Gov. Bev Perdue on Wednesday joined what became an emotionally charged meeting for survivors of the state’s 45-year-long eugenics program.
The meeting offered people who were involuntarily sterilized a way to tell their stories publicly and suggest ideas for compensation to the governor’s recently formed eugenics task force.
During the meeting, held in a conference room of the Department of Agriculture’s Eaddy Agronomics Building in Raleigh, victims and their families cried in anger and grief for the sterilizations that they or their relatives had endured. Most questioned the state’s ability to compensate victims properly.
The eugenics program was part of a national movement that used sterilization as a means to prevent people with mental illness, feeblemindedness, epilepsy and other traits considered undesirable from having children.
In North Carolina, 7,600 men, women and children were sterilized through the program between 1929 and 1974. White women were the targets in the early days, and black women were targeted in the 1960s. But men and children also were sterilized through the program.
“They cut me open like I was a hog,” said Elaine Riddick, who was sterilized at age 14. “I didn’t even know nothing about this stuff.”
Riddick, now 57, said her only crime was being poor and from a bad home environment.
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“I was hungry,” she said. “I was cold. I was dirty. I was a victim of rape. I was a victim of child abuse, and I was black.”
Black women were the targets of these forced sterilization programs now outed in North Carolina, and today black women are targets of abortion. They are connected because the founder of both was well connected to Planned Parenthood- read on…………Many of Planned Parenthood’s founders corresponded with Hitler and the Nazi regime…watch the documentary Maafa21 for more history there !
The Associated Press Writes, “Nearly 35 years after ending the country’s most active post-war sterilization program, North Carolina is the only state trying to make amends to thousands of people who cannot have children because of eugenics-inspired theories about social improvement.
Victims and their relatives will tell their stories to a state task force considering compensation to victims of sterilizations that continued into 1974. Roughly 85 percent of victims were women or girls, some as young as 10. North Carolina has more victims living than any other state because a majority was sterilized after World War II, said Charmaine Fuller Cooper, director of the state Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation.
Eugenics programs gained popularity in the U.S. and other countries in the early 1900s, but most abandoned those efforts after World War II because of the association with Nazi Germany’s program aimed at racial purity. However, North Carolina’s expanded, with sterilizations peaking in the 1950s and early 1960s. About 70 percent of the state’s 7,600 sterilizations occurred after the war, state figures show.
Overt rationalization for the programs ranged from protecting the potential offspring of mentally disabled parents to improving the overall health and intellectual competence of the human race. Before the atrocities of World War II, it was seen by many — both blacks and whites — as a legitimate effort to improve society.
“Sterilization was always a cost-cutting measure,” said Paul Lombardo, a professor at Georgia State University’s College of Law. “The argument was, anybody who generates social costs shouldn’t be allowed to have children.”
In 1968, Elaine Riddick was like many others who were sterilized: poor, black and female.
Now living in Atlanta, Riddick plans to drive to Raleigh next week to tell the task force about her sterilization at age 14 following a rape. She said her grandmother gave the state permission for the procedure.
“My grandmother was worried about me. I didn’t blame her,” Riddick said.
Yet she said it was a traumatic experience that led to years of depression and physical problems. Riddick wants financial compensation from the state to pay for doctor bills and medicine.
Researchers estimate more than 60,000 people nationwide were sterilized during the 20th century as part of government programs. Even in states without sterilization laws, the procedures still occurred on local or informal levels. That means the real number could be 100,000 or higher, Lombardo said.
Among the 33 states with eugenics programs, North Carolina’s was unique. The state had the most open-ended law in the country, allowing doctors and social workers to refer people living at home to the state Eugenics Board for possible sterilization. In every other state, Lombardo said, people had to be either institutionalized or jailed before they could be sterilized.
According to research done by University of Vermont professor Lutz Kaelber, North Carolina averaged about 300 sterilizations per year between 1950 and 1963.
It’s not totally clear why support for sterilizations remained strong in North Carolina as it declined in nearly every other state.
The most obvious explanation is the influence of the Winston-Salem-based Human Betterment League, Fuller Cooper said. The nonprofit group aimed at social reform folded in 1988, but at its peak its members had the passion and financial backing needed to shape public policy, she said.
