“‘The Newest Science’: The Appeal of Eugenics in Jim Crow North Carolina, 1910-1930”

Anna L. Krome-Lukens, Ph.D. Candidate, History, UNC-Chapel Hill
Tuesday, March 26, 2013, 12:30-2:00 PM
Open to students and faculty; lunch provided, RSVP Required: csas@unc.edu

ABSTRACT

North Carolina’s eugenic sterilization program—under which the state’s Eugenics Board surgically sterilized thousands of people—has received considerable attention in the past several years, particularly with last year’s attempt to provide compensation to those sterilized.  This talk provides a historical backdrop for that story, turning to the first decades of the twentieth century.  Krome-Lukens will trace the development of ideas about eugenics in North Carolina before the 1933 establishment of the Eugenics Board.  In the early twentieth century, eugenics-inflected arguments about hereditary “fitness” and the future of the “Anglo-Saxon race” appealed to many white Progressive reformers who sought to mitigate social problems of crime, poverty, and mental illness.  In particular, white women reformers interpreted the “science” of eugenics and turned its rhetoric to their own political purposes.