Wesley Critz George

Who was Wesley Critz George?

Wesley Critz George was a professor of histology and embryology at the medical school of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he chaired the anatomy department. Beginning with studies of sponges and tunicates, he became an internationally-recognized researcher on the genetics of race. George is remembered for his 87-page pamphlet, The Biology of the Race Problem, printed for the Commission of the Governor of Birmingham, Alabama, 1962.

George argued that the division between "black" and "white" races was founded on fundamental biological differences, and saved special venom for Franz Boas and the Boasian physical anthropologists who argued that race was of no biological consequence. George used some of the same materials on intelligence tests that Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray among others later used as evidence of lower black average intelligence.

Materials from 1944, and preserved at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, document George's theories concerning the genetic basis of racial differences in average intelligence. There are also letters documenting George's disputes with religious leaders, particularly at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, about racial mixing in churches, and George's disapproval of the liberal tendencies of university president Frank Porter Graham and sociologist Howard W. Odum. After the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision, George's fight against school integration escalated, reaching its height in 1955 - 1957, when George was active in the Patriots of North Carolina and then in the North Carolina Defenders of States' Rights which picked up the anti-integration banner after the Patriots' demise.