I am watching "Neshoba" right now, a documentary about the murder of civil rights workers Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney in 1964. In discussing the role of the White Citizen's Councils, the movie shows a brief clip of a guy named Henry Garrett who was saying that "Negroes" are incapable of academic achievement on the level of whites. It turned out that he was the chairman of Columbia University's psychology department for more than a decade.
Henry Garrett From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Henry Edward Garrett (27 January 1894 – 26 June 1973) was an American psychologist and segregationist. Garrett was President of the American Psychological Association in 1946 and Chair of Psychology at Columbia University from 1941 to 1955. After he left Columbia, he taught at the University of Virginia, where his racial ideas were supported by the dominant state political leadership represented by Senator Harry F. Byrd, who promoted Massive Resistance to school integration. A.S. Winston chronicles Garrett's involvement in the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE), the journal Mankind Quarterly, the neofascist Northern League, and the ultra-right wing political group, the Liberty Lobby. In the 1950s Garrett helped organize an international group of scholars dedicated to preventing race mixing, preserving segregation, and promoting the principles of early 20th century eugenics and "race hygiene." Garrett was a strong opponent of the 1954 United States Supreme Court's desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which he predicted would lead to "total demoralization and then disorganization in that order." He is credited with coining the term equalitarian dogma in 1961 to describe the by then mainstream view that there were no race differences in intelligence, or if there were, they were purely the result of environmental factors. He accused the Jews of spreading the dogma, and wrote that most Jewish organizations "belligerently support the equalitarian dogma which they accept as having been 'scientifically' proven" (Garrett, 1961).[1] He wrote in the White Citizens' Council monthly journal The Citizen, "Despite glamorized accounts to the contrary, the history of Black Africa over the past 5,000 years is largely a blank," and, "The crime record of the Negro in the United States is little short of scandalous" (Garrett 1968). Garrett served as a Director of the Pioneer Fund in 1972–1973. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
