"A Moral Intelligence": Mental Disability and Eugenic Resistance in Welty's "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" and O'Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"

The South, he argues, had a distinctive response to the eugenics movement. Because of regional emphases on religious faith and opposition to external interference, Larson argues that for the most part, the eugenics movement gained less legal traction in southern states than it did in the West and Midwest (7- 9). Despite challenges from Reconstruction legislatures, the Black Codes of 1865 and 1866 laid the foundation for the color line that was more officially implemented in the 1890s as the South transitioned to Jim Crow rule (M. Smith 51). [...]while eugenic discourse lent scientific authority to racial discrimination throughout the United States, segregation policies in the South predated the eugenics movement.