Eugenics Board of North Carolina

The Eugenics Board of North Carolina (EBNC) was an agency of the U.S. state of North Carolina created in 1933 after the state legislature authorized the practice of eugenics by state officials four years earlier.

In 1971, an act of the legislature transferred the EBNC to the then newly-created Department of Human Resources (DHR), and the secretary of that department was given managerial and executive authority over the board. Under a 1973 law, the Eugenics Board was transformed into the Eugenics Commission. Members of the commission were appointed by the governor and included the director of the Division of Social and Rehabilitative Services of the DHR, the director of Health Services, the chief medical officer of a state institution for the feeble-minded or insane, the chief medical officer of the DHR in the area of mental health services, and the state attorney general. In 1974 the legislature transferred to the judicial system the responsibility for any sterilization proceedings against persons suffering from mental illness or mental retardation.

The Eugenics Commission was formally abolished by the legislature in 1977.

The board sterilized about 7,600 people, many of them against their will, between 1929 and 1974, in an attempt to remove mental illness and "social misbehaviour" from the gene pool. Among the victims were 2000 young people, some as young as ten years old.

Many victims have charged the state for monetary compensation for causing emotional and physical damages since the program's end in 1977. Since this time, three state-sponsored task forces have been established to asses victim damage and to discuss compensation. In a 2011 television special entitled State of Shame aired on NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams, Governor Bev Perdue said money is only a piece of just compensation, and a task force she created in August 2011 recommended that the victims be compensated, but they were unsure how much to award the victims.

“From my perspective, and as a woman, and as the governor of this state, this is not about the money. There isn’t enough money in the world to pay these people for what has been done to them, but money is part of the equation,” Perdue said.

Eugenics

The concept or term eugenics refers to the intentional and selective breeding of humans and animals to rid the population of characteristics deemed unfit by those administering the practice. In the U.S., eugenics was carried out by individuals, nonprofit organizations and state governments that felt that human reproduction should be controlled. During Hitler's dictatorship the practice was carried out in Germany against Jews, "abnormal" people and Gypsies.

Early proponents of eugenics

There were several early supporters of the eugenics movement in North Carolina. Dr. William Allan was one of the first major voices in the movement for eugenics in North Carolina. Dr. Allen ran a successful medical practice before he stopped to start a medical genetics department at Bowman Gray. In 1916, Dr. Allen wrote his primer study on the process of manipulating society’s gene pool. In his study, he argued that genetic diseases could be ended and prevented; he thought that the best way to do this would be to create a bank of everyone’s genetic background to help the state decide who were best fit to be parents. (Note: The Bowman Gray School of Medicine, renamed in 2011 to the Wake Forest School of Medicine, is now part of the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. While the university has repeatedly condemned the practice of eugenics, there is no mention of the subject in any of the school’s literature.)

After Dr. William Allan died in 1943, Dr. C. Nash Herndon took over his work at Bowman Gray. Dr. Herndon served as the President of the American Eugenics Society (1953–1955) and the President of the Human Betterment League of North Carolina. According to the “Forsyth in the Forefront, Dr. Herndon was the “greatest contributor in pushing the eugenics movement forward in North Carolina after World War II.” While head of the medical genetics department, Dr. Herndon conducted surveys of citizens living with disabilities; his goal was to attempt to figure out how hereditary diseases were spread, and thus leading to how to stop them.

In addition to Dr. Allan and Dr. Herndon, James G. Hanes was a loud voice in the fight for eugenics in North Carolina. In 1947, he founded the Human Betterment League of North Carolina. The main goal of the league, which was a success, was to make North Carolinians more comfortable with the idea of eugenics. The league utilized many strategies to make eugenics seem legitimate; for example, in 1957, they started a mailing campaign that culminated in mailing more than 575,000 mailers. Because of their efforts, North Carolina saw an increase in the number of black women, and at risk white men and women, receiving compulsory sterilizations in the following years.

Two other smaller voices in the fight for eugenics in North Carolina were Ira M. Hardy, the Superintendent of the North Carolina School for the Feeble Minded, and Kate Burr Johnson, a social worker. Hardy is important because she argued that the mentally ill should be sequestered from the general population. Johnson was a bit more savvy in her attempts to legalize eugenics. She argued that women should be sterilized so that they could have “reproductive freedom”. However, it was clear to all that studied Johnson’s remarks that she was arguing for the practice of eugenics.

Organization and administration

The N.C. Eugenics Board administered the program, which was technically a part of the Department of Public Welfare (modern day Division of Social Services). The Attorney General and representatives from Dorothea Dix Hospital, the Department of Public Welfare, the Department of Public Health, and the Department of Mental Health composed the five-member board.

In the late 1940s, the Department of Public Welfare began to promote increased sterilization as one of several solutions to poverty and illegitimacy. In the 1950s, the N.C. Eugenics Board began to focus increasingly on the sterilization of welfare recipients which led to a dramatic rise of sterilizations for African Americans and women that did not reside in state institutions. Prior to the 1950s, many of the sterilization orders primarily impacted persons residing in state institutions.

