They were wives and daughters. Sisters. Unwed mothers. Children. Even a 10-year-old boy. Some were blind or mentally retarded. Toward the end they were mostly black and poor. North Carolina sterilized them all, more than 7,600 people.
For more than 40 years North Carolina ran one of the nation's largest and most aggressive sterilization programs. It expanded after World War II, even as most other states pulled back in light of the horrors of Hitler's Germany.
Contrary to common belief, many of the thousands marked for sterilization were ordinary citizens, many of them young women guilty of nothing worse than engaging in premarital sex.
I don't want it. I don't approve of it, sir. I don't want
a sterilize operation.... Let me go home, see if I get along all right.
Have mercy on me and let me do that.
— A woman pleading with the eugenics board, 1945.
The sterilization program ended in 1974, but its legacy will not go away. Many of its victims are still alive and they bear witness to a bureaucracy that trampled on the rights of the poor and the powerless.
The
Winston-Salem Journal obtained and examined thousands of these documents. It found that:
More than 2,000 people ages 18 and younger were sterilized in many questionable cases, including a10-year-old who was castrated. Children were sterilized over the objections of their parents, and the consent process was often a sham.
The program had been racially balanced in the early years, but by the late 1960s more than 60 percent of those sterilized were black, and 99 percent were female.
Doctors performed sterilizations without authorization and the eugenics board backdated approval. Forsyth County engaged in an illegal sterilization campaign beyond the state program.
Major eugenics research at Wake Forest University was paid for by a patron whose long history of ties to science had a racial agenda that included a visit to a 1935 Nazi eugenics conference and extensive efforts to overturn key civil-rights legislation.
North Carolina's eugenics law, passed in 1929 and rewritten in 1933, allowed sterilizations for three reasons — epilepsy, sickness and feeblemindedness. But the board almost routinely violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the law by passing judgment on many other things, from promiscuity to homosexuality.
Though more than 30 states had eugenic sterilization programs, North Carolina's record of dramatically expanding the program after 1945
and targeting blacks in the general population was different from most.
“That's quite astounding,” said Steve Selden, a professor at the University of Maryland and author of Inheriting Shame: the Story of Eugenics & Racism in America. “It's simply a story that has not been told.”
