About The Dark History of Eugenics in Oregon
In 1917, the Oregon Legislature created the Oregon Board of
Eugenics. Its charge was to review reports from the Oregon State Penitentiary,
the state hospitals, and the State Institution for the Feeble-Minded of
"all feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, habitual criminals, moral
degenerates, and sexual perverts, who are persons potential to producing
offspring who, because of inheritance of inferior or antisocial traits, would
probably become a social menace or ward of the State." Based on its
determinations about those persons, the board was required to order many of
them to be sterilized. The Oregon Board of Eugenics was part of a much
larger trend towards racial purity and xenophobia in the United States that
included "Better Baby" contests and the "Fitter Families"
program to ensure racial purity. The eugenics movement mostly died out in
the 1940s, when it came to light that Adolph Hitler had patterned the
extermination of the Jewish population on the American eugenics movement.
Surprisingly, the Oregon State Board of Eugenics survived in one form or
another until 1983. Join Marc Brown to learn about the American eugenics
movement and its manifestation in Oregon.
About the Speaker:
Marc Brown is the chief deputy defender with the
Appellate Division of the Office of Public Defense Services. Brown spent
several years teaching political science at Washington State
University-Vancouver. In 2014, he received a Fulbright Scholarship to teach at
the South China University of Technology School of Law and in 2017, Marc
co-taught a comparative constitutional law course at Shivaji University College
of Law in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, India.
