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Winston-Salem, NC — A Triad area congregation hosted survivors of state-ordered sterilization, Sunday. The service went on without the presence of State Representative Larry Womble who is among lawmakers calling for victim’s compensation.
Womble remains hospitalized after a head-on collission that left the other driver dead, Friday night.
Among the survivors at Emmanuel Baptist Church today Lillie Ann Buelin, 72, from Ararat, NC.
Buelin says welfare workers told her that if she didn’t go to school they would operate on her and have her sterilized. She says they also tested her and labeled her retarded.
“I was just 13 years old.”
Buelin says she is sharing her story because she wants something done and that she is also praying for Larry Womble’s recovery.
The Eugenics Board of North Carolina approved 7,600 sterilizations between 1933 and 1976. Most of the victims were young, poor and black. But the list includes blacks and whites, males and females.
“The most important thing of my life was being a mother when I grew up and got married to have children and that was taken from me.”
Eugenics sterilization proponents had ties to Planned Parenthood,received awards,funded Sanger
Wallace Kuralt was a monster , he was rooted in eugenics and not surprisingly and in 1983 Planned Parenthood if Greater Charlotte gave him the Margaret Sanger Award – according to a Charlotte Observer Obituary from 1994. Not surprisingly because Sanger was a racist eugenics supporter and members and Planned Parenthood got referrals from their eugenics Courts. One of Sanger’s supporters and financiers was Clarence Gamble and he funded the NC Eugenics Society which sterilized many black women including Elaine Riddick.
Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized from the 1920s into the 1970s under programs that embraced eugenics – the idea that one way to improve the population was to limit the number of children born to people with undesirable traits.
North Carolina performed the third-most eugenic sterilizations in the United States, behind California and Virginia. North Carolina is the first state to consider compensating people who were sterilized under its eugenics program.
VICTIM : Janice Black
According to the Charlotte Observer: Janice Black’s crooked signature crawls across the consent form. She didn’t know what kind of paper she was signing. Her name was the only thing she knew how to write.
It was 1971. She was 18. Janice’s IQ had tested out at 44. Her estimated mental age was 7. Her family decided she wasn’t fit to raise children. Her stepmother took her to Charlotte Memorial Hospital. Janice didn’t know why. She didn’t feel sick. She woke in a hospital bed. She tried to get up, and it hurt. She looked and saw an incision from her belly button on down. The state of North Carolina had sterilized her.
Between 1929 and 1974, the state – through the N.C. Eugenics Board – authorized the sterilizations of some 7,600 North Carolinians who were classified as mentally ill, epileptic or “feebleminded.”
She is 59 now. She lives in a house off The Plaza with the family of Sadie Gilmore Long, her longtime friend and legal guardian. Janice works three days a week and sings in her church choir and laughs at “Meet the Browns” on TV.
She tries not to think about the past. It left a scar. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been born, you know what I’m saying?” she says. “Sometimes I – what I feel like – that I wasn’t treated fairly. Like I was a human being. I was treated like I’m not no human being.”
It’s not clear how Janice came to the attention of the Mecklenburg County Welfare Department. But Wallace Kuralt, head of the Welfare Department from 1945 to 1972, was known nationwide as a leader in eugenic sterilization. His department sought out clients among the (as he put it) “low mentality-low income families which tend to produce the largest number of children.”
Kuralt saw sterilization as part of a progressive vision of family planning. Some women, especially in the days before the birth control pill, came to the county begging to be sterilized. But the county also promoted the operations for people who were poor, disabled, or in trouble.According to PJmedia: The Charlotte Observer has obtained records sealed by the state that tell the stories of 403 Mecklenburg residents ordered sterilized by the N.C. Eugenics Board at the behest of Kuralt’s welfare department.It’s a number that dwarfs the total from any other county, in a state that ran one of the nation’s most active efforts to sterilize the mentally ill, mentally retarded and epileptic.
Race played a major role. Of course. Kuralt was a strong Progressive eugenicist.In 1960, just under 25 percent of Mecklenburg residents were African-American.
Most of that happened in the ’50s and early ’60s. After 1971, only 48 people in North Carolina were sterilized through the Eugenics Board. So, of the 7,600 people who were sterilized in North Carolina, Janice Black was one of the last.
State law listed three types of people that the state could sterilize. People with a mental illness, such as schizophrenia. People with epilepsy. And people who were classified as “feebleminded” – which generally meant they had an IQ of less than 70. Janice, with her IQ score of 44, was labeled as feebleminded.
