From the Charlottesville [Virginia] Daily Progress:

Former Charlottesville Mayor and longtime Del. Mitchell Van Yahres died Friday of complications from surgery for lung cancer.

Van Yahres, 81, served 24 years in the House of Delegates representing Charlottesville and Albemarle County through 2005 as a Democrat who chaired the Agriculture Committee but was best known as a progressive voice and a joyful political warrior.

… Thanks to his efforts, in 2001 Virginia became the first state to express its profound regret for the practice of involuntary sterilization of thousands of poor people and mental patients. California and other states have followed suit with official apologies.

The forced sterilizations of 8,000 Virginians were carried out over several generations into the 1960s at state hospitals through belief in eugenics, a discarded theory and false science that taught racial purity and was used in the 1920s to reclassify the state’s Native American population as black. Thirty states and Nazi Germany had adopted eugenics laws, some patterned after Virginia’s racial purity laws in effect from 1924 into the 1970s.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 11:12 am and is filed under eugenics, obits, politics, sterilization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post