The Unfit
By Dan Currier
(Digital Video, 4:26. 2006)
Click to play movie trailor
The purpose of the video is to educate and heighten the attention given to the eugenics movement in
Virginia. Eugenics was a pseudo-science, which gained popularity at the turn of the twentieth century.
The word “Eugenics” means “well bred” and the movement was an attempt to authorize the sterilization
of the “socially inadequate” people supported in institutions or maintained wholly or in part of by public expense.
It was thought that if you sterilize the people who are a drain to the public health system you would
rid the society of “defective persons” whose reproduction presented “a menace to society.”
Jesse Meadows was sent to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in
1940 at the age of 17. He arrived in June and four months later, he was sterilized.