eugenics – C-VILLE Weekly

In brief: DMV’s court order, Brown’s abrupt closing, Murray’s lump of coal and more

Driver’s license suspensions under siege

A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction December 21 and ordered Department of Motor Vehicles Commissioner Richard Holcomb to reinstate the driver’s licenses of three plaintiffs who automatically lost their licenses when they were unable to pay court costs and fines. The judge said they are likely to prevail in their arguments that such automatic suspensions are unconstitutional.

That same week, Governor Ralph Northam called for an end to the practice. And Republican state Senator Bill Stanley has filed a bill that would end the automatic suspensions.

The class-action lawsuit—Stinnie v. Holcomb—challenges the automatic loss of driving privileges regardless of a person’s ability to pay and without notice or a hearing. Brought by the Legal Aid Justice Center in Charlottesville, the case alleges that approximately 650,000 Virginians have had their licenses suspended for reasons that have nothing to do with driving violations and solely for failure to pay fines.

In his ruling, Judge Norman Moon says, “While the Court recognizes the Commonwealth’s interest in ensuring the collection of court fines and costs, these interests are not furthered by a license suspension scheme that neither considers an individual’s ability to pay nor provides him with an opportunity to be heard on the matter.”

Two of the plaintiffs—Damian Stinnie and Adrianne Johnson—are from Charlottesville, and Moon’s injunction noted how the inability to drive affected their ability to find employment and “created a cycle of debt.”

His ruling only affects the plaintiffs in the case, and the DMV is ordered to reinstate their licenses without charging its $145 reinstatement fee.

“Today’s ruling is a victory for the Constitution and for common sense. The Court stated unequivocally that Virginia’s driver’s license suspension statute likely violates procedural due process rights, says Angela Ciolfi, executive director of Legal Aid Justice Center, in a release.

Since the case was filed in 2016, the issue, which advocates call a “modern-day debtors prison,” has gained national attention. Lawsuits have been filed in six other states and a federal judge in Tennessee recently issued a similar injunction there.

Quote of the week

“We cannot ignore the role of firearms in mass school shootings, nor should we avoid our responsibility as legislators to act.”—Democratic minority report to a House of Delegates committee report on school safety that does not address gun violence

In brief

Eugenics landmark closes

The Central Virginia Training Center outside Lynchburg, where 4,000 Virginians were sterilized, often without their knowledge, will close in 2020. Charlottesvillian Carrie Buck was sent there in 1924, because she was pregnant and accused of promiscuity and “feeble-mindedness.” In Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court famously ruled that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” and okayed her later sterilization. The institution stopped performing sterilizations in 1952 but continued to care for the intellectually disabled.

Hung out to dry

Brown’s Cleaners abruptly shuttered its four stores Christmas Eve, leaving employees without paychecks—and customers wondering how to retrieve their dry cleaning. A sign said to check legal notices in the Daily Progress about how to pick up orders, but as of December 28, the Progress said it had received no info from the 71-year-old business, which took its website down and left phones unanswered. NBC29 reports the company declared bankruptcy.

Virginians favor pot decriminalization

A new ACLU poll shows 71 percent of registered voters favor dropping criminal penalties for small amounts of marijuana, and 63 percent say it should be legal and regulated like alcohol. The poll also shows a majority believe that race or economic status influence how one is treated in the criminal justice system, and 62 percent say fewer people should be sent to prison because it costs taxpayers too darn much.

Garrett’s swan song

In his last days as 5th District representative, Tom Garrett saw President Donald Trump sign his bill renaming the Barracks Road Shopping Center post office in honor of Captain Humayun Khan, a UVA grad who died in Iraq in 2004. The Republican also delivered a bipartisan letter to Trump opposing the president’s decision to remove U.S. troops from Syria, calling it a threat to national security.

Lump o’ coal

The office of UVA Vice Rector Jim Murray got a visit from one of “Santa’s elves,” who delivered a piece of coal and said the venture capitalist had been naughty this year for opposing a living wage and calling its proponents “intellectually lazy,” according to a video circulated by Virginia Organizing.

Another Landes challenger

Ivy resident Lauren Thompson, 30, became the second Democrat to seek the nomination to run against 12-termer Republican Delegate Steve Landes, 59, whose 25th District, mainly in Augusta and Rockingham counties, includes a swipe of western Albemarle. Thompson, a Navy veteran, faces Augusta activist Jenni Kitchen, 37, for the Dem nod.

By the numbers

Housing affordability

The folks at the Virginia Public Access Project are always crunching the numbers, and last week they published how much of your take-home pay goes to housing, depending on where you live.

