One Hundred Years Is Not Too Long Ago
One hundred years ago today, the Virginia General Assembly passed the Eugenical Sterilization Act.
One Hundred years ago today, March 20th, the Virginia General Assembly passed the Eugenical Sterilization Act. This allowed the state to impose sterilization on those it judged defective. Thousands of sterilizations took place just across the river from Lynchburg at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, now a retired campus, remembered as the Training Center.
1924 was a dark year in Virginia, which also saw the passing of the Racial Integrity Act, outlawing interracial marriage and identifying whiteness as a person “who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.”
My grandparents were born not a decade or two beyond 1924. Some of us have loved ones still living who were born in the 1920s. Not alive today are the unrealized children and grandchildren of the women who were sterilized at places like the Virginia State Colony, sometimes without their knowledge. It wasn’t that long ago.
Not alive today are the unrealized children and grandchildren of the women who were sterilized, sometimes without their knowledge.
In her book of essays Places I’ve Taken My Body, Molly McCully Brown recounts a stop at the grounds of the Virginia State Colony on a weekend road trip with a friend. Moving among the grave markers in the Training Center’s burial grounds, she remarks,
I remembered hearing about the doctors who told my parents, when I was born in 1991, that I would probably never live independently, might never even speak. I felt time and space collapse: sixty-five years ago, born in my hometown, I might have lived and died in the Colony, been buried in that field.
She further describes the research she did to understand what happened in that place,
When in an 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court ruled it was in the state’s interest to sterilize [Carrie Buck], they legitimized the thousands and thousands of sterilizations that would follow - at the Colony and all over the country - and they underwrote the eugenicist philosophy on which Hitler would later base his “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring.” When Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, then an Associate Justice, delivered the Courts’ famous ruling, he wrote “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Almost twenty years later, Nazi doctors at the Nuremberg Trials would cite that language as a defense. The Colony’s history was a record of violence and discrimination that would radiate outwards, beyond national boundaries, for generations to come. 1
No, it wasn’t that long ago.
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Molly McCully Brown, Places I’ve Taken My Body, (Persea Books New York, 2020), 96-97