While I applaud the attempt to make use of the evil side of some our campus namesakes for the purpose of education (“Building names reflect different era on campus” from 8/30) it would behoove the CW to get the facts correct. Josiah Clark Nott was not a eugenicist, having died 10 years before the discipline was founded by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton.

He was an unabashed racist and one of the most influential scientific racists in the South and in the U.S. in general.  In his non-medical work, he had two primary goals: to get religion out of understanding natural phenomena and to scientifically establish the inferiority of Africans.  He considered Africans to be a separate and inferior species to Europeans, and his evaluation of them argued that they were only suited for slavery.

To indicate his influence in the middle of the 19th century, his book “Types of Mankind” published in 1854 was one of the best-selling science books of its day.  Among the first to buy it were the United States departments of State, Navy and Treasury!  It was the scientific bible on the race question and one of its contributors, Louis Agassiz of Harvard, was the scientist Lincoln consulted on the “Negro problem” after the emancipation proclamation.

In keeping with the thesis of the book, Agassiz, a frequent correspondent of Nott, advised Lincoln, “Beware of how we give to the blacks rights by virtue of which they may endanger the progress of whites. They are incapable of living on a footing of social equality.”

This is Nott’s legacy, not eugenics, which implies that he had an appreciation of evolution by natural selection, whereas all his work argued for the separate creation of the races as different species. We’re a University–let’s get the facts right before committing them to print.

Jim Bindon is a professor emeritus of the department of anthropology at the University of Alabama.