The North Carolina branch was organized by several wealthy and prominent citizens, including textile magnate James Hanes and tobacco czar R.J. Reynolds. The group’s members drummed up support for sterilization through direct mail campaigns and other methods.
A league brochure from 1950 states: “You wouldn’t give a responsible position to a person of little intelligence. Yet each day the feebleminded and the mentally defective are entrusted with the most important and far reaching job of all — the job of parenthood.”
The Department of Social Services even established a psychology division to test individuals referred by social workers. Many received benefits such as special education or occupational training. Some with mental disabilities, mental illness or even epilepsy were deemed unfit to become parents.
** NOTE What AP Conveniently leaves out of this report is the close connections and funding of Planned Parenthood supporters seeped in Eugenics – and who funded this FORCED STERILIZATION PROGRAM..Supporters like Clarence Gamble…why does the media black out Planned Parenthood’s role in this racism?
According to the Winston Salem Journal, With the passage of the North Carolina Sterilization Act in 1929, North Carolina’s sterilization program began. In 1933, the act was declared unconstitutional on the grounds that it did not allow an appeals process. In the same year, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a law allowing an appeal process and created the Board of Eugenics to oversee sterilizations.
Created in Pasadena, California in 1928, the Human Betterment Foundation sponsored and conducted research relating to sterilization’s physiological, mental, and social effects. Closely aligned with the Human Betterment Foundation, the Human Betterment League of North Carolina used mass media and advertisements to promote the implementation of sterilization procedures. Founded by James G. Hanes in 1947, the Human Betterment League included members, such as Alice Shelton Gray, a trained nurse, and Dr. Clarence Gamble, an heir to the Procter and Gamble fortune.
The League funded a newspaper article campaign to convince the public that sterilizations were needed. In the literature, sterilization was not presented as a form of punishment but as a protection. The public was informed that most of the “unfit” did not live in mental institutions but were in the community and “breeding,” according to the literature, with normal people. The League persuasively convinced North Carolinians that the sterilizations must occur as soon as possible.
After World War II, many states dismantled their sterilization programs; they feared that their eugenics efforts might be compared to Nazi Germany. In North Carolina, however, sterilization increased by nearly four-fifths. By 1957, the League distributed more than 575,000 pieces of mail which promoted the sterilization program. During the 1960s, social workers were given the authority to recommend sterilizations, and the eugenics program expanded to include welfare recipients. These factors contributed greatly to the increase in sterilizations among African Americans and women.
During the early 1970s, the League stopped promoting eugenic sterilizations and started producing educational material regarding birth control and genetic counseling. The League’s name changed to The Human Genetics League. It went out of existence in 1988.
According to the North Carolina Winston-Salem Journal, “Clarence Gamble who helped found the Human Betterment League of North Carolina in 1947 did so to promote eugenic sterilization. Journal research shows a long history of abuses in the N.C. sterilization program – abuses that Gamble consistently glossed over..” Gamble wanted sterilizations to increase rather than decrease, and increase they did.
Clarence Gamble, funded the North Carolina Eugenics Society which sterilized this woman and many black women as well. Click Here : Clarence Gamble. Gamble also supported Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Movement. Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood and she had many of her board members and presidents were members of the American Eugenics Society.
Planned Parenthood Founder, Margaret Sanger, in a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble dated December 19, 1939, made this statement:
“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. The minister’s work is also important and also he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation [of Eugenicists] as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” that plan was called “The NEGRO Project”.
Read all the ways Eugenics Financier Clarence Gamble supporter Planned Parenthood’s founder: Margaret Sanger, on the website of the Pathfinder Website, an organization founded by Clarence Gamble Here
Listen to what the State of North Carolina’s Eugenic Board (Funded by Sanger supporter- Clarence Gamble) did to this “African American woman” : Elaine Riddick
( Interview From the film: Maafa21)
More on eugenics in the film Maafa21 (trailer below)
N.C. History Project’s Troy Kickler discusses eugenics, ” it was a defense for abortion” and “racist program that targeted African Americans”
Troy Kickler, director of the N.C. History Project (www.northcarolinahistory.org)
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