Dr. Michael Phillips, an historian of racism in the Lone Star State, will tell the surprising and previously untold story of the Texas eugenics movement and its impact on American immigration law. 

The eugenics movement in Texas sought to create a "super race" through selective human breeding. It played an underappreciated role in the passage of harsh laws limiting immigration to the United States in the 1920s. A psychologist at the University of Texas, Clarence Stone Yoakum, helped design the "Army IQ Tests" which sparked a national panic about the supposedly low IQs of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. The test scores resulted in passage of a 1924 law setting quotas on immigration from that part of the world. Meanwhile, an East Texas member of the United States House, John Calvin Box, tried and failed to convince the Congress to set a similar quota for immigration for Mexico.