Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

The term eugenics, from the Greek “well born,” was coined by a British biologist named Francis Galton in the late 19th century. Eugenics is a form of scientific racism that calls for selective breeding to eliminate “inferior” people, with the aim of creating a “superior” race.

The term Jim Crow refers to segregation laws that emerged in the South in the 1870s in response to Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 overturned Jim Crow laws.

Monogenesis is a theory that all humans descend from a single origin. For Christian proponents of monogenesis, all humans, regardless of race, are descendants of the biblical Adam and Eve.