Scientific Racism Provides Academic Legitimacy to Jim Crow and Lynching

American universities and scientific journals in the early twentieth century produced and popularized pseudoscientific racial hierarchies that provided academic legitimation for segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial violence. Madison Grant's 'The Passing of the Great Race' (1916), Lothrop Stoddard's 'The Rising Tide of Color' (1920), and journals like the American Journal of Sociology published eugenicist and white supremacist theory as mainstream science. IQ tests developed during WWI were interpreted to prove Black intellectual inferiority. This manufactured academic consensus informed legislation, court decisions, and public opinion for decades.