Award-winning author and investigative journalist Edwin Black will deliver a multimedia presentation entitled, "Eugenics-- From Virginia to Auschwitz" on August 28 at the campus of Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg VA. Virginians from across the state will be driving to the campus to hear Black speak. Among the groups will be groups of Native Americans victimized by state eugenics.
Black's many books have included IBM and the Holocaust, The Farhud, and War Against the Weak. The latter of these recounts the growth of the pseudo-science known as eugenics that was funded by corporate America and which sought to eliminate so-called ‘unfit’ people such as African-Americans, Native Americans, and the poor, through sterilization abetted by local and state governments. Black follows the connections between American eugenicists and their funders and supporters, such as Henry Ford and the Carnegie Institution, to Adolf Hitler and the logical terminus of their inhuman philosophy in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Author Black uses exhaustive research and dynamic literary style to bring alive the testimony of the victims of pseudo-science and intolerance in our own country and abroad. He will stop at Virginia Tech while travelling as a scholar-in-residence invited to North Carolina where, after speaking at several major universities, he will address the state legislature, which is currently considering legislation offering compensation to victims of forced sterilization. Click here to see lecture schedule.
In the early twentieth century and into the 1930s, over 60,000 people in the U.S. were forcibly sterilized in state institutions. The sterilizations were justifed because of the alleged criminality (generally poverty) of the victims, their race, intelligence, or perceived promiscuity, among other reasons. Virginia was the epicenter of the rash of sterilizations, having been the first place were eugenic genocide took place under official auspices. In next door North Carolina, over 7,600 people sterilizations took place that were assigned by a state eugenics board. Some victims were as young as 10 years old. This was done, said Black, to ostensibly improve the human race by eliminating undesirable humans.
Author Black, who has tackled other subjects requiring his meticulous research and team of investigators, said his goal is to bring America's history of eugenics into the light. Acknowledging that sunlight is an effective disinfectant, Black wants to scientists of the future to reject eugenics with a "never again" attitude. "My mission is to remind people that we will never improve our future until we look over our shoulder and confront our dark past. Only then can we avoid walking back to where we started and repeating these same crimes again," he said.
A key reason for Black's book tour and lectures is to address the question of compensation for eugenic sterilization. This official policy on the part of numerous states during the 20th century "was nothing short of genocide," said Black.” The author continued, "States that undertook this genocide should compensate. But the guilt must be shared with the philanthropic organizations and academic groups that pushed the state to do the unthinkable and tried to rationalize it as sound science—when it was all a fraud."
Black’s appearance in Blacksburg is sponsored by the Virginia Tech Departments of Africana Studies, American Indian Studies, Appalachian Studies, English, Humanities, and Sociology in association with the Institute for Policy and Governance, Race and Culture Studies, and the Race and Social Policy Institute.
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