Liberty University’s latest theatrical production focuses on an ugly period in Central Virginia history, when the now-discredited science of eugenics was used to justify involuntarily sterilizations.
“Kin,” which opens Friday, tells the story of Carrie Buck, who was sterilized in 1927 under a new law that legalized the practice after a court case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Her story takes place right here in Central Virginia. After giving birth to a child out of wedlock when she was in her mid-teens — she was raped by someone connected to the foster family she was living with — Buck was sent to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, now known as the Central Virginia Training Center, in Amherst County.
Her mother, an alcoholic who’d lost custody of Buck, also was institutionalized there.
“Since her mother was already there, the question was, ‘What do we do with her?’” says Neal Brasher, the Liberty theater professor who is directing the show. “Since this whole idea of people being feebleminded being hereditary, that was a natural thing for them to do: We’ll put her in the Colony.”
At the time, sterilizations had already been occurring there, usually “justified as ‘for the relief of physical suffering,’” according to a 2004 exhibit about eugenics in the University of Virginia’s Historical Collections at the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library.
Virginia’s Eugenical Sterilization Act was passed by the General Assembly in 1924, according to the exhibit, and Buck, then 17, was chosen to test the law’s legality in a case that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the law legalizing involuntary sterilization.
The case against Buck was based on the now-discredited science of eugenics, which was focused on improving the genetic quality of the human population.
According to the exhibit, doctors argued that she and her mother, Emma Buck, “shared the hereditary traits of feeblemindedness and sexual promiscuity. With Emma and Carrie already institutionalized, if it could be demonstrated that Carrie’s daughter, Vivian, was likely to grow up to be an ‘imbecile’ like her mother and grandmother, the case for inheritance of such a quality would be assured.”
Buck was sterilized in October 1927. It’s estimated that between 7,200 and 8,300 people in Virginia were sterilized from 1927 to 1979, according to the ACLU of Virginia, “because they were deemed by society at the time to be unworthy or unfit to procreate. … Many of those sterilized were not even told they were being sterilized, but instead given some other explanation for their operation.”
Most were institutionalized like Buck.
“One of the things that makes this story a little bit spooky is that in the Nuremberg trials after World War II, the defense attorneys who were defending the Nazis quoted that case as precedent as [a] defense,” Brasher says. “[They argued] ‘Look here’s what they were doing in the United States for racial purity and the purification and perfection of the race.’ It was used as a precedent as a defense for the Nazis.”
“Kin” is told through the eyes of an older Carrie Buck, “who’s already lived her life, and she’s flashing back to when she was young,” says Linda Nell Cooper, chair of Liberty’s theater department. “It’s only focused on her early years. She even mentions, toward the end of the play, she did go on and lived a very happy life. But she says that’s another story for another time.”
The story that’s told in “Kin,” though, is one that will anger audience members, Cooper says.
“She was so trusting of all those lawyers and really didn’t feel as if she had the voice to speak for herself,” Cooper says. “So you’re sitting there in the audience, upset for her because she didn’t have that voice.
“You really get angry … especially when you’re sitting there, going, ‘I’m sitting in Lynchburg. How could people in Lynchburg have allowed this to happen years ago? And the people of Virginia?’”
Brasher says they cast the show in late January, so the students have had plenty of time to do their own research into the case and the era in which it occurred.
“That’s something we try to do for all of our plays,” he says. “That’s the challenge you face, especially with academic theater, because you’re dealing with students who even though they may be very bright … there’s just not as much water under the bridge and they may not have had as many life experiences as some of the people they’re portraying.”
They’ve all come away with a desire to honor those who were affected by the law.
“Some of them are still around,” Brasher says. “A lot of people in the area who were affected by this are with us still. We want to honor them as well.”