White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

by Nancy Isenberg

Eugenicists made Virginia the national test case for weeding out bad blood. Priddy recruited Arthur Estabrook of the Carnegie Institution to his campaign, getting him to offer in the Virginia courts his expert opinion on intelligence testing. But this colleague of Davenport’s spread the eugenics message in yet another way. In 1926, Estabrook published Mongrel Virginians, a study of an isolated mountain community in Virginia known as the Win tribe. The Wins offered a curious case of inbreeding and interracial breeding; they were of “mixed races, neither black or white”—largely Indian. The portrait was damning: the community Estabrook described suffered from congenital ignorance, all springing from the licentiousness of mixed-race women. Their habit of breeding was in his words, “almost that of an animal in their freedom.”67 The evidence in Mongrel Virginians was sufficient to guide passage of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriages between blacks and whites, and treated Indian blood no differently from black blood. The Virginia law defined a white person as one having “no trace” of any but Caucasian blood. Following the agenda of the eugenicists, the first draft of the law required a racial registry, tracking pedigrees in order to ensure that no light-skinned black with Indian blood might marry a white person. This regulation was removed from the final version of the bill, but the law still divided the population into white and black, fit and unfit, pur...