first equilibrate the various races, then allow all races to improve simultaneously. Eugenics would not, and should not in these mens view, improve one racial group ahead of all others. W.E.B. DuBois was the first black intellectual to tackle the hereditarian doctrines that undergirded Americas eugenics movement. DuBoiss effort to define race as a historical entity, his attempts to debunk purported racial differences in intelligence, and his

4 African-American support for eugenics, hereditarianism, and "civilizationist rhetoric" has only recently come under intensive historical scrutiny. Important analyses, which will be discussed later, include: Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 3439, 8082; Marouf A. Hasian, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1996), Chapter 3; Michele Mitchell, "Adjusting the Race: Gender, Sexuality, and the Question of AfricanAmerican Destiny, 18771930," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University (1998); Stephanie Athey, "Eugenic Feminisms in Late Nineteenth-Century America: Reading Race in Victoria Woodhull, Francis Willard, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells," Genders 31 (2000), <http://www.genders.org/g31/g31_athey.html>. 5 As Michele Mitchell noted, "with its basic tenet that sexual behavior was a decisive factor in determining whether children were 'well-born," eugenic thought suggested individuals possessed the potential to improve their offspring through strategic mating....Thus, whereas African Americans had to contend with a legion of theory which implied that all people of color came from degenerate stock, they could actually subvert racism within eugenic thought through the guise of uplift." Mitchell, "Adjusting the Race," 154.

steadfast objection to racial supremacy, have often been cited as evidence of DuBoiss
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hostility toward hereditary determinism and eugenics. Although DuBois railed against white supremacists who used eugenics to hide their racism, a closer reading of DuBoiss work reveals the subtle influence of hereditarian thought on his own social theorizing. DuBois had a healthy respect for the notion of genetic fitness and unfitness and this provided part of the intellectual foundations for his famous formulation, the Talented Tenththe best and most able representatives of African America whose fitness destined them to lead blacks to equality. DuBoiss notions about the power of heredity in determing human life described an arc from racial essentialism to intellectual elitism. In his controversial 1897 address The Conservation of Races, DuBois acknowledged that there are differencessubtle, delicate and elusive, though they may bewhich have silently but definitely separated men into groups. Although he viewed most of these racial differences as the result of
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historical context, he nevertheless argued (anticipating Garvey) that African Americans destiny is not absorption by the white Americans. Instead, it is our duty to conserve
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our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our spiritual ideals through race organization, by race solidarity, by race unity. Only by racial solidarity and
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inbreeding could blacks eradicate their heritage of moral iniquity, a condition that DuBois famously described as the hereditary mass of corruption from white adulterers,
6 Most notably in his 1927 debate against the white eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard. See, W.E.B. DuBois, Report of Debate Conducted by Chicago Forum, in Herbert Aptheker, ed., Pamphelets and Leaflets by W.E.B. DuBois (White Plains, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1986), 222-228. See also David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 19191963 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 235-237. 7 W.E.B. DuBois, The Conservation of Races, in Ibid., 2. Despite this apparent racial essentialism, by 1918, DuBois would argue, There are no races, in the sense of great, separate, pure breeds of men, differing in attainment, development, and capacity. DuBois quoted in Thomas C. Holt, W.E.B. DuBoiss Archeology of Race: Re-Reading The Conservation of Races, in Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds., W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 71. 8 Ibid., 4 9 Ibid., 5.

that was genetically instilled in some mixed-race children.

