Tom Hood/AP
In a hagiographic video series titled “Armed and Fabulous” on the National Rifle Association website, the gun group touts Sandy Froman, a current board member and past president, noting that “her illustrious career has established her as not just part of the American gun culture but as an integral thread in the fabric of firearms history.” The video, one of several sponsored by Smith & Wesson highlighting “NRA Women,” celebrates Froman’s career as a lawyer, her hobby of making chainmaille jewelry, and her years of advocating gun ownership for women. She once declared, “I love guns—never met one I didn’t like.” The video plays up what seems to be an anomaly, quoting Froman saying, “I am often asked how a Jewish woman, a native of San Francisco, and a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law became president of the NRA.” But the video leaves out an intriguing piece of her past: When she was at those prestigious schools, she helped controversial Stanford University professor William Shockley, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, as he promoted his theory that blacks were genetically inferior to whites.
In late 2015, Froman, now a Tucson, Arizona-based attorney specializing in mediation, was elected to the board of directors of Sturm, Ruger & Company, one of the largest manufacturers of guns in the United States. On May 9, the company will hold its annual shareholder meeting, and some activists are calling on major investors in the firm to oppose reelecting Froman to the board due to her ties to the NRA and its fierce opposition to gun safety measures. On Tuesday night, Majority Action, a shareholders activist group, began the process of submitting a shareholder advisory with the Securities and Exchange Commission challenging Froman’s position on the board and citing “archival records” revealing “that she worked with Shockley over at least a three-year period.” The group intended to point out that the Southern Poverty Law Center has called Shockley “an ardent eugenicist whose theories of black racial inferiority eventually made him an academic pariah.”
In 1956, Shockley shared the Nobel Prize for physics with two colleagues for his role in developing the transistor at Bell Telephone Laboratories years earlier. By this stage, he had started a semiconductor company in Mountain View, California, in a move that is widely regarded as the kick-start for the establishment of Silicon Valley. Yet in the mid-1960s, while a professor at Stanford, he turned his attention from physics to eugenics and genetics. He contended that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, and that this was due to genes. As the New York Times noted when Shockley died in 1989, “He preached a philosophy of ‘retrogressive evolution.’ Stipulating that intelligence was genetically transmitted, he deemed blacks genetically inferior to whites and unable to achieve their intellectual level.” In a 1972 response to a letter written by the president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) defending the group’s decision to not endorse Shockley’s research, Shockley declared that he “rebelled at sweeping…racial questions under the rug. I undertook research on existing research. This research led me inescapably to the opinion that the social and intellectual disadvantages of American Negroes arise primarily from genetic causes.” He at one point proposed a “voluntary sterilization bonus plan”: People with an IQ under 100 would be paid a cash sum if they agreed to be sterilized. (In 1980, he maintained that the “major cause for American Negroes’ intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially…
