Science for Segregation

Race, Law, and the Case against Brown v. Board of Education

John P. Jackson, Jr.

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780814743829
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Law

In this fascinating examination of the intriguing but understudied period following the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, John Jackson examines the scientific case aimed at dismantling the legislation.

Offering a trenchant assessment of the so-called scientific evidence, Jackson focuses on the 1959 formation of the International Society for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE), whose expressed function was to objectively investigate racial differences and publicize their findings. Notable figures included Carleton Putnam, Wesley Critz George, and Carleton Coon. In an attempt to link race, eugenics and intelligence, they launched legal challenges to the Brown ruling, each chronicled here, that went to trial but ultimately failed.

The history Jackson presents speaks volumes about the legacy of racism, as we can see similar arguments alive and well today in such books as The Bell Curve and in other debates on race, science, and intelligence. With meticulous research and a nuanced understanding of the complexities of race and law, Jackson tells a disturbing tale about race in America.

1
A Scientific Conspiracy

Founded in 1970, the Behavioral Genetics Association (BGA) is dedicated to the “scientific study of the interrelationship of genetic mechanisms and behavior, both human and animal.”¹ Like many professional organizations, the BGA has the president of the association address the banquet at the annual meeting. In 1995 the president of the BGA was Florida State University psychologist Glayde Whitney, who had been on the editorial board of the association’s journal, Behavior Genetics, for a number of years and had an established research program investigating taste preferences in mice. His address, “Twenty-five Years of Behavioral Genetics,” started in a typical fashion for such occasions, as Whitney recounted his training at the University of Minnesota and his arrival at Florida State University in 1970, where he established his “mouse lab” and began his lifelong research program. The address soon took a different turn, however, as Whitney began discussing the racial basis of crime. Such an investigation had been hampered, he declared, by the dogma that the environment determined all behavioral traits and by the taboo against scientific research into race. Whitney decried these trends, as he saw them: “The Marxist-Lysenkoist denial of genetics, the emphasis on environmental determinism for all things human … [represents an] invasion of left-liberal political sentiment [that] has been so extensive that many of us think that way without realizing it.” Whitney’s invocation of Lysenkoism was a quick one-two punch for his audience of geneticists. First, it called up the discredited doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Often called “Lamarckism” after Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, one of its eighteenth-century proponents, it claims that changes to the body caused by the environment could be passed down through the generations. Second, it recalled that when Trofim Lysenko, a Stalinist functionary, declared Lamarckism was demanded by Marxist ideology, geneticists who refused to toe this party line were purged.² For many in the West, “Lysenkoism” became a cautionary tale for the dangers of control over the free inquiry of science—science should remain apolitical, or bad science is the result.

Against this leftist tide, Whitney declared that objective scientists should fearlessly investigate racial differences in behavior. As an example, Whitney used crime data from the United Nations to argue, “Like it or not, it is a reasonable scientific hypothesis that some, perhaps much, of the race difference in murder rate is caused by genetic differences in contributory variables such as low intelligence, lack of empathy, aggressive acting out, and impulsive lack of foresight.” Whitney ended his address with a call for behavioral geneticists to “do for group differences what we have already accomplished with individual differences.”³

Many BGA members were appalled by Whitney’s address. Beginning in the 1930s, Daniel Kevles has argued, “students of human heredity insisted that human genetic investigations had to be emancipated from the biases that had colored mainline-eugenic research—notably the attentiveness to vague and often prejudiced behavioral categories.” After World War II and the overt eugenic racism of the Nazi regime, geneticists in general, and human geneticists in particular, had struggled to guard their growing discipline from accusations of racism. BGA member Nicholas Martin spoke for many of his fellow geneticists following Whitney’s address: “To have all this blown in one evening by one insensitive person is galling, to say the least.”⁴

The official minutes of the business meeting noted that Whitney had “shared his feelings about ethnic differences.” The Executive Committee also made explicit that “the Association has no official spokesman and the presidential address does not represent official policy of the association.” For some, this disavowal of Whitney’s speech was not enough, and there were calls for his resignation. Two members resigned from the BGA Executive Committee in protest, including the incoming president, Pierre Roubertoux. A compromise was eventually reached where Whitney would not be asked to resign but would not attend next year’s meeting and would not identify himself with the BGA when he wrote on racial differences.⁵

In 1998, in his next published piece on racial differences, however, Whitney was listed as the “Past President of the Behavioral Genetics Association,” and unlike his presidential address, the piece brought him some national notoriety. The piece was the introduction to the autobiography of David Duke, the American Nazi and Klansman. The major theme of Whitney’s presidential address, that racial differences were real and that scientific investigation into them was being smothered, was reemphasized in this introduction but with a new element: the Jewish conspiracy to control academia. “From personal experience in academia,” he wrote, “it is sometimes hard to believe that Jews constitute only 2% or 3% of the general population. Individuals of Jewish ancestry are vastly overrepresented in the ranks of highly successful scientists.” When these Jews organized, danger was afoot, for “[o]rganized Jewry … dogmatically attempts to keep the general population from awareness of the findings of modern science.”⁶

As Whitney came under increasing criticism, Florida State University, like the BGA, anxiously distanced itself from his views. The university was quick to defend his freedom to write and speak as he saw fit, without agreeing with his conclusions. Robert J. Contreras, his departmental chair, made it clear that “Glayde’s views are his alone and do not represent my views or those of the department.”⁷

While Whitney’s brief national fame quickly faded, he continued to write on racial difference and the smothering of scientific research. Whitney’s most extensive critique of Jewish control over racial research was given in 2000 at the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), where he claimed:

Even though common knowledge among academics, the suppression of knowledge about Jewish involvement in issues linking genetics, race, psychology is being actively pursued. In many countries “politically incorrect” discussion of these topics can get you fired, while worldwide the B’nai B’rith and allied pressure groups are pushing to criminalize any mention of race differences.⁸

It was no accident that Whitney made these claims at this venue. The IHR was dedicated to “historical research” that purported to show the Nazi genocide of Jews was a myth created by worldwide Jewish conspiracy to extort money. The parallels between the IHR’s conspiracies about the fabrication of history and Whitney’s conspiracies about the taboo on racial research were the result of a commonly shared anti-Semitic worldview. For example, Whitney pointed to the early-twentieth-century rise of cultural anthropology that signaled “the shift from legitimate science to ideological pap under the direction of the Jewish immigrant Franz Boas.” Boas as the chief villain of racial science was a theme in other writings by members of the IHR.⁹

While he had saved his depreciation of Jewish control over scientific research for David Duke and the IHR, the basic thrust of Whitney’s argument about the taboo on racial research and the reality of racial differences in crime appeared in pieces he authored long before. In a 1990 article, Whitney had surveyed the history of behavioral genetics, noting that the decline in hereditarian thinking owed in large part to political rather than scientific reasons. After the Nazi regime, Whitney noted, “considerations of genetic bases of individual and group differences in human and animal behavior tended to be received with an assortment of responses that ranged from impolite to insensitive to outrageous violations of taboo. Even today it is not unusual for the epithet ‘Nazi’ to be hurled at any public discussant of behavior genetics.” In a 1995 article in the Encyclopedia of Bioethics, Whitney explained the decline of hereditarian thought in a similar fashion and argued that it was time to abandon environmental explanations for human behavior. “The theory of a flat Earth at the center of the universe would not have gotten us to the moon,” he wrote, “and environmental determinist theories of human behavior have not yet solved most of our social problems.” Writing specifically about race and crime, Whitney declared in 1990 that “[i]nclusion of a racial dimension in developmental studies obviously could be productive for criminology. Ignoring or denying the possible genetic bases of racial differences in criminal behavior has not made the differences go away.”¹⁰

The Whitney episode represents a number of tensions in postwar American scientific discourse. There is a tension between Whitney’s claim of the reality of racial differences and his claim that scientific research into racial differences has been taboo—how do scientists know if this reality if the research is smothered? There is a similar tension between mainstream scientists’ toleration of claims of racial differences in staid scientific prose and their attempts to distance themselves and their professional organizations from those claims when baldly stated. These tensions and the arguments that give rise to them have a documented history in the United States. Since the 1920s a small number of scientists have lent their names and the mantle of scientific objectivity to the political cause of the American racialist right wing. The focus of this book is to explore the symbiotic relationship between racist ideology and science by examining the origins of these arguments in the fight to preserve racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. My central argument is that science provides racist ideology with important rhetorical tools that allow the perpetuation of racist claims that would otherwise not be tolerated in public discourse. At the same time, the use of science, or rather speaking in a scientific mode, gives us insight into the nature of science.

Massive Resistance and Racism

The three great racist regimes were Germany during the Nazi era (1933–1945), South Africa during apartheid (1948–1980), and the American South before 1965. It was in these three regimes that, as George Fredrickson has argued, “white supremacy attained its fullest ideological and institutional development.”¹¹ In the American South, whites articulated their defense of the racist regime most fully in two historical periods. The first was between 1830 and 1865, when the threat of slave uprising and a militant abolitionist movement required the white South to elaborate the “proslavery argument” against threats to the established order. The second was in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, when the burgeoning civil rights movement required a similarly elaborate defense of the “southern way of life” that segregation represented.

