New Names Submitted for Goethe School (HAH!)

New Names Submitted for Goethe School
Written by Jason Kobely, Internet News Producer

An advisory committee with the Sacramento City Unified School District has submitted three recommendations for renaming Goethe Middle School following allegations of racism leveled against the school's namesake Charles M. Goethe, school district officials said Friday.

All three candidates -- local labor advocate Ruth Holbrook, civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks and landmark Japanese-American litigant Mitsuye Endo -- are women with strong ties to Sacramento's minority communities.

The south Sacramento school, which was named after the prominent Sacramento millionaire in 1962, began looking into a name change in February following disclosures about Goethe's controversial views.

According to information presented in 2004 by a Sacramento State researcher, Charles Goethe was an unrepentant racist who supported Hitler, endorsed selective breeding and advocated the involuntary sterilization of "socially inadequate" women.

http://www.news10.net/display_story.aspx?storyid=28883

That fucker sounds like bush. Only not as bad.

so can anyone explain what a "socially inadequate" woman might be?

Or just one who didn't think other people should control her sexuality. At least, those were the reasons that women in the U.S. were forcibly (or unknowingly) sterilized.

would be non aryians, mentally disabled, roma, and Jews.

a snip from a PDF detailing Goethe's life. . .

In the United States, eugenics enjoyed wide support between the world wars and drew upon a variety of ideological views, from the birth control movement to right-wing nativism. Goethe, as founder of the Sacramento-based Eugenics Society of Northern California, was involved with its most reactionary tendency, which promoted "Anglo-Saxon" societies as the engine of modern civilization and advocated policies of sterilization and apartheid in order to protect the "high powers" from contamination by the poor, mentally ill and "socially inadequate." (emphasis added)

Goethe believed that a variety of social successes (wealth, political leadership, intellectual discoveries) and social problems (poverty, illegitimacy, crime, mental illness and unemployment) could be traced to inherited, biological attributes associated with "racial temperament." And he put his ideas into practice: Working with the influential Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena and the California Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Goethe lobbied the state to restrict immigration from Mexico and carry out some 20,000 involuntary sterilizations of mostly poor women, defined as "feeble-minded" or "socially inadequate" by medical authorities between 1909 and the 1960s. One of Gray Davis' last acts as governor was to issue a public apology to these victims.

It seems this definition was applied by "medical authorities," between 1909 and 1960, but its not clear who these "authorities" may have been or what criteria was included, though it appears it was more than simply racism and included a variety of social aspects (intelligence, sanity, poverty and crime).

www.csus.edu/cshpe/eugenics/docs/bedfellows.pdf