Weird Little Guys

In the decade after the Supreme Court's ruling in the Brown v Board of Education case, segregationists used every tool available to prevent integration. By the early 1960s, a group of Pioneer Fund-backed scientists had teamed up with the lawyer they hoped could get their pseudoscientific argument against Brown in front of a judge.

Sources & Further Reading:

Tucker, William (2002). The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and The Pioneer Fund. University of Illinois Press.

Jackson, John P. Jr (2005). Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown v. Board of Education. New York University Press.

Sussman, Robert Wald (2014). The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea. Harvard University Press.

Gould, Stephen Jay (1996). The Mismeasure of a Man. Penguin Books.

McMillen, Neil (1971). The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-1964. University of Illinois Press

Reardon, Sean & Grewal, Elena & Kalogrides, Demetra & Greenberg, Erica. (2012). Brown Fades: The End of Court-Ordered School Desegregation and the Resegregation of American Public Schools. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. 31. 876-904. 10.2307/41653800.
https://selc.wordpress.ncsu.edu/files/2013/03/Brown-Fades.pdf

Albert P . Blaustein & Andrew H. Field, "Overruling" Opinions in the Supreme Court , 57 MICH. L. REV. 151 (1958). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol57/iss2/2

Amy M. Gardner, Comment, "An Attempt to Intervene in the Confusion: Standing Requirements for Rule 24 Intervenors," 69 University of Chicago Law Review 681 (2002).
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5684&context=journal_articles

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/08/how-often-does-the-supreme-court-overturn-its-own-decisions/
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Wickliffe Draper's Pioneer Fund started out in 1937 by funding screenings of Nazi propaganda films in high schools. But like most American racists, the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the Brown v Board of Education case changed how he approached the fight for white supremacy.

Sources & Further Reading:

Tucker, William (2002). The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and The Pioneer Fund. University of Illinois Press.

Jackson, John P. Jr (2005). Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown v. Board of Education. New York University Press.

Sussman, Robert Wald (2014). The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea. Harvard University Press.

McMillen, Neil (1971). The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-1964. University of Illinois Press

Kevin M. Kruse, The Paradox of Massive Resistance: Political Conformity and Chaos in the Aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, 48 St. Louis U. L.J. (2004).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lj/vol48/iss3/13

Thompson, Susan C. "Racial Injustice: A History of the Segregated School System in Jackson, Mississippi." Georgia State University, 2018. https://doi.org/10.57709/12100172

Sadler, Cynthia Jones, "Standing in the Shadows: African American Informants and Allies of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission" (2011). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 268. https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/etd/268

https://www.mississippifreepress.org/how-integration-failed-in-jacksons-public-schools-from-1969-to-2017/

https://www.nytimes.com/1964/05/06/archives/antiintegrationad-seeks-teachers-aid.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1998/02/20/justice-department-lawyer-george-s-leonard-86-dies/238e9399-ef53-4983-9814-40b2250a2223/

https://ldfrecollection.org/content/archives/ba006941-a08b-4c85-b0d7-2f2e5ff00e85

https://www.nytimes.com/1964/08/21/archives/jackson-schools-end-segregation-43-negroes-sign-up-quietly-for.html

https://www.mississippifreepress.org/meridian-schools-no-longer-under-federal-supervision-stemming-from-1965-desegregation-lawsuit/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB929056013324992946

https://www.nytimes.com/1964/03/19/archives/mississippi-agency-channels-260000-to-antirighits-drive.html

https://da.mdah.ms.gov/sovcom/document/images/png/cd12/113717

https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/coordinating-committee-for-fundamental-american-freedoms/

https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/nativist-lobby-three-faces-intolerance/

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/eugenics-voter-id-laws-thomas-farrs-connections-pioneer-fund/
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Sometimes when a weird little guy gets shot, the guy who killed him is just a weirder little guy.
Original Air Date: 9/18/2025
Sources:

Schmaltz, William H. (2000). Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Washington, D.C.: Brassey's

Schmaltz, William H. (2013). For Race And Nation: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. River's Bend Press

Simonelli, Frederick J. (1999). American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Lee, Martin A. (1997). The Beast Reawakens. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Rosenthal, A. M.; Gelb, Arthur (1967). One More Victim: The Life and Death of an American-Jewish Nazi. New York: New American Library
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In 1937, the heir to a textile manufacturing fortune established a charitable foundation to funnel money into disseminating propaganda produced in Nazi Germany. Since then, that fund has subsidized the overwhelming majority of research in the pseudoscientific field of 'race science.'

Sources & Further Reading:

Tucker, William (2002). The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and The Pioneer Fund. University of Illinois Press.

Saini, Angela (2019). Superior: The Return of Race Science. Beacon Press.

Gould, Stephen Jay (1996). The Mismeasure of a Man. Penguin Books.

Lusane, Clarence (2003). Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era. Routledge.

Kühl, Stefan (1994). The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. Oxford University Press.

Barry Mehler, “The New Eugenics,” Science for the People (May/June 1983)

Lorimer, Frank, et al. “The Role of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population.” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 4, 1971, pp. 86–105. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3349466.

“Current Topics.” The Economic Journal, vol. 45, no. 178, 1935, pp. 406–09. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2224670.

“116. International Congress for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems.” Man, vol. 35, 1935, pp. 109–109. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2790721.

“Medical News.” The British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 3890, 1935, pp. 192–93. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25344986.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1994/12/01/the-tainted-sources-of-the-bell-curve/

1994 publication of excerpt from The Bell Curve:
https://newrepublic.com/article/120887/race-genes-and-iq-new-republics-bell-curve-excerpt

Rebuttals published in the same issue:
https://newrepublic.com/article/120890/responses-new-republics-bell-curve-excerpt

Andrew Sullivan’s 2022 article
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/03/denying-genetics-isnt-shutting-down-racism-its-fueling-it.html

https://investigations.hopenothate.org.uk/race-science-inc/

https://x.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/business/media/im-still-reading-andrew-sullivan-but-i-cant-defend-him.html

https://www.ub.edu/personal/docencia/infocomp/bell.htm

https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,748954-1,00.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1956/06/17/archives/dr-cg-campbell-88-expert-on-eugenic.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/136100c0

https://www.nytimes.com/1935/08/31/archives/berlin-congress-ends-in-dispute-international-and-scientific-nature.html

https://newrepublic.com/article/147960/charles-murray-marketing-genius

Herrnstein 1971 article in the atlantic
https://gwern.net/doc/iq/1971-herrnstein.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/16/obituaries/richard-herrnstein-64-dies-backed-nature-over-nurture.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20170324145730/http://www.intelligence.martinsewell.com/Gottfredson1997.pdf

https://web.archive.org/web/20200608195813/http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intelligence/cache/eugenics2.html

https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/the-bell-curve/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2757926/
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