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DuBoiss incipient, and ultimately short-lived racial separatism evolved into his belief in the essential biological equality of the races. By 1904, DuBois argued that, the Negro races are from every physical standpoint full and normally developed men [that] show absolutely no variation from the European type sufficient to base any theory of essentially [sic] human difference upon. While the races were biologically equal, that
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did not mean that there were not fit and unfit examples of each racemerely that the races defied hierarchical organization by groups. DuBois wrote, the Negroes have their degenerate types in the dwarfs and Hottentotsso have the Europeans; they [Negroes] have their mixed types of all degrees and kinds of mixtureso have the Europeans. But it is an unproved and to all appearance an unprovable thesis that the physical development of men shows any color line below which is black pelt and above the white. In 1910 DuBois declared that I believe that there are human stocks with whom
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it is physically unwise to intermarry, but to think that these stocks are all colored or that there are no such white stocks is unscientific and false. Perhaps thinking of himself,
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DuBois argued that racial intermarriage was not necessarily undesirable and race blending may lead, and often has led, to new, gifted, and desirable stocks and individuals
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10 The first quotation is from Ibid., 6; the second quotation is from W.E.B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 9. DuBoiss idea had clearly developed toward hard hereditarian ideas between 1897s The Conservation of Races and 1903 when Souls appeared. 11 W.E.B. DuBois, Heredity and the Public Schools, in Aptheker, Pamphlets and Leaflets, 50. 12 Ibid., 51. In-born racial inferiority did not account for differences in achievement between black and white children, social heredity did; DuBois repeatedly argued that black children tended to inherit bad social environments. 13 W.E.B. DuBois, The Marrying of Black Folk, The Independent 69 (October 13, 1910): 812-813; reprinted in Herbert Aptheker, ed., Writings by W.E.B. DuBois in Periodicals Edited by Others vol. 2 (1910-1934), (Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1982), 33. 14 Ibid. He continued, I believe that the mingling of blood between white and black and yellow races is neither unnatural nor physically deleterious. Mulattoes, Eurasians, and the like have been insulted and hated and loaded with obloquy for obvious reasons, but there is no adequate scientific proof of their necessary physical degeneracy, nor has the will of God in the matter of race purikty been revealed to persons whose credibility and scientific poise command general respect.

The hereditary superiority of the Talented Tenth, whether the top ten percent of the white population, or the top ten percent of the black population, appears throughout his writing. In Souls of Black Folk, DuBois confirmed his belief in the rule of inequality:-that of the million black youth, some were fitted to know and some to dig He made this inborn fitness the basis of his call for education according to ability.
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Indeed,

although DuBois decried the use of intelligence testing to rank races, he invoked it in support of the eugenic breeding of the Talented Tenth among African Americans. In 1932, DuBois contributed an essay on birth control to Margaret Sangers Birth Control Review. DuBois accepted the conventional eugenic wisdom that the more intelligent class exercised birth control, which meant that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly. He chided that African Americans must learn that among human races and groups, as among vegetables, quality and not mere quantity really counts. DuBois adhered so strongly to this notion that he allowed
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this article to be reprinted, unchanged, again in 1938. DuBois considered these

distinctions scientific and unbiased; others shared his view. Dr. Thomas Wyatt Turner, a Cornell-trained biologist who taught eugenics at Tuskegee, Howard, and Hampton universities, held to a more explicitly hereditarian
15 DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, 70. His exaltation of the inherently talented is woven throughout the book; see also Souls, 46,48,72,76, 79, 136-137, 140, 143-144. DuBois defined the Talented Tenth in an eponymous essay, but mentions it explictly in Souls, 87. 16 W.E.B. DuBois, Black Folk and Birth Control, Birth Control Review 16 (June 1932): 166-167. 17 In 1939, DuBois opened an essay on black scientists with a thinly-veiled reference to hereditary fitness. After meeting a little brown boy who had passed an intelligence testand scored an I.Q. of 170, one of the highest in the city [of Cincinnati], DuBois realized that he had known the boys grandfather. The boy, it turned out, was the progeny of a a promising scientist whose career was crushed by racism. DuBois, who considered himself a social scientist whose career had been constrained by racism, thus related the paradox presented by the possibility of the eugenic improvement of black life, and the impossibility of that improvement having tangible effects in a racist environment. W.E.B. DuBois, The Negro Scientist, American Scholar 8 (Summer 1939): 309-320; reprinted in Herbert Aptheker, ed., Writings by W.E.B. DuBois in Periodicals Edited by Others vol. 3 (1935-1944), (Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1982), 88.

