Casey Leigh’s Reviews > Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia > Status Update

"after 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that racial covenants were unconstitutional, the city “increased economically restrictive zoning as a proxy for explicit racial restrictions” to an extent so great that these same zoning practices now impede the city’s ability to grow."

"He was sterilized there when he was sixteen years old. Later, he joined the military and, over the course of a twenty-one-year career, was awarded a Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and Prisoner of War Medal. Hudlow explained that his teenage years at the Colony were more traumatic than his time as a prisoner of war in Germany."

"Maybe we have tried so hard to give men like Albert Priddy and Joseph DeJarnette enlightened ideas that we have actually neglected to grant them with common sense. [..] But this is what eugenics in Virginia actually looked like, even out of the shadows; a pathetic guild of men complaining that the very system they controlled was making their lives difficult."

"Irving Whitehead, another friend and a former Lynchburg Colony board member, was hired to represent Carrie. All of these men were advocates of eugenic sterilization. Carrie’s case was not meant to be a true appeal, but more a legally binding theatrical performance."

'Today, the United States is straining to return to a hard-line immigration system for a president who pouted in 2018, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” '

"I do not care if someone accuses me of the ultimate historical sin of judging people in the past by the yardstick of the present. I do not subscribe to the view that time is the real villain of this story, that it tormented important people with difficult questions—like what the cheapest way was to castrate a prisoner—that only an accident of fate forced them to answer."