First Unitarian Church of Dallas welcomes Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf for a discussion with Rev. T. J. FitzGerald about their new book The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Dallas.

Sunday, June 21 in the Sanctuary
12:30 – 1:15: Discussion
1:15 – 1:30: Q&A Session
1:30 – 2:00: Book Signing

Click to register in Realm.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, 32 states passed laws allowing involuntary sterilization on those deemed biologically “unfit”: convicted criminals, the disabled, the poor, and people of color. Texas, despite a history of violent racism, was not one of them. In The Purifying Knife, Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf explore this curious instance of the Lone Star State’s exceptionalism. The first history of the eugenics movement in Texas, it is a narrative that intersects with debates over race, immigration, abortion, the role of women in society, homosexuality, medical ethics, and the politics of disability in the state—debates resonating today in Texas and beyond.

From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Americans embraced eugenics. Yet the Texas legislature ultimately rejected nine of ten laws advocated by the state’s eugenicists and their predecessors. Phillips and Friauf trace this unlikely resistance to a variety of influences: wealthy cotton growers concerned that the anti-immigrant politics of the eugenics movement would deprive them of a source of easily exploitable labor; a populist distrust of higher education and the academic elites who enthusiastically supported the eugenics movement; and the forces of anti-Darwinist fundamentalism and pre-millennial dispensationalism in the 1920s, among others. The Purifying Knife also details how eugenical ideas survived long past their decline in the 1940s and have entered a disturbing afterlife in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

A thoroughgoing look into a rare case where the eugenics movement “failed” in spite of its power in the United States and around the world—while still wielding a toxic influence—Phillips and Friauf’s work offers insight into the history of the LGBTQ community, abortion, and immigration policies in Texas, and persuasively argues that the long arc of eugenics history has helped shaped contemporary politics in the Lone Star State.

About Michael Phillips:
Michael Phillips is a scholar of American racism, right-wing extremism, and apocalyptic religious beliefs.  He covered crime as a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram before earning his Ph.D.in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. 

He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Based on his award-winning dissertation, his first book, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, won the 2007 Texas Historical Commission’s prize for best book on Texas history.   He recently retired from teaching American history after a 20-year career as a professor.

Since then, he won a one-year senior research fellowship at Southern Methodist University. He has served as an historical consultant for and appeared in the award-winning documentary about the Kennedy assassination and its long-term impact on Dallas, City of Hate.  He was also an adviser and appears in a series of short films about Dallas history, Recovering the Stories, periodically broadcast on Channel 13 and available on the KERA website.

In 2019, he won a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Community College research fellowship to examine the history of eugenics in Texas. As a result of that research, he most recently co-authored, with Betsy Friauf, The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas History, published by the University of Oklahoma Press on June 3.

About Betsy Friauf:
Betsy Friauf is a Fort Worth native and a UNT grad. She spent 30 years as a journalist, for the Denton Record-Chronicle and then the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She then served as deputy chief communications officer for the Fort Worth city manager, senior communications specialist at the UNT Health Science Center and finally Children’s Hospital, Dallas and Plano.

In all these jobs as well as periods of freelancing, she was primarily a writer and editor on a variety of topics from breaking news to emergency instructions during tornadoes to the covid vaccine. Working with Michael Phillips she has won numerous awards as an independent scholar, including for the essay ““Those Boys Didn’t Learn to Hate Here”: Racial Violence in Texas, 1965-2020” which appeared in the book Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020, which won the Texas State Historical Association’s 2025 Gail and Chuck Swanlund Award for Best Texas History Anthology.

Now retired, Friauf is active in immigrant rights and resistance to fascism.