Eugenics is still a dirty word. It makes us think about science gone horribly wrong. It reminds us of the ghosts of Nazis past. The specter of eugenics is invoked when discussing new genetic technologies, often serving as a warning that engineering humanity can go too far.
It wasn’t always like this. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, eugenics was a term associated with possibility and progress. Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor, defined eugenics as “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding.”1 Eugenicists thought they could fix a whole host of problems with a clear understanding of heredity and its applications. Their strategies for human improvement often had negative consequences for marginalized people like African Americans, people with disabilities, and gender nonconforming folks.
We often think of these marginalized people as victims of eugenics, and they often were. But we don’t often ask what they thought of eugenics. What did human improvement mean to them? What did they think of the possibilities of eugenics?
During the early twentieth century, African Americans of different socioeconomic classes embraced the possibilities of eugenics for racial improvement. While their participation was not unanimous or monolithic, their investment in eugenics challenges the ways we think about how people understood and mobilized it. Scholars Shantella Sherman and Michell Chresfield have explored some of the ways in which African Americans used eugenics for racial improvement.2 My own work argues that African Americans crafted their own theory and practice of eugenics as part of broader struggles for racial justice.
African American physicians, biologists, and social scientists used the language of eugenics and reproductive control to frame their scholarship on racial improvement. Famous scholar and activist W.E.B Du Bois borrowed eugenic language in his 1903 essay on the Talented Tenth, in which he stated “The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by exceptional men.”3 Du Bois was also a strong proponent of birth control for African American women. In an article for the June 1932 issue of Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review entitled “A Negro Number,” Du Bois argued that birth control for poor African Americans was necessary for the race and that people “must learn that among human races and groups, as among vegetables, quality and not mere quantity really counts.”