Segregationist policies preceded the eugenics ideas that justified them.

Evidence

Assimilationists and antiracists launched the NAACP at a crucial moment. Segregationists had just launched their eugenics movement, demonstrating the progression of their racist policies and the racist ideas to justify them. Social Darwinism had fully immigrated to the United States. In 1910, former University of Chicago biologist Charles Davenport secured some financial support from a railroad heiress to establish the Eugenics Record Office at the nation’s first center dedicated to improving the nation’s genetic stock, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Davenport was the son of an abolitionist and had studied at Harvard during Du Bois’s tenure. Davenport sought to prove one of the most oppressive figments of the human imagination: that personality and mental traits were inherited, and that superior racial groups inherited superior traits. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 792

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces the reader’s core goal: Kendi’s policy-first inversion applied to eugenics; connects to the later American sterilization programs. — connects to: Segregation was deliberately engineered through planning policy, not emergent preference. — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 21