While Charlottesville may seem like one of the most expensive markets in the state, in Emporia City, 32.7 percent of median household income goes for housing, compared to nearly 25 percent in Charlottesville and 20.14 percent in Albemarle County. Highland County is the cheapest place to live, taking only an 11.6 percent bite out of paychecks, according to VPAP.

What’s in a name? UVA buildings bear names of white supremacists

With a wing named for him since 1936, the UVA hospital honors a man who was fundamental in the university’s eugenics movement, and perhaps best known for his popular address titled “The American Negro: His Past and Future,” in which he argued that African Americans benefited from slavery.

A group of local activists wants his name—Paul Barringer—off the building.

“We are at a critical time in UVA’s history, where we must acknowledge our past, but also make deliberate decisions about which values and names we elevate,” says Lyndsey Muehling, a member of Cville Comm-UNI-ty, a civic engagement and science education nonprofit made up of university and community members.

She adds, “I believe that Paul Barringer doesn’t represent the values and vision of UVA today, or its direction for the future.”

The hospital’s website calls Barringer a medical school faculty member instrumental in the hospital’s founding, and while that may be true, today some of his beliefs smack of white supremacy.

The man who also served as the university’s chairman of faculty from 1895-1903 taught several students who went on to have key roles in the famously unethical Tuskegee Study, in which poor black men were denied treatment for syphilis without their knowledge or consent, according to Muehling, an immunology doctoral candidate at the university.

“Barringer himself had previously suggested that syphilis infection in the black population was highest due to genetic inferiority,” she adds.

Muehling wasn’t aware of Barringer’s history until she attended an event at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on July 8, 2017—the same day the Klan came to town.

“That really gave me a shock because, although I do not work in the Barringer wing, I had worked on a project in that building and had never heard anything about him,” she says. She also credits her knowledge to research by Preston Reynolds, a physician-historian at the university, whom she heard speak about eugenics at a post-August 12 event.

In a recent collection of essays by UVA faculty called Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity, Reynolds says that during Barringer’s tenure, blacks were denied medical services and subjected to racist scientific investigations.

“Barringer’s solutions to the ‘Negro problem’ were to segregate blacks (moving them into neighborhoods further away from whites), to restrict interaction between the two races through Jim Crow laws and regulations, and to transfer education at all levels from black teachers to white teachers,” writes Reynolds, adding that Barringer believed blacks shouldn’t be educated beyond their roles as laborers and artisans, and that he once said, “every doctor, lawyer, teacher, or other ‘leader’ in excess of the immediate needs of his own people is an antisocial product, a social menace.”

Muehling says she and other Cville Comm-UNI-ty members will soon write an open letter and petition to remove Barringer’s name, and then will perhaps take aim at other figures with ties to the university and controversial histories.

UVA Health System is aware of the community concerns, and spokesperson Eric Swensen said the health system will address the issue. “The university is updating its naming policy; once that update is complete, we plan to follow the new process and seek Board of Visitors approval to change the name,” he said.

Another once-celebrated, now-controversial figure, as reported recently in the Cavalier Daily, is known white supremacist and eugenicist Edwin Alderman, the university president from 1904-1931, and namesake of Alderman Library.

“The term ‘white supremacy’ did not have the pejorative ring it has today,” says UVA assistant history professor Sarah Milov. “White supremacy was so mainstream, especially in Alderman’s milieu, that nobody would have thought twice about using the term. Indeed, it would have been a tremendous scandal if Alderman had been a secret integrationist or even an egalitarian.”

Milov says Alderman was a “progressive segregationist” who believed in “absolute social separateness” to facilitate social advancement for whites and blacks.

Alderman held similar views to Barringer on education, and believed poor African Americans should be educated for physical labor, while middle-class blacks could be educated as teachers, doctors, and nurses for other black people, according to the historian.

UVA became a leader of eugenic education under Alderman, who hired many prominent eugenicists, says Milov.

“Alderman embodies the duality and contradiction within a lot of UVA’s history, starting with Jefferson,” she says. “UVA is a place that has advanced education and scholarship, but for much of its history has done so in a way that upholds and solidifies race hierarchy.”

In an upcoming renovation of the library, Milov hopes the university will also consider changing its name. UVA is already reckoning with its history, and the planned President’s Commission on UVA in the Age of Segregation will continue the work of coming to terms with the difficult aspects of the university’s past, says commission co-chair and assistant dean Kirt von Daacke.

As for Charlottesville’s recent white nationalist events and the August 11, 2017, tiki-torch march across Grounds?

Says Milov, “Alderman would likely agree with some of the white supremacist race theory of someone like Richard Spencer. However, Alderman valued order above all and would not have appreciated open flames on campus.”