In our Jim Crow Virginia part three we look at Social Life and Social Control in Virginia, beginning with “Avenues of Faith” describing church adaptations to the challenges of modernization. We then turn to the Progressive Era’s efforts at social control in the private spheres of life with “Sexuality, Politics and Social Control in Virginia”, and an investigation of the rape myths of the period in “White Women, Rape and Race Relations”.
Lastly we turn to an unhappy chapter in Virginia’s history related to the pseudo science of eugenics, with “Segregation’s Science”, “Three Generations, No Imbeciles” and “The Sterilization of Carrie Buck”.
For more book reviews at TheVirginiaHistorian.com in this historical era addressing other topics, see the webpage for Gilded Age, New South, Civil Rights, New Dominion (1889-present). General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Avenues of Faith
Samuel C. Shepherd, Jr. wrote Avenues of Faith: Shaping the Urban Religious Culture of Richmond, Virginia, 1900–1929 in 2001. It is available on Kindle and online used. Shepherd in this intellectual, religious and social history, discovered seven adaptations among mainline Protestant churches 1900 to 1929 in response to modernization and urbanization in Richmond.
The Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Southern Baptists and Disciples of Christ all adapted national movements from the Sunday School movement to the Social gospel. While individual conversion remained the primary business of churches, they embraced a larger religious diversity, interdenominational cooperation, professionalized leadership, expanded leadership roles for women, expanded church activities, evangelism at home and abroad, and Christian social ministries.
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Sexuality, Politics and Social Control
Pippa Holloway wrote Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945 in 2006. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. Amidst changes in public sexual behavior, the Virginia Assembly sought to regulate public forms of deviant behavior and deviant behavior with public consequences. Unlike proposals for state interference in the personal lives of elites, those to regulate African Americans and lower class whites succeeded.
Measures included film censorship, birth control availability, control of venereal disease, eugenic sterilization and restrictions on interracial marriage. With World War II, both Richmond and Norfolk saw an influx of newcomers, but they managed the challenges differently. Richmond’s efforts to maintain public decency were generally applauded, while Norfolk gained a national reputation for a failure to control vice.
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White Women
Lisa Lindquist Dorr wrote White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900–1960 in 2004. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Virginia’s Jim Crow era judicial system traded in violence and brutality, sentencing black men to death on thin or tainted evidence. But paradoxically, although 22% of this study were executed, most accused were convicted of lesser offenses, received disparate sentences and obtained pardons before serving their entire terms.
While elite white women more frequently found revenge in court, character of the accuser mattered, and children victims were not as valued as the mature. Black communities refused to accept kangaroo courts. They hid the accused, raised money for defense funds, testified as character witnesses, and engaged the NAACP.
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Segregation’s Science
Gregory Michael Dorr wrote Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia in 2008. It is available online in hardcover new and used. Eugenics, the study of racial improvement largely shaped racial theory in the early twentieth century. It became a justification for racial purity and segregation of blacks from whites, sick from the healthy, able from the disabled, and fit from the unfit. These were codified in 1924 by the General Assembly in the Racial Integrity Act and the notorious sterilization law. Virginia physicians performed one-eighth of all American eugenic sterilizations from 1927 to 1980.
Eugenics developed into racist mainline thinking as promulgated by turn of the century University of Virginia professors interpreting Thomas Jefferson’s racial views and subsequently enforced in public health departments, state hospitals and courts. It then morphed into concerns of neo-Malthusian overpopulation and increasing costs of welfare programs. Old Stock Virginians were legislative insulated from the one-drop rule by a exception for descendants of Pocahontas and John Rolfe.
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Three Generations, No Imbeciles
Paul A. Lombardo wrote Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell in 2008. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court, that in the Buck family case, “three generations of imbeciles are enough”. The grandmother, mother Carrie Buck and daughter were ruled to be a burden on society and dangers to themselves.
The superintendent of the state Eugenics Records Office coordinated with the head of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded to bring a test case of his Model Sterilization Law passed by the Virginia Assembly. The defense lawyer who was on the board on the Virginia Colony arguably failed Carrie Buck “because he intended to fail” so as to justify his belief in sterilization of the socially inadequate.
Learn more to buy “Three Generations, No Imbeciles” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.
Sterilization of Carrie Buck
David Smith and K. Ray Nelson wrote The Sterilization of Carrie Buck in 1989. It is available in eTextbook and online used. Virginia’s 1924 sterilization law was a statute designed by leading eugenicists to provide for the sterilization of “mental defectives” under certain conditions while residents of state institutions. The test case that went before the Supreme Court rested on factual error; Carrie Buck was not an imbecile, she was not even feeble-minded, as judged by her activities after leaving the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded in Lynchburg, Virginia.
The flawed “science” of eugenics was used by advocates to reason from preconceived conclusions in her case back to the misrepresented facts, ignoring contrary evidence.
Learn more to buy “Sterilization of Carrie Buck” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.