Inventor William Shockley's Wishes to Name City Park in His Honor Stirs Debate due to His Racist Beliefs, Said Blacks Were Inferior

I cannot fathom how officials in Auburn, California, would have the gall to name an area park after a white supremacist and think that would be readily accepted by the residents. The officials are reportedly still debating on the matter. Exactly what's there to debate? Earlier this year, the estate of William Shockley donated 28 acres of prime forested land to Auburn on the condition that it be named "Nobel Laureate William B. Shockley and his wife Emmy L. Shockley Memorial Park." According to the Sacramento Bee, city officials agreed to such conditions before discovering from activists that Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, believed African-Americans are inferior and should be paid not to reproduce. As far as I am concerned, public land should have no strings attached to it, but there might be some legal ramifications to this man's wishes. This man should not be able to set the parameters, especially in light of the fact that he was a known racist. They can keep the land, period.

So, who is William Bradford Shockley? He was an American physicist and inventor. Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, he co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Mr. Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s led to California's "Silicon Valley" becoming a hotbed of electronics innovation. In his later life, Shockley was a professor at Stanford, and he also became a staunch advocate of eugenics. (Wikipedia)

The man was brilliant and I won't take that from him, but his legacy has been greatly overshadowed by his personal beliefs, which are racist and vile. He believed that the higher rate of reproduction among the less intelligent was having a dysgenic effect, and that a drop in average intelligence would ultimately lead to a decline in civilization. Shockley also advocated that the scientific community should seriously investigate questions of heredity, intelligence and demographic trends, and suggest policy changes if he was proven right. Wow. That's pretty disturbing on so many levels.

Although Shockley was concerned about both black and white dysgenic effects, he found the situation among blacks more disastrous. While unskilled whites had 3.7 children on average versus an average of 2.3 children for skilled whites, Shockley found from the 1970 Census Bureau reports that unskilled blacks had 5.4 children versus 1.9 for the skilled blacks. Shockley reasoned that because intelligence (like most traits) is inherited, the black population would, over time, become much less intelligent countering all the gains that had been made by the Civil Rights movement. Shockley's published writings and lectures to scientific organizations on this topic, such as the National Academy of Sciences, were partly based on the research of Arthur Jensen, Cyril Burt and H. J. Eysenck.

Shockley also proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization. He donated sperm to the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank founded by Robert Klark Graham in hopes of spreading humanity's best genes. The bank, called by the media the "Nobel Prize sperm bank," claimed to have three Nobel Prize-winning donors, though Shockley was the only one to publicly acknowledge his donation to the sperm bank. However, Shockley's views about the genetic superiority of whites over blacks brought the Repository for Germinal Choice notable negative publicity and discouraged other Nobel Prize winners from donating sperm. Source: Wikipedia

So, I don't believe this man should have a public park named after him, whether or not his estate donated the land. He risked damaging his reputation as a trailblazer and a brilliant physicist, for some patently racist views. To the residents of Auburn, would you want your children running around in a park named after William Joseph Simmons, the modern founder of the Ku Klux Klan? I scarcely believe so. It is amazing that this story has managed to fly under the radar of the mainstream media, with only the UPI wire picking it up.