The Measure of Black (Un)Fitness: Legacies of Slavery in the Early Eugenics Movement

This presentation considers how people of African descent became targets of eugenic study during the early decades of the twentieth century. It delves into the methods and assumptions eugenicists used to cast people of African descent as inherently unfit. Eugenicists saw blackness as a heritable trait that signaled a lack of vitality, innate promiscuity, and low achievement. That said, views about Black people’s inherent unfitness circulated well before the advent of eugenics. As such, this paper highlights the ways in which studies on fitness, some of which were carried out by the United States government in the aftermath of the Civil War, proved instrumental in laying the groundwork for future eugenic studies of people of African descent. Drawing upon a number of sources from NLM’s digital collections, Dr. Hogarth will trace the genealogy of ideas white eugenicists held about black people’s allegedly inherent unfitness in medical writings from the era of slavery and beyond. Dr. Hogarth’s talk is co-sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of the NLM/NEH partnership to collaborate on research, education, and career initiatives.

Author: Rana A. Hogarth, PhD, Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Air date: Thursday, April 28, 2022, 2:00:00 PM

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