third grade, when we discovered Mrs. Sweeney’s “special” class. We had wondered for some time why the window in Mrs. Sweeney’s door was covered with cardboard, wondered specifically why we kids weren’t supposed to look in. I suppose it never occurred to us that the cardboard also kept the kids inside from looking out, but then, lots of that kind of stuff never occurred to us. What did occur to us was that Mrs. Sweeney’s kids had to be “special” in some very strange way, strange enough that we had to be prevented from seeing them. Our imaginations ran wild with the possibilities, and we were not at all disappointed the day Dicky Hollins told us that he knew the secret to those kids, that his mom knew the mother of some kid in Mrs. Sweeney’s class, and the kid was, honest-to-god, a retard.
Just what that meant remained a mystery. For all we knew, “retards” were circus freaks or juvenile delinquents or some barely imaginable combination of the two. We deduced that they must be somehow pathetic and perhaps somehow frightening; we knew for sure that they were different from other kids, and that the difference was wildly fascinating.
For months, our school days were preoccupied with the effort to catch a glimpse of the retards. We’d linger outside Mrs. Sweeney’s door at lunch time, knock on her door and hide just around the corner, we’d come to school early in the hopes of seeing the retards arrive and stay late to catch them leaving, and through it all, we never saw more than Mrs. Sweeney’s disapproving frown. And then Mrs. Sweeney failed to show up for school one morning, and we were sure it was because the retards had killed her, and we anxiously awaited the showdown, the cops versus the retards. But she only had a cold, and she was back early the next day, with the cardboard over her window, preserving the great mystery inside.
The spell was broken on a spring morning. We had a substitute teacher that day, and he was either more gullible or more lazy than most, so when we told him that it was physical fitness week, and that instead of geography we were having extended recess in the morning, he dutifully took us outside to play kickball at 10:30 in the morning, a full ninety minutes before our scheduled break. It did not occur to him, nor did it occur to us, that 10:30 might have been the time set aside for some other kids’ recess, and that some other kids might have been on the playground, playing kickball, when we arrived.
But 10:30 was Mrs. Sweeney’s time, and she was there when we got to the playground. So too was her class.
“It’s them.” Dicky Hollins, now our resident authority, made the matter-of-fact pronouncement, and all the boys knew exactly what he meant. We all stood there, transfixed, and watched them play. I recall thinking that some of them looked a little different, but I’m not quite sure how. And that some of them moved a little differently, though again, I could not explain how.
On they played, oblivious, it seemed, to our presence.
We stood silently and watched.
They kicked the ball. They ran. They laughed. They celebrated.
One kid dropped a ball kicked right at him.
We all heard him when he cussed.
And it occurs to me now, as I think about it for the first time, that no other kid called him a name.
Our substitute said something to Mrs. Sweeney, and then, with a very serious look on his face, he said something to our class. The kids in our class started to file back into school, but some of us boys lagged behind, and somebody grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me up the walk to the school, and I kept turning around, just looking. When we all got back to our classroom, the substitute handed out maps of the United States, and he told us to color in the Middle Atlantic states, and when we complained that we didn’t have crayons, he told us to use our pencils. He gave us an hour and a half to finish the exercise, and I spent the last eighty-five minutes drawing pictures of Frankenstein, and football players, and World War II fighter planes. And all the time I was thinking about Mrs. Sweeney’s kids, and I looked around the room at the other boys in the class, and I knew they were thinking about the same thing too.
I don’t remember ever seeing any of Mrs. Sweeney’s kids again. Nor do I remember ever saying a word about them to any of my friends, or hearing a word about them from anybody. It was as if the whole day never happened. Except for one thing: after that day, for some reason, none of us ever called any kid a “retard” again.
Carrie Buck was a retard. That, at least, was the prevailing opinion of her in 1924, when the director of the Virginia Colony for the Feebleminded concluded that the eighteen-year-old resident of the Colony was “feebleminded of the . . . moron class.” Carrie’s mother was also of limited intellect, a moron as well, according to the director. Carrie was born out of wedlock and, it was assumed, had inherited both her mother’s intellectual disabilities and her moral defects: Carrie too, after all, had conceived an illegitimate daughter. For her mental and moral failings, Carrie’s foster family arranged to have the young mother institutionalized in the Virginia Colony in January 1924. That September, the Colony, acting under the authority of a Virginia state law, sought to sterilize Carrie Buck.
The director of the Colony, Albert Priddy, had been the chief architect and sponsor of Virginia’s sterilization law. The law found its scientific support in eugenics theory, still in vogue in 1920s America, but compulsory sterilization depended upon more than the mere belief in the genetic perfectibility of humanity. For that drastic measure, some odd combination of moral and political values was necessary: a bit of social Darwinism, a bit of political Progressivism, some economic conservatism, a little thinly disguised racism, and, for men like Priddy, a certain priggish disdain for the sexual habits of the poor. Armed with this intellectual grab bag, Priddy had won the near unanimous approval of the Virginia legislature for his sterilization law in March 1924.
But his advocacy was not ended. Similar laws had been struck down by courts in other states, some because they did not afford sufficient procedural protection for their subjects, others because they unfairly targeted only the residents of state institutions. But with his counsel and friend, Aubrey Strode, Priddy had carefully drafted the Virginia law to meet these objections; now, they were determined to find the test case that would secure judicial approval. The case they settled on was Carrie Buck’s.
The Virginia law provided for the sterilization of inmates of state institutions where four conditions were met. First, it had to appear that the “inmate is insane, idiotic, imbecile, feeble-minded or epileptic” and, second, that the inmate “by the laws of heredity is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring likewise afflicted.” Third, sterilization must not harm “the general health” of the inmate, but rather, as the fourth and final requirement, must promote “the welfare of the inmate and of society.” Carrie Buck, the young unwed mother, provided an easy case under the terms of this statute, particularly the way the deck was stacked.
Priddy’s petition for the sterilization of Carrie Buck was approved by the Special Board of Directors of the Colony; under the Virginia law, Carrie was entitled to appeal that decision to the Virginia state courts. Her trial was held on November 18, 1924. Aubrey Strode called eight lay witnesses to testify that Carrie was feebleminded and immoral and that her mother and daughter were “below the normal mentally”; he called two physicians to testify to the medical advantages of sterilizing the feebleminded; he called a eugenicist to testify by deposition as to the value of eugenic sterilization as “a force for the mitigation of race degeneracy”; and he called Priddy himself to testify that, for Carrie and society at large, compulsory sterilization “would be a blessing.”
Irving Whitehead, Carrie’s appointed attorney, called no rebuttal witnesses.
The court approved the sterilization order, and the highest court in Virginia affirmed this decision. Carrie’s attorney dutifully appealed to the United States Supreme Court. On May 2, 1927, the Supreme Court, by a vote of eight justices to one,