The proslavery argument has received a lot of historical attention, but despite the importance of the massive resistance movement, scholars have paid little attention to the articulated ideology of the segregationists. Historian David L. Chappell wrote, “Historians have on the whole ignored the ideas of the segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s. They assume, apparently, that racism—which historians have studied from every conceivable angle—is enough to explain how and why people fought to preserve a racist institution in a specific time and place.”¹² Chappell argued that the segregationist cause ultimately failed, at least in part, because they had no coherent intellectual agenda. Writing on what he calls “The Divided Mind of Southern Segregationists,” Chappell states that there were at least two distinct groups of southern segregationists. The first group centered their demands on constitutional and legal arguments. For these writers, among them Senators Richard Russell of Georgia and Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, the U.S. Constitution laid out a specific division of powers between the state and federal governments. This division of powers was violated by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1954 Brown decision and again in 1957 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in paratroopers to enforce the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. “After 1957,” writes Chappell, “the federal executive was helping the courts usurp the powers reserved to the states. According to this interpretation, it was not merely a state’s right, but an American’s duty, to resist [desegregation].”¹³

In Chappell’s second group were racial purists who believed that states’ rights were a diversion from the real issue, which was the threat of racial intermarriage. The archetypal example of this second group was segregationist writer Carleton Putnam—a key figure in this book. Time and time again, Putnam warned that the South was wasting its time with the call to defend “states’ rights” and should instead call forth the true danger: miscegenation. Putnam laid out his case clearly in a speech before the Citizens’ Council of Jackson, Mississippi, in 1961:

The issue here is not equality of opportunity. The issue here is not the democratic way of life. The issue here is that school integration is social integration, that social integration always and everywhere, has and does lead to intermarriage in the long run and that intermarriage, under our population ratios in the South, will destroy our society.¹⁴

Putnam believed that science had proven the truth of his contention regarding the dangers of miscegenation and was the most outspoken publicist for a small group of scientists who provided him with his scientific armamentarium. Yet Putnam’s racism, based as it was on the notion that the races were clearly divided by immutable differences, was not the only argument science could provide to the South. It was possible to defend segregation scientifically without resorting to biological racism of this sort. When it came time directly to assault the Brown decision, segregationist lawyers abandoned Putnam’s biological argument in favor of an argument that did not turn on essential biological differences between the races but that held it was sociologically and psychologically beneficial for the races to attend separate schools. That the segregationists could so easily abandon an essentialist argument about race gives us insight into the flexibility and adaptability of racial ideology.

Recent writers on the history of racial ideology in Western thought and society agree that racism is a recent phenomenon, quite different from forms of subjection and oppression that existed before the late eighteenth century. Audrey Smedley provides a convenient listing of the traditional relevant elements of racial ideology that distinguishes it from “mere” ethnocentrism: first, humans can be classified into discrete biological groups; second, these groups can be arranged hierarchically; third, physical characteristics of human beings are indications of their inner mental and spiritual qualities; fourth, these qualities are inherited; fifth, and finally, these racial groupings are fixed and cannot be transcended.¹⁵

One puzzle this has left for historians is that racial oppression, or what certainly looks like racial oppression, has existed in times and places when there was no coherent concept of a race to support it. The most telling example is the racialized slavery that developed through the Atlantic slave system in the Americas. Europeans developed the racialized slavery that typified the American South without a firm concept of Africans as racially “other.”¹⁶ One historian who has addressed this dilemma is George Fredrickson. Fredrickson notes that the South African regime that founded apartheid did so because of cultural rather than biological differences. Fredrickson concludes that our conceptualization of the ideology of racism needs to be reformulated in light of the different ideological justifications for racial oppression. “If the term racism is to apply,” Fredrickson argues, “its association with the specific form of biological determinism that justified slavery and segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries must be regarded as fortuitous rather than essential.” In his most recent book, Fredrickson noted correctly that “deterministic cultural particularism can do the work of biological racism quite effectively.”¹⁷

Science and Objectivity

The actors at the center of this book were scientists, and as such, they had a unique voice in American society. One way the objectivity of science could aid the segregationist cause was by providing appeals...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A Scientific Conspiracy
• 2 Racial Science and the Anti-Nordic Conspiracy
• 3 Radical Right Underground
• 4 The South and the Scientific Backlash to Brown
• 5 Organizing Massive Resistance and Organizing Science
• 6 The Attack on Brown
• 7 The Scientists React
• 8 Back to the Underground?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author