worldview. The son of former slaves, a charter member of the NAACP, and a devout Catholic, Turner maintained three identities often believed incompatible with support for eugenics.
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Turner's career underscores how African-American scientists could exploit

eugenics ideological flexibility to harmonize their racial, religious, and reformist beliefs, thereby transcending the issue of racial purity.
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Like W.E.B. DuBois and other black intellectuals, Turner identified the "Talented Tenth"people like himself and his studentsas the eugenically fit. Turner agreed that these folks, whose intellectual achievements and social status certified their genetic worth, should marry and procreate to increase the proportion of "fit" individuals in the black population. Concurring with DuBois that the "best" blacks were every bit as "fit" as the "best" whites, Turner ignored race and accepted the class biases of white
18 Marouf Hasian reveals the degree to which eugenics could comport with both an individuals Catholic and African-American identity in The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought, Chapters 3 and 5. 19 Turner advanced eugenic ideas at an unlikely timejust as eugenical ideology crested in the nation and Virginia, resulting in immigration restriction, sterilization, and racial integrity laws. As eugenic awareness gripped Americans' attention, state and national legislators passed eugenics laws mandating the segregation of the unfit in asylums, the compulsory sterilization of the feebleminded, "antimiscegenation statutes" restricting racial intermarriage, and restrictive immigration laws closing America's shores to those deemed genetically unfit. Among the many states that implemented these eugenic panaceas, Virginia surely holds a prominent position. Virginia's compulsory sterilization statute, passed in March of 1924, became the test-case for the constitutionality of state intervention in procreation. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes sustained state-sponsored eugenics in his 1927 opinion for Buck v. Bell, writing, "The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination of schoolchildren is broad enough to cover the cutting of the Fallopian tubes....Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927). The most comprehensive treatment of Virginia's eugenic history is Gregory Michael Dorr, "Segregation's Science: The American Eugenics Movement and Virginia, 19001980," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2000. For more on Buck, see Dorr, Segregation's Science," Chapter 5; Paul A. Lombardo, "Three Generations, No Imbeciles: New Light on Buck v. Bell," New York University Law Review 60 (April 1985): The same session of the Virginia General Assembly that passed the sterilization statute also passed the eugenically-motivated Racial Integrity Act (RIA), which made it "unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person...." See,An ACT to Preserve Racial Integrity," Virginia Acts of Assembly (1924), 53435. For a detailed discussion of the RIA as part of Virginia's larger eugenic program, see Dorr, "Segregation's Science," Chapter 6. Although the sterilization act passed the General Assembly with relatively little protest, the RIA incensed members of the African American community. Largely disfranchised, however, black protests failed to translate into legislative opposition. Nevertheless, Turner used eugenics to fight the RIA.

