We Still Live With Eugenics' Legacy Today

Eugenics was everywhere a century ago. Dozens of countries and a similar number of U.S. states passed eugenics laws allowing forced sterilizations. In 1924, Virginia passed a sweeping eugenics law on the same day that its Racial Integrity Act became law, banning interracial marriage of any kind. This eugenics law became famous as it worked its way through the court system, reaching the Supreme Court in 1927 in Buck v. Bell. There, in a landmark ruling that would stand until the ’60s, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. would pen the terrible closing lines of the majority opinion: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”