These days, in North Carolina, parents can petition a judge to have a child sterilized. But it’s the last resort. Ellen Russell, director of advocacy for The Arc of North Carolina – a nonprofit that works with the developmentally and intellectually disabled – says IQ isn’t a reliable measure of the ability to raise children. Raising kids, she says, involves subtler skills, as well as support from the community.
“There are certainly people with developmental disabilities who can raise children well,” Russell says. “As there are people without developmental disabilities who can’t.”
The Eugenics Board doesn’t appear to have dealt with the subtleties. They approved the vast majority of cases brought to them. Janice Black signed the consent form, and so did her father, and Wallace Kuralt sent the file to Raleigh. He recommended that Janice be sterilized. The board agreed.
That’s how she ended up at Charlotte Memorial, in the hospital bed, with the scar.
One interesting point to the Charlotte Observers article, is that they failed to show the connection Kuralt and many others inside the North Carolina Eugenics Boards have to federally funded Planned Parenthood today- like the 1983 Margaret Sanger Award which was bestowed on him.In writings and interviews, Wallace Kuralt described sterilization and birth control as the key to saving tax money and rooting out poverty…have we not heard this reasoning before? Like Recently with ObamaCare?
In fact, Kuralt was so excited about Planned Parenthood that he approached a woman by the name of Sarah Bryant to start one and she later founded Planned Parenthood Health Systems Incin the late 1960s
Bryant, then asked many of Charlotte’s most powerful bankers, lawyers, ministers, doctors, teachers and community servants to join her on a Planned Parenthood board. In 1971, two years before abortions were legalized, the agency opened its first health Planned Parenthood center on Morehead Street. Bryant got businesses and government to provide financial support.
Another interesting connection is that the Doctor who worked with Kuralt: Dr. Elizabeth Corkey joined in a lawsuit to overturn North Carolina’s abortion ban in 1970, and chaired a Planned Parenthood clinic….very interesting, HUH? According to the Charlotte Observer, Many of the women sterilized in the late 1950s were seen by the Health Department’s Dr. Elizabeth Corkey, an obstetrician. Dr. Corkey died Thursday, Aug. 24, 1995, but according to the obituary in the Charlotte Observer, She helped start the Charlotte chapter of Planned Parenthood, also documented in the Planned Parenthood website – here. And in this 1964 article she is a speaker at a Planned Parenthood conference.
ELAINE RIDDICK
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( H/T) Elaine Riddick was 13 years old when she got pregnant after being raped by a neighbor in Winfall, N.C., in 1967. The state ordered that immediately after giving birth, she should be sterilized. Doctors cut and tied off her fallopian tubes.
“I have to carry these scars with me. I have to live with this for the rest of my life,” she said.
Riddick was never told what was happening. “Got to the hospital and they put me in a room and that’s all I remember, that’s all I remember,” she said. “When I woke up, I woke up with bandages on my stomach.”
Riddick’s records reveal that a five-person state eugenics board in Raleigh had approved a recommendation that she be sterilized. The records label Riddick as “feebleminded” and “promiscuous.” They said her schoolwork was poor and that she “does not get along well with others.”
“I was raped by a perpetrator [who was never charged] and then I was raped by the state of North Carolina. They took something from me both times,” she said. “The state of North Carolina, they took something so dearly from me, something that was God given.”
It wouldn’t be until Riddick was 19, married and wanting more children, that she’d learn she was incapable of having any more babies. A doctor in New York where she was living at the time told her that she’d been sterilized.
“Butchered. The doctor used that word… I didn’t understand what she meant when she said I had been butchered,” Riddick said.
North Carolina was one of 31 states to have a government run eugenics program. By the 1960s, tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized as a result of these programs.
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“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, BLACK, and from a bad home environment.
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Listen to what the State of North Carolina’s Eugenic Board (Funded by Margaret Sanger supporter- Clarence Gamble more below) did to this “African American woman” : Elaine Riddick
( this clip below from the powerful documentary on eugenics and black genocide called: Maafa21 )
Clarence Gamble a supporter and funder of the founder of Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger… 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.
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.
Think the targeting of blacks for sterilization was coincidence? Just like they way they are targeted today for abortion??? Think again:
Read what Planned Parenthood Founder, Margaret Sanger, wrote to Dr. Clarence Gamble (who funded the State of North Carolina’s Eugenics Programs) in a letterdated December 19, 1939,
“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
Learn More on eugenics in the film Maafa21 (trailer below)
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NEVER NEVER FORGET WHAT THESE EUGENICS PEOPLE DID:
Lela Mae Moore Dunston lives in Raleigh, just a few miles away from where a board of men and women she’d never met voted to have her sterilized in March of 1963.
