Forced Sterilization Victims to be Compensated

by Johnnie Grant

Almost 140 people from Buncombe County were victims of North Carolina’s Eugenics (forced sterilization) program.

Now, nearly 40 years after the program ended, the state hopes to compensate those who suffered under it. Despite having the fifth-highest number of victims in the state, Buncombe County has yet to have a single victim come forward; now time is running out to identify those impacted by the program.

“Connecting with living victims has been a daunting task for the state-run NC Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation. We have one paid full-time staff member, and two part-time workers to cover two-and-a-half years of work,” said Executive Director Charmaine Fuller Cooper. “The agency has the names of 7,600 victims, but the records do not include modern identifiers, such as driver license or social security numbers. Sometimes the records list a county of residence, but it’s unclear whether that means the person’s home county or the county of the state hospital where the victim was a patient. Some records list rural route addresses, which are no longer used.”

The Eugenics Act (the Forced Sterilization Program) was aimed at filtering out people considered “undesirable.” About 60,000 people were sterilized nationwide; 7,600 NC citizens, the vast majority of them young women and teenage girls, were forced into the procedure between the years of 1929-1974, most of them during the 1950s. Some adults were forced to have their children sterilized under the threat of losing their land, public assistance, or custody of their children.

The state’s sterilization act required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth, and it divided society into only two classifications, “white” and “colored.” The act defined race by the “one-drop rule,” defining as “colored” all persons with a single drop of blood from an African or Indian ancestor. Victims of sterilization, many of them African American, could be identified by any “law abiding citizen,” who had the duty to report “promiscuous” behavior. The 10 counties with the highest number of authorized sterilizations between 1946 and 1968 are, in order, Mecklenburg, Guilford, Gaston, Pitt, Buncombe, Forsyth, Rowan, Scotland, Wake, and Hertford.

In 2010 Gov. Bev Purdue formed the Eugenics Task Force to locate sterilization victims and to hash out details of a compensation plan. Compensation amounts could range from $20,000 to $50,000. North Carolina is the only state to offer a compensation plan.

If you believe you are, or if you know someone who may have been, affected by the sterilization program and would like to verify your status and access your patient files, call the Sterilizations Victim’s Foundation’s toll-free hotline at (877) 550-6013 for information, or visit www.sterilizationvictims.nc.gov to download a verification request form. Foundation staff is available to assist callers from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday.