RFK’s ideas about “wellness farms” for young people are eugenic and unconstitutional

Kylie Smith

Before he became Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. touted an idea about sending young people with substance abuse and other mental health issues to “wellness farms” where they could spend a few years being “reparented” or re-educated by growing organic produce.^[1] Now that he’s in charge of the Department, he’s made his thoughts about young people with autism and intellectual and developmental disability even more clear, and in doing so has revealed the eugenic principles at the core of his thinking.

There is nothing new here – historically most approaches to “troubled youth” in the US were eugenic in origin. Institutions like training schools and therapeutic camps were designed to remove from society young people who were considered “defective” or “delinquent” in some way. Once there, they were subject to abuse, neglect, involuntary sterilization, and forced labor. In the South, in the context of Jim Crow segregation, these practices were also overtly racist. Black children were more likely to be diagnosed as “criminal,” subjected to hard labor, or excluded from special education programs.

But these problems with youth institutions did not go uncontested. In the 1960s and 70s, lawyers and activists worked to expose conditions and enforce new legislation about civil rights and patients’ rights. In the rest of this article, I look at two examples from Alabama and North Carolina to demonstrate the problems with youth institutions and the arguments that lawyers made against them. The lesson to learn from this history is that confining young people with disability is not only ineffective and eugenic, it is also unconstitutional and unjust.

Historically, across the South, what Kennedy might now call “wellness farms” were part of a large network of institutions designed to deal with children and youth who were given various labels like “feeble-minded,” “mentally deficient,” or “delinquent.” The labels, and therefore the institutions, were often interchangeable. They began with “colony farms” for wayward youth. As eugenic concerns about disability rose and state hospitals became overcrowded, states opened new “schools” like Gracewood in Georgia (1921) or the Partlow School and Hospital in Alabama (1919).^[2] But none of these early places accepted Black children. Black families were usually left to cope on their own in the Jim Crow south, or found their young people confined in the adult carceral or mental health system.

In Alabama, educators at the Tuskegee Institute recognized the problem and formed a group led by Margaret Murray Washington (Booker T. Washington’s wife) to build a facility at Mt. Meigs about halfway between Tuskegee and Montgomery. The model for Mt. Meigs followed the philosophy of the Institute itself – that what Black youth needed was the physical discipline of agricultural or mechanical labor to provide a grounding in the practical skills for life in the Jim Crow south. For Black leaders at Tuskegee, the approach to “racial uplift” sometimes merged with eugenics, showing how pervasive this thinking could be. However, their approach to their own young people was one of character building not oppression.^[3] The focus on farm labor was a recognition of the reality of life for Macon county sharecroppers, so the curriculum at Mt. Meigs revolved around crop farming, basic reading and writing, and basketball.

In 1911 Mt. Meigs was taken over by the “State Institutions” branch of the Alabama state government, and once under the control of the state, conditions deteriorated rapidly. In 1969, when local Civil Rights activists brought a case against the state for maintaining racially segregated youth services, even the conservative appellate court was appalled by what they found. In their decision the judges wrote, “the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children is inferior in every way …, its principal activity seems to be in raising cucumbers…Academics are not stressed: many of the children have never been to school…There are 14 teachers for 460 students. One group goes to school for six days while the other group is out farming, and then the groups alternate.” The court also described in detail the overcrowded facilities, such as 106 girls living in a single building so crowded they were forced to share beds. There were no welfare or social workers, no psychologists, and the current superintendent used to be the Farm director. “On these facts,” the judges wrote, “the Negro school would flunk Plessy v. Ferguson. Its overcrowded condition and plainly inferior facilities are enough in themselves to require the immediate and simultaneous desegregation of all three schools.”^[4]

Similar problems plagued other youth facilities across the South, especially in North Carolina, which ran as many as six “training schools” and four “therapeutic camps” segregated by race and gender. In North Carolina the link with eugenics was particularly clear — the North Carolina Board of Eugenics was in official operation from 1933 until 1977. Its role was to adjudicate petitions for sterilization from parents or state agents, and it approved more than 7600 procedures in 40 years.^[5] In 1969, a group of law students from Duke University undertook inspections of the various facilities run by the state and reported that youth services administrators worked with the board to identify candidates for sterilization.^[6] They also reported that the worst of the institutions was Dobbs Farm, which had been designated for Black girls until 1965, and had only a token representation of white girls post-integration. Most of the white girls were sent to Samarcand Manor, which was notorious for the confinement and forced sterilization of young girls, but received substantially more attention and funding than Dobbs Farm.^[7] “In 20 years no judges have visited the farm and few other dignitaries even travel to the school,” the law students wrote. “Visitors are rare. Nobody seems to really care…The main source of gloom seems to be the large, looming shadow of opulent Samarcand Manor. The manor seems to have everything and the farm nothing.”^[8]

The young law students also documented the way Dobbs Farm provided no real educational or therapeutic program. There was no psychotherapy, and the vocational rehabilitation program was almost nonexistent—farm or kitchen work, sewing, commercial laundering, and beauty parlor training were the only skills the girl learned.^[9] Both Samarcand Manor and Dobbs Farm maintained close links with the Eugenics Board: pregnant girls were removed to the “Juvenile Evaluation Center” at Swannanoa, and were registered with the Board for forced sterilization once they had delivered their babies.^[10] When RFK talks about removing disabled young people and placing them out of sight on remote camps and farms, these are the types of places he is referring to.

None of these systems were forced to run an education program until the passing of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1975, and even then they struggled to do so because of underfunding and poorly trained staff. In 1979, building on the surge of disability and patients’ rights cases in the 1970s, lawyers in North Carolina brought a court case in the Charlotte district court called Willie M v. Hunt. In this case, lawyers argued that the treatment of children in the state’s training schools and therapeutic camps was unconstitutional as it forced the children into restrictive environments against their will, relied on forced and uncompensated labor, and provided no individual treatment or educational plans.^[11] The lawyers won the case, and over the next 20 years more than 1000 young people were able to petition for admission into the class as “Willie M. students,” which enabled them to access dedicated services and provided individual treatment and educational plans. As a result of the Willie M court case, the state was forced to reevaluate all of its institutions which were found wanting. By 2009 all the therapeutic camps had closed, and the state had streamlined its juvenile institutions into smaller short term stay units, where they use an evidence-based therapeutic model.^[12]

All of these facilities and institutions originated from the idea that disabled or delinquent children need severe discipline and hard work instead of love and compassion. They were founded on the same ideas and the same language that we are hearing from RFK today. But the historical evidence demonstrates that this program did not work at the time, and it will not work now. RFK’s ideas will place an undue burden on poor families and communities of color, and they are clearly illegal and unconstitutional. Rather than punishing children for the way our society continues to fail them, or returning to the dark ages of forced labor and involuntary sterilization, RFK and his cronies should focus on funding systems based on the hard-fought, legally-mandated rights to treatment and education.

Featured image caption: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking with attendees at the 2024 FreedomFest at Caesars Forum Conference Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Courtesy Gage Skidmore)

Kylie Smith

Series Editor for the AAHN Nursing History Week series and the Beyond Florence series. Associate Professor, Andrew W Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing & the Humanities, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

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