She was 13, living with her mother in Wilmington, and pregnant with her first child. It would be the only child the state would allow her to have.
Dunston, who was termed “mildly retarded” as the justification for sterilization, says she is not mentally handicapped and is one of a growing number of sterilization victims demanding that the state compensate them. Their mental evaluations were often based on flawed intelligence testing. Others were sterilized for reasons including epilepsy, blindness or rumors of promiscuity.
Many of these victims have read the petitions for sterilizations that social workers wrote about them. Often, they contain more racism and class prejudice than hard facts. The petition to sterilize Dunston says that she and her mother “live in an area that has a low socio-economic level.” Dunston is described as “a rather alert little Negro girl” who “wore a very ragged sweater and her hair literally stood on end all over her head.”
That was “a bunch of baloney,” Dunston said.
In the early 1960s, as Gov. Terry Sanford was leading North Carolina through integration, the sterilization program, which operated beneath the radar, began targeting black women of modest means. Sometimes, the petitions contained outright lies, as in this line from Dunston’s: “Both the mother and Lela Mae understand that sterilization will result in Lela Mae not being able to reproduce and both seem happy with this.”
Dunston said she didn’t know what the operation was about. “I was only 13,” Dunston said. “Thirteen years old you don’t know nothing about this kind of mess. You’re a child yourself.”
Here is a sample of what the Eugenics Victims have said:
Elaine Riddick: “I have to get out what the state of North Carolina did to me. I am not feeble minded. I’ve never been feeble minded. They slandered me. They ridiculed and harassed me. They cut me open like I was a hog, My body was too young for what they did to me. I had to have a child at the age of 14. When I had my son, at the same time they took my child in cesarean and then did that to me. What do you think I’m worth? … I’ve never had nobody to take care of me. I’ve had to do this all by myself. I never had anyone give me anything. I had to pick my own self up…What am I worth? The kids I didn’t have. Couldn’t have. What are they worth?”
Tony Riddick added, “You harmed my mother and killed her womb . When u look forward – It’s genocide – premeditated murder – you deserve to be punished….This is sinister. I know I don’t have the power to bring justice myself….We say we are a nation that’s concerned and compassionate and these victims have not been compensated yet. For my mother, it’s been 43 years…God will hold you accountable for what you have done to my mom.”
“This right here is a good example of what God is capable of doing.My mother’s life and my life, by ANY measure, would have been, should have been, COULD have been totally written off.”
LeLa Dunston (victim)
“I can’t have no babies…They told me to sign papers. I didn’t sign papers. That was not my signature on these papers…I need a reward or something…some kind of compensation for all they put me through. I wanted more children. I wouldn’t have minded having a daughter. Maybe two, maybe three.”
Australia Clay (victim’s family member)
“Every victim that went through any of this victimization was a guinea pig. A science guinea pig. It was bogus medicine. Bogus science…This is North Carolina’s holocaust. We need a wall. We need a library. My mother needs her name and picture in a library room.”
Melissa Hyatt (victim’s loved one)
“Nobody explained what the surgery was for, at least to him.”
Karen Beck (victim’s family member)
“I’m sure the surgeons that wielded the knives against their small bodies believed they were doing the right thing. Indeed, how could any of them be wrong?”
Deborah Chesson (victim’s family member)
“The eugenics board has deemed my mother nothing. To me, she is everything….You tore families apart. You hurt people. There’s no compensation that can put that back.”
Janice Black’s crooked signature crawls across the consent form. She didn’t know what kind of paper she was signing. Her name was the only thing she knew how to write. It was 1971. She was 18. Janice’s IQ had tested out at 44. Her estimated mental age was 7. Her family decided she wasn’t fit to raise children.
Her stepmother took her to Charlotte Memorial Hospital. Janice didn’t know why. She didn’t feel sick. She woke in a hospital bed. She tried to get up, and it hurt. She looked and saw an incision from her belly button on down. The state of North Carolina had sterilized her.“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been born, you know what I’m saying?” she says. “Sometimes I – what I feel like – that I wasn’t treated fairly. Like I was a human being. I was treated like I’m not no human being.”
A great documentary about this Eugenics relationship of Planned Parenthood is the film: Maafa21 – see a clip here http://www.maafa21.com – watch it in full it is a stunning film !
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