Number of victims

Between 1929 and 1974, an estimated 7,600 people were sterilized by choice, force, or coercion under the authority of the N.C. Eugenics Board program. The exact number of victims alive today is unknown. However, the State Center for Health Statistics estimates that 2,944 victims may be living as of 2010.

Stories of victims

Due to the large amount of meetings that the NC Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation has had, scores of stories from living victims are starting to come forward and into the spot light. One story that is perhaps gaining the most attention is the story of Elaine Riddick. Elaine Riddick is a fifty one year old African American woman who was born into a poor single family home in Perquimans County, North Carolina. When Riddick was thirteen years old, she was raped, and subsequently impregnated. Because Riddick was from a broken home, did not receive the best grades in school, and was a black female, her social worker labeled her a detriment to society. When she discovered that Riddick was pregnant, she coerced her grandmother, her official guardian, to sign a waiver allowing Riddick to be sterilized. Because Riddick’s grandmother was illiterate, she simply signed by writing an “X”; this illustrates that she could not have fully understood what she was signing. As soon as Riddick gave birth to her son, she was sterilized. Riddick would not fully understand what happened to her until much later in life after she began to try to have children again. Because of all the pain and suffering that the forced sterilization caused her, Riddick sued the state of North Carolina for one million dollars, arguing that her constitutional rights had been denied; however, Riddick lost her case. She appealed her case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, unfortunately, the court decided not to hear her case. Riddick has appeared on several television shows to talk about what happened to her. When asked to describe how she feels about the incident, she states “They robbed me of my dignity.” Another famous sterilization case is the case of Junius Wilson. Wilson was born in North Carolina in 1908. Wilson was born deaf, and as such, his other learned skills were crippled. When Wilson was eight, he was sent to the North Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind. Wilson stayed there for years receiving subpar instruction and attention from his teachers; in fact, Wilson never learned ASL (American Sign Language) while in school. After he left the school, his family sent him to a mental asylum because they had no idea of how to deal with him. Wilson could not communicate with the outside world. While the black boys in the school had learned a means of communicating amongst themselves since they were not being taught ASL, they were still incapable of communicating with the outside world. Because of his inability to communicate, somewhere between leaving the school and being at the asylum, Wilson was sterilized by the state. While Wilson never received any type of reparations for his coerced sterilization, after a court case, he was released from the asylum because there was no proof that he actually needed to be there. He was given a cottage on the outskirts of the asylum grounds and was allowed to live the out the remainder of his life there.

Legality

North Carolina law during the eugenics period endorsed sterilization of people who had epilepsy, sickness, “feeblemindedness” and other disabilities. Eugenics was a popular movement, especially prior to the World War II, and other states had similar programs. However, North Carolina was the only state that allowed social workers to petition for the sterilization of members of the public. These local social workers would petition the board to sterilize a person, and the board would make the final decision. Over 70% of North Carolina’s sterilization victims were sterilized after 1945 in contrast to other states that conducted the majority of their sterilizations prior to World War II and 1945.

Reparations controversy

By the time that coerced sterilizations ended in 1974, more than 7,600 people had been sterilized. There is now a growing controversy over if, and how, the state should make any types of reparations for their offenses against the victims.^{[citation needed]} The arguments for the pro-reparations side argue that the State knowingly took advantage of innocent men and women, often children, and robbed them of their God-given right to reproduce; therefore, the State must do something to make up for that egregious offense.^{[citation needed]} The argument against reparations is that during these trying economic times, there simply is no money to do anything, especially pay reparations for a “legal” activity that occurred years ago; this side also argues that there is no way to pick a fair amount to pay to the victims.^{[citation needed]} However, the state has attempted to make proactive steps in solving this issue. In 2009, North Carolina Governor Beverly Purdue put into place the “North Carolina Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation.” The foundation serves as a “clearing house” for all claims made, and to assist victims of the eugenics board. The foundation has regular meetings were they meet with victims of eugenics to hear their grievances and to try to work with them to find a fair and balanced solution to situation.

While there is yet to be any financial reparations made, in 2002, then-Governor Mike Easley publicly apologized for the state’s eugenics program. While citizens in the public and in the media commended Easley on his apology, many, especially the victims, felt that his apology did little to help them move past the pain that they still feel as a result of their forced sterilization.^{[citation needed]} Some argue that there is nothing that the state could ever do to take away the pain and suffering that they have had to endure because of State’s decisions. One victim, Elaine Riddick, describes how she suffered from deep depression due to the sterilization that occurred when she was thirteen. Her depression affected the way that she was able to relate to others, she said “"If one of my friends got pregnant, I would make it my business to separate myself from that person and the person had not done anything to me. I buried myself. I hid myself."

External links

• Krome-Lukens Anna, L. 2009. “A great blessing to defective humanity: women and the eugenics movement in North Carolina.” Master’s thesis, Dept. of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/117169/
• http://www.northcarolinahistory.org/commentary/316/entry
• State Library's Project on Eugenics in North Carolina
• The Winston Salem Journal: Against Their Will - North Carolina's Sterilization Program
• The Greensboro News & Record