The Example of Dr. King.

Today we remember the significant contributions of an African-American, Martin Luther King, Jr., towards a just and peaceful society. It gives one pause to recall that only a hundred years ago respected American researchers were using bad science to justify their theories of inherited white intellectual superiority. A French psychologist at the Sorbonne, Alfred Binet(1857-1911), developed a psychological test intended to be used as an empirical tool to identify school children that needed what we now call special or remedial education. His 1908 test established the criterion used in measuring intelligence ever since. Binet never thought his test scores should be used as a definitive, theoretical measure of innate human intelligence.

American scientists expanded and reified Binet's test, later called an IQ test, into something that was misused to justify eugenics, concentration or sterilization of the mentally disabled, and immigration restrictions (Gould1981). Lewis Terman (1916), a Stanford University professor gave his greatly expanded and revised version of Binet's test the name, Stanford-Binet. This test through many revisions has come down to us in the 21st century as a paradigm for the plethora of IQ tests now in use. It was Terman (1923) who advocated mass testing of school children for the purposes of proper placement in society. But it was a Harvard man, Robert Yerkes, who actually put mass IQ testing into practice. Yerkes was able to convince the US Army to allow him to administer intelligence tests to 1.75 million recruits during WWI. Imagine the surprise of the researchers expecting to find confirmation of their racist theories of white intellectual superiority, when their data told them the mental age of white Americans was about 13, one year above the highest mental age of morons (1921). A mental age of 12 was considered the upper limit for individuals categorized as morons, a scientific term invented by H. H. Goddard(1914) then in use to describe the feeble-minded.

Although the army did not make much use of the testing results, their civilian policy effect was significant. C.C. Brigham (1923) used the testing data in his influential study on intelligence in which he advocated both eugenics and immigration restriction to prevent declines in intelligence levels of the native stock. In 1924 Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act. The act severely restricted the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans. Both of these ethnic groups had scored low on the army's Alpha and Beta IQ tests perhaps because of language and cultural barriers. Calvin Coolidge proclaimed as he signed the bill that "America must be kept American." Brigham recanted six years after the quotas were imposed. He recognized that a test score could not be reified as an entity inside a person's head. But the damage was already done. The act's restrictive quotas may have doomed many Europeans seeking to escape Nazism in the 1930s.

Scientific racism, or biological determinism if you prefer, has lately been discredited. But claims for a hereditarian theory of intelligence were made as late as 1979 (Jensen). The moral of this story remains relevant. Brigham, a disciple of Yerkes, went on to become secretary of the College Entrance Examination Board and develop the familiar Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) based on army models. That test has been criticised as culturally biased and a poor indicator of general intelligence, yet its result has a tremendous impact on a student's future socioeconomic status. One of the world's great athletes, Muhammad Ali, flunked his army induction IQ test. Yet few who remember his superb motor coordination, verbal perspicacity and principled stand against the Vietnam war would ever call him a dumb negro. Thank you, Dr. King for sharing your dream with us.