by Hoang M Nguyen

Created on: June 05, 2007   Last Updated: June 07, 2007

Eugenics became a popular science in the early 20th century as a discipline which was interested in making sure the people with better intelligence and physical traits would survive through progeny. Eugenics had been developed by the Englishman Sir Francis Galton as a "study of the agencies under social control that seek to improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally."

Eugenics in turn brought about the fear of dysgenics, the idea that the weaker and less intelligent people and races would produce more offspring and detrimentally affect the betterment of the desirable race. During the post-Civil War era, as African Americans endeavored to raise themselves from the demeaning effects of hundreds of years of slavery, they were met with resistance and hatred from those white Americans who saw them as a threat to a pure, white America. Eugenics proved to be a dangerous, discriminatory science. In order to succeed, African Americans struggled against the results of anti-miscegenation laws, unethical medical testing, and intelligence tests.

Eugenicists used questionable science in citing brain measurements as a valid science to prove that whites had larger brains than blacks; therefore, whites were superior and had better capacity for culture and language. Scientists like the African American writer Charles Chesnutt, in his article, The Future American, rejected the pseudo-scientific research of eugenicists, saying "that the shape or size of the head has little or nothing to do with the civilization or average intelligence of a race; that language, so recently lauded as an infallible test of racial origin is of absolutely no value" (Chesnutt The Future American). However, these ideas fell on the deaf ears of white supremacists and purists, who saw no virtue in fair science that would force them to recognize blacks as social and intellectual equals. The white supremacists were afraid the growing population of African Americans would overwhelm the United States.

Lewis Terman, a professor at Stanford University, even suggested that sterilization should be used because even though "[t]here is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, . . . from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding." Theodore Roosevelt, the U.S. president during the beginning of the 20th century, expressed fear that the American Anglo-Saxons were

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