eugenicists. Turner explicitly argued that if African Americans used biology and eugenics to "uplift" the race to meet white norms, then whites could no longer use biology to deny black equality. Whites would then have to admit what Turner believed to be the absolute biological truth: that human beings' fundamental genetic similarities far outweighed visible, phenotypic differences. By engaging in a parallel program of eugenics, blacks could undercut white assertions of inherent racial supremacy.
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The son of former slaves, Turner liked to say that he "came out of the woods" to become a leading black biologist and educator. Largely educated in the ramshackle,
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segregated schools of southern Maryland, the eighteen-year-old Turner determined to walk the fifty miles to Washington, D.C. to attend Howard University Preparatory School. Turner graduated from Howard Prep in 1897, then took a bachelor's degree at Howard in 1901. From 1902 to 1912, Turner taught biology at the Tuskegee Institute and sought to advance his own graduate training. Turner first encountered eugenics during this period. In the summer of 1904, Turner studied at the Long Island Biological Laboratory. There he worked under the laboratorys director, Dr. Charles Benedict Davenport, the dean of American eugenics and an avowed, if genteel, racist. Despite the
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20 Until quite recently, historians have assumed that the blatant racism of white main-line eugenics prevented African Americans from embracing eugenics in any form. In the last decade or so, however, historians have increasingly discovered that many blacksboth educated elites and common folk embraced certain eugenic tenets that comported with both their common sense and their desire for social meliorism. Pathbreaking work on the relation of eugenics and African American culture has been done by Hasian, Rhetoric of Eugenics, Chapter 3; Michele Mitchell, "Adjusting the Race: Gender, Sexuality, and the Question of African-American Destiny, 1877-1930," (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1998); and Daylanne Kathryn English, "Eugenics, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance," (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1996). 21 The biographical information in this and the following paragraphs comes from Turner's obituary "T.W. Turner, 101, Dies; Rights Activist, Educator," Washington Post, April 23, 1978, B6; and "Biographical Sketch" both in the Turner Papers. The author acknowledges his gratitude to the Hampton University Archives and its staff for permitting access to the Turner Papers. This collection comprises seventeen unnumbered boxes that often bear the same designation. The material is largely unsorted and, therefore more specific location references in these notes is impossible. 22 A single photograph survives documenting Turner's summer in Cold Spring Harbor. That picture, together with Charles Davenport's later correspondence, portrays the likely quality of Turner's experience at the laboratory. In the photograph, some 50 white male and female investigators are mixed together on

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racially-charged environment, the work in genetics and eugenics mesmerized Turner, and he continued his dogged pursuit of an advanced degree for the next sixteen years, earning a doctorate in botany from Cornell in 1921.
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Turner joined the Howard University faculty in 1913, and began teaching eugenics upon his arrival. Turner taught generations of Howard students about the power of heredity in human affairs. As a text, Turner relied on Paul Popenoe and Roswell Johnson's mainline-classic, Applied Eugenics. He also assigned Charles Davenport's famous article, "Eugenics and Euthenicsan essay that championed hereditary determinism. Lecture notes and examinations from his courses on "Sex Hygiene" and
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"Biology and Education" reveal his belief in the power of Mendelian genetics and eugenics. Examining his Sex Hygiene students in 1915, Turner asked them to, "Define Eugenics. Explain how society may be helped by applying eugenic laws." In 1920

the verandah of the laboratory's main building. Tightly bunched, the portrait conveys the warm intimacy of a family reunionwith one striking exception. Toward the right-rear, a lone black man stares solemnly at the camera. Thomas Turner stands alone in a crowd. There is a space of slightly more than a body's width separating him from those around him. No white person stands to his rear. While all the others' expressions seem comfortable and relaxed, Turner's face is taught and anxious. Whatever biology Turner learned that summer on Long Island Sound, his achievements failed to overcome racial prejudice. Nine years later, when asked to admit a "mulatto" to the summer school at the laboratory, Davenport replied that the last black man, "a professor from a colored college [Turner]," had displayed, "a scandalously erotic nature. The example he set for the young people here was frightful." See, Harvey Ernest Jordan to Charles Benedict Davenport, July 16, 1913; Charles Benedict Davenport to Harvey Ernest Jordan, August 7, 1913, "Jordan, H. E." folder, Charles Benedict Davenport Papers, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia. I cannot be certain that Davenport was referring to Thomas Turner in his letter to Jordan, since he does not name Turner explicitly. Yet, in all my study of Davenport's papers and the laboratories at Cold Spring Harbor, I have never come across another instance of a black man attending any of the summer programs at the institution. The bulk of the circumstantial evidence points to Turner and the "professor from a colored college" being the same man. 23 Turner earned a master's degree from Howard in 1905. In the summers of 1915 through 1917, Turner attended Cornell University and finished the course work for his doctorate. During a sabbatical year in 1920-1921, Turner finally achieved his goal, taking his degree in botany. "Biographical Sketch," Turner Papers. 24 See Turners "Lecture Notes," particularly for "Breeding," "Heredity," and "Eugenics," Turner Papers. Not surprisingly, Turner's lecture notes and examinations reveal the influence of his eugenic sources. Turner asked his students in "Biology and Education" to, "Explain the application of Mendelism to Eugenics." See, Biology and Education, Second Examination (n.d.)," Turner Papers.

