Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

by Dorothy Roberts

Scientists at Wake Forest University School of Medicine also played a key role. Dr. C. Nash Herndon, chair of the department of medical genetics at the university’s medical school, helped to promote the state’s involuntary sterilization program by serving as president of the Human Betterment League and issuing academic reports advocating eugenics. He also conducted his own eugenic studies with funding from Wickliffe Draper, a wealthy segregationist. Draper was so committed to the merger of Jim Crow and eugenics that he traveled to Germany in 1935 to attend a Nazi eugenics conference. After supporting Herndon’s research with two grants in the 1950s, Draper donated $100,000 to the school, solicited by the medical school dean, on the condition that the school promised not to advocate interracial marriage and consider teaching students about therapeutic sterilization. Other faculty members performed involuntary sterilizations on patients at state hospitals, with and without authorization from the Eugenics Board.72