It was even more provocative because he was headed to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, the place where Carrie Buck worked as a maid and was raped and impregnated by a male member of the family, only to be sent to a state farm for the mentally enfeebled and ordered to be sterilized.
And because the Governor's School was held in Staunton, site of the DeJarnette Sanitarium and Western State Hospital. Joseph DeJarnette was the enthusiastic architect of the Virginia sterilization law and program who helped inspire the Nazi eugenics effort. In 1934, he lobbied the state General Assembly to extend the sterilization law to match the Nazis saying, "The Germans are beating us at our own game and are more progressive than we are."