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Turner asked, "Explain the meaning of the term 'Eugenics'. Explain how society may be helped by applying the laws of Mendel." Turner clearly expected his students to learn,
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and adopt, the major tenets of eugenics. Turner adhered to conventional eugenic notions of fitness, even as he molded them to serve a liberatory function for African Americans. For instance, Turner taught mainline beliefs regarding feeblemindedness; yet he did so in a way that undercut racist notions of "reversion to type," which held that African Americans were devolving to savagery. "Defectiveness is not a reversion but direct inheritance," Turner wrote, distancing normal fit blacks from unfit, retarded blacks and whites. The feebleminded
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person, Turner declared, in consonance with the established wisdom, "is incapable of competing on equal terms with his normal fellows, etc." Many white eugenicists argued
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that this inability to compete characterized black/white group relationships, implying that all blacks were inherently feebleminded. Turner, however, viewed the situation differently. Turner believed that "defectives" occurred in, and should be eliminated from, both the black and white races. Eugenics thus benefited both races and the entire human race, by reducing the absolute and relative number of defectives in the population. Turner's professional essays trumpeted his belief that social tensions, including racism, could be ameliorated by the application of biological knowledge. In "The
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Biological Laboratory and Human Welfare," Turner wrote that social reform must, "look to the improvement of the individual as well as to the improvement of the race. It must seek to make society better by working upon the individual units of society. It must aim
25 Thomas W. Turner, "Sex Hygiene Examination (May 17, 1915)," and "Sex Hygiene Final (March 19, 1920)," Turner Papers. 26 Turner, "Lecture XEugenics," Turner Papers. 27 Turner, "Feeblemindedness," Turner Papers. 28 Turner fits Kathy Jane Cookes definition of a biological progressive pursuing reform through the gospel of social evolution. See Kathy Jane Cooke, "A Gospel of Social Evolution: Religion, Biology, and Education in the Thought of Edwin Grant Conklin," (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1994), 5. Conklin, himself a believer in eugenics, but also a racial liberal who taught in black schools, never subscribed to the racialist theories of mainline eugenics.

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not only at ameliorating the conditions of life but also at bettering life itself." Turners
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hereditary determinism made eugenics the surest tool for lasting social uplift. Turner, like most mainline eugenicists, argued that all public policy must stem from a biological understanding of life. Just as white eugenicists distrusted sociology's environmental analysis of life, Turner believed that, "The sociologist, then, if he will make anything more than a superficial survey of this problem must be primarily a biologist." Only a strong biological understanding of social interaction would bear practical fruit. Turner remained convinced of "the value of the methods of science in
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fitting one for sound citizenship." Proper scientific training would allow citizens to
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consider social problems dispassionately and objectively. Ethical behavior would emerge, in this view, from a proper exercise of scientific inquiry. Turner averred that, "We are nearer the goal of universal brotherhood, I feel, today than we were a century ago, largely, because the pursuit of science has developed a larger sympathy among men, by teaching them that they are truly of one flesh, with a common parentage." The
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dangerous syllogismscience is objective, objective things are moral, therefore science is moralremained as attractive to Turner, seeking to liberate people from oppression, as it did to his ideological opponents who invoked it to legitimate racial hierarchy and oppression. While Turner's position eventually captured the mainstream in scientific circles, it would be another twenty-six years before most biologists would agree to a universal statement affirming the fundamental similarity of all human beings.
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29 Turner, "Biological Laboratory and Human Welfare," 4. 30 Ibid., 5. 31 Ibid., 5. "The legislator who would make laws concerning [social problems] without a due appreciation of their biological significance, may do much that is worthless and even positively harmful," Turner wrote. In September of 1924, the month Turner's article appeared in the Howard University Record, the first legal challenge to the Virginias Racial Integrity Act resulted in the denial of marriage licenses to a white man and a "colored" woman. The Racial Integrity Act, and the case of James Connor and Dorothy Johns, referred to here, is discussed in Dorr, Segregations Science, Chapter 6. 32 Ibid., 7. 33 The famous UNESCO "Statement on Race," finally broke the silence among many scientists and allowed them to take an overtly political stand. Reacting to the horrors of science run amok in the Nazi

