When you hear about the governor who gave New Havens largest high school its name, you never hear about a state-commissioned report that would have carried out a Nazi-style ethnic cleansing campaign in Connecticut. One group in town says its time you did. <\/p>\n
The secret 1938 report, prepared for the state by a pro-eugenics researcher with ties to Nazi Germany, called for mass sterilization and deportation based on a ranking of all Connecticut citizens by 21 classifications such as race descent, nativity and citizenship, and kin in institutions. Blacks, Jews, immigrants, the poor, and most of all people with physical deficiencies such as blindness and deafness, and people classified as mentally handicapped, would not fare well in that project. <\/p>\n
The plan never became reality, although Connecticut did have a sterilization law, first enacted in 1909 and found to be constitutional by the state attorney general in 1912. Under the law the state sterilized 557 people classified as mentally handicapped or insane, up until 1963. (A woman could be classified as feeble-minded for having a child out of wedlock or a low IQ test score.) <\/p>\n
Details about the secret report emerged in recent years due to the research of a prolific author about American institutional connections to Nazi-era crimes, named Edwin Black. His work caught the interest of the New Haven chapter of a group called the Society of Former Slaves and Freemen, which has begun circulating excerpts of Blacks writing on the subject. (The video captures an event the group held in New Haven this past weekend.) <\/p>\n
Society organizer Linwood Branham Sr. (at center in photo at the top of this story) contacted the Independent to ask that the subject be raised with the broader community, to spark discussion about Wilbur Crosss role and how we should recognize it today, including whether to have the citys largest public high-school and the Wilbur Cross Parkway named after him. Yales alumni association also gives out an award in Crosss name. No word of the episode appears in official or widely read accounts of Crosss tenure in office, which focus instead on the opening of the parkway and his ascension to political office after a non-political career as a Yale English professor and literary critics. <\/p>\n
Our forefathers did not always do the right thing. We have the obligation to set some things straight. The people will decide what to do about it, Branham said. <\/p>\n
We have to be able to talk about these things. We have to heal and grow as a society. (Those interested in contacting the society about it can email Branham .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).) <\/p>\n
A current Yale professor who specializes in eugenics research and has revisited some of the source material that forms the basis of Blacks work agreed that this was a disturbing episode in Connecticut history. He disagreed that evidence points to personal culpability by Cross. <\/p>\n
What do you think? Lets start with Blacks argument. <\/p>\n
Black, the son of Holocaust survivors, is a journalist who has written numerous books and spoken around the world about genocide and human rights. He has assembled teams of researchers to pore into untold stories about ties between, for instance, IBM and the Carnegie Institution and prominent American scholars with the emerging Nazi regime in the 1930s. <\/p>\n
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