Preventing “Mental Taint”: Black Eugenics, Mental Health, and Racial Equality, 1900–60

For African American physicians and activists in the early twentieth century, addressing African American mental health was a crucial part of uplifting the race. They saw a significant relationship between African American health, and broader struggles for racial justice. I argue that their understanding of this relationship was undergirded by what I call black eugenics. Black eugenics was a hereditarian approach to racial uplift that emphasized social reform, reproductive control, and public health as strategies of biological racial improvement. It emerged from a longer tradition of black political organizing for racial equality and the beginnings of black engagement with medicine and science, especially as greater educational opportunities became available in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As part of this project of biological racial improvement, African American physicians and activists advocated for improved access to mental health care. Their goals were twofold. They believed that mental health care, as part of broader public health work, could help to improve the collective health of the race, and therefore its hereditary makeup. They also believed that mental health care would prove that madness was not an innate quality of the race, but rather rooted in institutional racism and systematic oppression. In this way, mental health care challenged the prevailing scientific racism that marked African Americans as intellectually inferior, and refuted arguments that emancipation from slavery caused black insanity. African American physicians and activists pushed for greater access to mental health care from public facilities, leading to the establishment of institutions like the Crownsville State Hospital. They also established smaller and private institutions like the Lafargue and Northside Clinics in Harlem, NY. Though not always explicitly articulated in eugenic terms, these efforts were part of a larger project to biologically improve the race and were thus vital to black liberation.