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Turner's anti-racist stance did not diminish his biological and hereditary determinism. For Turner, biology revealed the origins and development of humankind by explaining surface distinctions in terms of the underlying organic similarity of all human beings. Turner was incensed that while biologists in other fields are spending their lives in trying to find relationships and compatibilities among the various groups of living things, when [the biologist] comes to deal with his own species he is content to emphasize and present to his youth only the differences, the incompatibilities, the contrasts."
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Emphasizing differences led to invidious distinctions and hierarchies. Instead, Turner argued that biological study would reduce racism, by presenting impartially the achievements of each group in so far as these achievements are recognized as biological factors; for every race which has survived and made progress undoubtedly possesses many characteristics worthy of note." Recognizing that there were readily apparent
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differences between cultures, Turner sought to place difference into an associational rather than a segregationist framework. Turner acknowledged that, "[t]his has been an
37

eugenics program and the advent of the atomic bomb, scientists found their social conscience. The UNESCO statement bonded the majority of reputable scientists in favor of the position that "race" is merely a social construction that aids categorization without expressing anything about the innate biological essence of individuals. Nevertheless, dissenters from this position remained then and continue their invidious distinctions today. See Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Rae in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 341343; Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 138. 34 In a tortuous passage, Turner poured forth his philosophy. The application of biological principles to man, though admitted for plants and lower animals, still gives a shock to many minds, yet a conception of History as a struggle for existence among human beings with its attending natural selection and survival of the fittest...would place [biology] upon a background which has both the pedagogic appeal and the dynamic force to serve as a permanent stimulus in the acquisition of information about the life history of the race as a whole, as well as that of the different branches of the human race. Ibid., 682. 35 Turner, 68485. 36 Ibid., 689. 37 Turner's theme harmonizes with the emergent doctrine of cultural pluralism advanced during this period by philosopher Horace Kallen. Kallen argued that society should be viewed as a symphony, with each different racial and ethnic group contributing its part to the overall score. In conflict, the various groups created a dissonant cacophony; isolated they created singular wails. Together, the groups created a harmony that could only advance human endeavor. Unfortunately, Kallen himself referred mostly to the stresses between white and white ethnic Americans in the 1920s. For all his appeals to pluralism, he could never quite envisage a part for African Americans in his greater American symphony. For Kallen's use of

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age characterized primarily by the ascendancy of the paler peoples," but he believed that, "it is inconceivable that any [group] should claim that its accomplishment was unrelated to that which has gone before."
38

Inverting the "race suicide" thesis, Turner argued for the relative impermanence of "civilization" in the face of the greater durability of human life. His ringing denunciation of cultural superiority surely would have alarmed white readers even as it gave AfricanAmerican readers a basis for hope and optimism: The proud, haughty, domineering people of today may be the cringing, begging, sycophantic paupers of tomorrow. Within the brief span of man's authentic history, we have record of the rise to power and the decadence of various human tribes black, yellow, and white; we do not know and probably cannot know what characteristics or lines of conduct have the greatest survival value and are the most enduring, but it should be the chief aim of courses in Human Biology to seek out and stress every factor which makes for peaceful, harmonious, cooperation among races and among nations.
39

