Let’s talk about Black euenics and why did some Black leaders at that time supported it at first then later changed their minds.
Several early 20th-century Black intellectuals and leaders supported aspects of the eugenics movement—often termed “liberal eugenics” or race betterment—believing it could facilitate “racial uplift” and improve the health of the Black community but distinguishing their goals from the racist, forced sterilization agendas promoted by many white eugenicists of the era.
Notable figures included W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. • W.E.B. Du Bois: As a scholar and activist, Du Bois (the “Talented Tenth”).
He worked with a White Blind/Deaf woman named Helen Keller who both changed their mind on eugenics down the line. I wonder if Hellen Keller was Black Deaf and Blind would Du Bois have worked with her. However we should know by now that race played a key role in Keller status.. To be honest both Helen Keller and W.E.B. Du Bois down the line changed their thinking about eugenics.
Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was involved in the implementation of the Negro Project. • Thomas Wyatt Turner, a noted scholar who was among the intellectuals endorsing eugenical ideas. Monroe Work, a sociologist known for the Negro Year Book, who presented his work to the Second International Eugenics Congress in 1921.
These leaders often saw birth control and selective breeding (“race betterment”) as tools to uplift the Black community that helped spread the concept of Black respectability politics that not only helped separate Black poor people but also kicked a lot of disabled Black Blues musicians out of the Black church. Although I was rejected to write about the above in my undergrad and now in my graduate, we need to really study it.
Black Eugenics
How how how
Did this happened
Booker T. Washington to W.E.B DU Bois
Listen this is not noise
So many Black names
I miss count
Calling Black disabled people lame
To keep Black poor down in their own lane
Black leaders played their part
Trying to separate classes
They needed glasses
To see it wasn’t only for health reasons
The Talented Tenth versus the useless eaters
Black on Black nobody got your back
To improve the race, ready to attack
Even a White blind deaf woman, Hellen Keller
Racial uplift
Biological racial improvement
Polygenist theory led to supremacy of Black bodies
No uplift just split
Between class, the well educated and healthy
Play into scientists pockets causing them to become wealthy
National Negro Health Week in 1915
Booker T Williams attended eugenics conferences
The Black Mis-leadership Class
Kicking Black poor people’s ass
The attack was on Black women
Through sterilization, weeding out
Working with White racists
Poor Black children was hated on
Categorize them as “defective,”
Always looked down as negative
Bringing down the race
Climbing into Black respectability politics
Blind Blues artists kicked out of Black churches
Calling it devil music
The Black Mis-leadership class
keeping Black eugenics alive as
In many different ways in powerful places
Using the police thus building Cop Cities
Same results, to get rid of the poor
When can we, the masses closed that door
On the Black Mis-leadership class
Who continues to rebirth Black eugenics
https://on.soundcloud.com/W0WdTncr9ewHllszu1
By Leroy F. Moore Jr.
