racially segregated United States of the time, he had almost no contact with black people.) In a debate with psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing M.D. and on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr., Shockley argued, "My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and, thus, not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in the environment." Shockley was one of the race theorists who received money from the Pioneer Fund, and at least one donation to him came from its founder, the eugenicist Wickliffe Draper. Shockley's writings and lectures were partly based on the writings of psychologist Cyril Burt. Shockley proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 should be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization. Anthropologist and far-right activist Roger Pearson defended Shockley in a self-published book co-authored with Shockley. In 1973, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee professor Edgar G. Epps argued that "William Shockley's position lends itself to racist interpretations". The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Shockley as a white nationalist who failed to produce evidence for his eugenic theories amidst "near-universal acknowledgement that his work was that of a racist crank". The science writer Angela Saini describes Shockley as having been "a notorious racist". Shockley's advocacy of eugenics triggered protests. In one incident, the science society Sigma Xi, fearing violence, canceled a 1968 convocation in Brooklyn where Shockley was scheduled to speak. In Atlanta in 1981, Shockley filed a libel suit against the Atlanta Constitution after a science writer, Roger Witherspoon, compared Shockley's advocacy of a voluntary sterilization program to Nazi human experimentation. The suit took three years to go to trial. Shockley won the suit but he only received one dollar in damages and he did not receive any punitive damages. Shockley's biographer Joel Shurkin, a science writer on the staff of Stanford University during those years, sums this statement up by saying that it was defamatory, but Shockley's reputation was not worth much by the time the trial reached a verdict. Shockley taped his telephone conversations with reporters, transcribed them, and sent the transcripts to the reporters by registered mail. At one point, he toyed with the idea of making the reporters take a simple quiz on his work before he would discuss the subject matter of it with them. His habit of saving all of his papers (including