Turner thus effectively refocused the eugenic quest. Instead of attempting to ensure the permanent superiority of any one group or civilization, a quixotic venture dependent on guesswork about what made for "fit" society, Turner aimed at creating tolerance. This effort allowed him to escape the trap of biological superiority while insisting on the deterministic basis of life. When Turner arrived at the Hampton Institute in 1924, he was ready to destroy racial hierarchies by teaching the "gospel of social evolution"that black uplift, eugenic and euthenic, could allow African Americans to equal whites in every way. To spread the
40

word, in 1927 Turner volunteered for the American Eugenics Society's list of eugenics
the symphony metaphor, and his limited appreciation for black cultural contributions, see Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924; reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), xviixviii, xliii, and 11718. 38 Turner, "Curriculum and Aims in Biological Teaching," 689. 39 Ibid., 68990. 40 Turner introduced a well-developed, modern biological curriculum to Hampton when he arrived in 1924. He offered ten biology courses covering the entire discipline, plus eugenics.

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lecturers. Turner continued to offer eugenics for the next 20 years. Finally, in 194541

1946, perhaps in response to the Holocaust, Turner's course description dropped any mention of human heredity. Turner retired the following year. Despite the legislative successes of racist white eugenicists in Virginia, despite the passage of the Pope's antieugenic encyclical Casti Connubii in 1931, Turner remained convinced, like other African Americans, that eugenically improving the race would end up disproving racism. Using eugenics to improve the black gene pool would, ultimately, undercut white pronouncements about black inferiority. Marcus Garveys hereditarian creed, his well-known separatist doctrine of Race First, turned mainline white eugenics on its head in ways both similar to and different from DuBois and Turner. Like the most racist white eugenicists, Garvey put a premium on maintaining racial purity. Garvey often stated that the integrationist mission of the NAACP and other biracial groups represented a dangerous race destroying doctrine that led him to proclaim that his group, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) believes in and teaches the pride and purity of race. We believe that the white race should uphold its racial pride and perpetuate itself, and that the black race should do likewise. By eschewing interracial marriage, Garvey hoped to purify the black gene
42

pool and establish a uniform type among ourselves.

43

As Barbara Bair has noted,

however, for Garveyites racial purity was a watchword for black autonomy, race pride, and revolution, as much as it was a statement of any belief in the science of eugenics. Garvey always cast racial purity as a steppingstone to political solidarity. By establishing a uniform type, diaspora Africans could eliminate intraracial caste distinctions based on lighter skin, good features and hair, and a continual reference to white beauty
41 American Eugenics Society, "A List of Eugenics Lecturers," 14, in American Eugenics Society Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; Hampton Catalog, 1929-1930, 70. 42 Garvey quoted in William Edwards, Racial Purity in Black and White: The Case of Marcus Garvey and Earnest Cox, Journal of Ethnic Studies 15 (1987), 121. 43 Marcus Garvey, Speech by Garvey, September 7, 1921 in Rober A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), vol. 4, 41.

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norms. The political rather than scientific nature of Garveys belief is reflected in the fact that he never used the word eugenics anywhere in his writings. Despite his infamous alliance with white supremacists in the Ku Klux Klan and Virginias Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, Garvey himself never invoked the idiom of eugenics beyond references to race suicide and racial purity. Garveys white allies Earnest Sevier Cox, Walter Plecker, and John Powell used eugenics and eugenic theory to lobby for Virginias 1924 Racial Integrity Act, which barred racial intermarriage on explicitly eugenic grounds. Although Garvey proclaimed that, I unhesitatingly endorse the race purity idea of Mr. Powell and his organization [the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America], Garvey simultaneously objected to the notion of white or black racial superiority. To my way
44

of thinking, Garvey wrote, this talk about social superiority is all tommy-rot. It is not meant, and it is not tak[en] seriously. Instead, according to Garvey, biological claims
45

