"Six Blacks from Home": Childhood, Motherhood, and Eugenics in America

"Six Blacks from Home":

Childhood, Motherhood, and Eugenics in America

In August 1919, a settlement house worker in Columbus, Ohio, filed a complaint in juvenile court against a seven-year-old girl whom I will call "Marie." The complaint read, "Marie runs the streets continually. She is very irregular in her attendance at school, and is as dirty as a pig. She has been found in a lumber yard with a negro, and it was alleged by her associates that he raped her there. She goes into stores and begs." According to the surviving records, Marie's "truancies from home" alerted settlement workers to the case. As a young child she reportedly began staying out late at night and loitering in the company of men and boys, and was threatened with being put out of the house when she was found alone with the African American man. By 1928, after Marie became an unwed mother at the age of sixteen, and had spent nine years in and out of child welfare institutions, a summary report contained the interesting typographical error that Marie's young life had strayed a distance of "six blacks from home." As incidental as slipping "blocks" into "blacks" may have been in one sense, it captured a powerful truth. Marie violated key boundaries of sexual, gender, and racial purity that made a woman a candidate for respectable motherhood, and she paid dearly for these transgressions.¹

When Marie and her mother entered the juvenile justice system for the first time in 1919, they denied that she had had sexual relations of any kind. Others presented conflicting evidence. A physician reported to the court that she had gonorrhea, but a probation officer advised the judge that he could find no evidence that Marie had been raped. Contrary to the complaint filed by the settlement house, her teachers reported fairly regular attendance at school, but they acknowledged that she was old for her grade. On this evidence the judge advised that they visit a nearby clinic at the Ohio Bureau of Juvenile Research for psychological testing. Marie scored 78 on the Goddard-Binet intelligence test, well above the feebleminded level, but received the indeterminate diagnosis of "potentially feeble-minded" and a "prognosis that she would probably become an institutional case." Marie and her mother went home.²

Two years later, when Marie was nine, the settlement house made another report to the juvenile court. She was "running the streets without supervision; loitering about with men." This time the juvenile court judge used his power to take custody. He committed her for "extended study and observation" at the Bureau of Juvenile Research's cottages. After five weeks of observation and testing, they diagnosed her again as "potentially feeble-minded" and assigned her 70 on the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. While she was in their custody, the bureau's fieldworker visited Marie's home and concluded that her parents "were unfit to handle a girl of Marie's type." The fieldworker recommended that she be committed permanently to the Ohio Institution for Feeble-Minded Youth. The juvenile court judge disagreed, so the bureau wrote a letter to Marie's aunt in Cleveland hoping that she would agree to adopt the girl. There was no answer. The fieldworker recommended Marie be fostered-out, but no foster home was found. Finally, the judge placed Marie in the Franklin County Children's Home on September 30, 1921.³

For contemporary readers, one of the most striking features of Marie's early involvement with the child welfare system is that none of the professionals seem to have understood her through the discourse of child protection. Instead, her case was framed in terms of whether she was an immoral delinquent who could be reformed, or an amoral menace which should be quarantined. To understand why social personnel constructed her in these competing ways and to draw general lessons...