to racial superiority appeared only as hollow justifications for one races economic and political exploitation of another. Although Garvey repeatedly claimed that any attempt to bring about the amalgamation of any two opposite races is a crime against nature, his objection rested on political grounds. His racial separatism formed the foundation of clear political
46

distinctionsan individuals racial identity announced their political position. People with a mixed racial heritage, in Garveys view, would be politically torn, not knowing with which group they should cast their lot. Better to purify the races, thereby clarifying political affiliations. Biologically equal, pure races could then compete on a level
44 Marcus Garvey, Letter of Introduction for John Powell by Marcus Garvey, Negro World (November 7, 1925) in Ibid., vol. 6, . 45 Marcus Garvey, Editorial Letter by Marcus Garvey, Negro World (Novemeber 5, 1921) in Ibid., vol. 4, 757. 46 See, for instance, Marcus Garvey, Opening Speech of the Convention, in Ibid., vol. 3, 583; Ibid., vol. 1, lxxxi-lxxxii; and Marcus Garvey, The Negroes Greatest Enemy, Current History (September 1923) in Ibid., vol. 1, 10.

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political field. As Garvey put it, We feel that there is absolutely no reason why there should be any differences between the black and white races if each stop to adjust [purify] itself. We believe in the purity of both races.
47

Garveys followers adopted his racial purity creed, and in so doing they helped Garvey to coopt the white oppostion. John J. Fenner, president of the Richmond Division of the UNIA worked to place eugenicists tracts in the hands of members of my race intelligent enough to understand [them]. He also secured black audiences throughout Virginia, who listened attentively to the pronouncements of white eugenicists. Fenner
48

stated that, I find an increased sentiment agreeing that the INTEGRITY OF THE RACES IS A FINE IDEA AND THE APPROVAL OF SAME IS GROWING.
49

Clearly, Garveys imprimatur made eugenic ideas accessible to rank-and-file Garveyites. Eugenic racial purity advanced Garveys ultimate political goal of racial separatism, even as he dismissed the notion of racial superiority. Ironically, once he was imprisoned for mail fraud, it would be powerful white eugenicists who lobbied for Garveys release. Seeing only racial purity and back to Africa in Garveys ideology, these white supremacists missed the more subersive message inherent in Garveys appeal to racial purity. A pure black race would solidify a Pan-African identity and polity, empowering diaspora blacks to compete with whites world wide. Obviously, examining the lives of three men barely begins to suggest the broad spectrum of hereditarian belief among African Americans. Nevertheless, this limited study has at least two important implications. First, I want to suggest that African Americans used the ideological flexibility inherent in eugenic theory to advance their own political and social programs. Black eugenicists could fight fire with fire as it were, turning the eugenic theories that whites deployed to contain black agency against
47 Garvey, Negros Greatest Enemy, Ibid. 48 John J. Fenner to Earnest Sevier Cox, June 17, 1925, Box 2, Earnest Sevier Cox Papers, Special Collections, Duke University Library. 49 Fenner to Cox, Spetember 28, 1925, Ibid. Emphasis in original.

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whites themselves, thereby increasing black agency. Second, this study suggests that African Americans iterated what became the scientific consensus on race some 30 years before white scientists acceded to it, and almost 80 years before the Human Genome Project proved it. This prescience reveals the socially constructed nature of scientific understanding: the fact that science is bound by the historical context and experience of the scientists performing it. With the diminution of the racism that separated white and black scientists at the beginning of the 20th century, both sides converged on an understanding of heredity that moved beyond racial purity. Integrationist eugenics comports more closely with both the facts of genetics and the realities of a more integrated society. It also raises the specter of continuing what Elof Carlson has called, in his masterful understatement, a bad idea; namely, the notion that some people are unfit and therefore less worthy of respect than others. Whether the legacy of
50

integrationist eugenics and the promise of genomics and genetic therapies will be realized in human harmony or invidious distinctions remains to be seen.

50 Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit: The History of A Bad Idea (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001).