State-Run Program Had Mostly Poor and Black Victims
Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Afro American Newspaper
Tony Riddick comforts his mother, Elaine Riddick during the Eugenics Task Force listening session in Raleigh, N.C. a year ago, June 22, 2011. Courtesy Photo
(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The North Carolina Senate dashed the hopes for compensation to victims of a government program that, for nearly 50 years, sterilized its residents by passing a budget June 20 without funds to compensate victims.
Senate Republicans refused to support a measure cleared by state House members to earmark $10 million in the state budget that would have given sterilization victims $50,000 each, according to NewsObserver.com. The move would have made North Carolina the first state to compensate victims—most of them poor and Black-- of a state-run program to keep certain people from conceiving children.
From 1929 to 1974, nearly 7,600 people, mostly women, were sterilized in North Carolina, the last of more than 30 states to abandon the practice of selective breeding, known as eugenics, during the 20th century. In all, 65,000 Americans were sterilized before the last state program was shut down in the early 1980s.
Records indicate that as many as 1,800 victims are still living in North Carolina.
Even though Gov. Beverly Perdue (D) had the endorsement of the Republican speaker of the North Carolina House, she was unable to gain support from North Carolina Senate Republicans for giving money to the program’s victims. Opponents cited uncertainty about the potential cost and the precedent it could set for those seeking damages for past wrongs, according to the Associated Press.
“If you could lay the issue to rest, it might be one thing. But I’m not so sure it would lay the issue at rest because if you start compensating people who have been ‘victimized’ by past history, I don’t know where that would end,” Republican state Sen. Austin Allran said, according to Politico. He added that the state “has no money anyway.”
Compensation advocates in the House voiced dismay. “At this point, I have lost all hope,” Democratic state Rep. Earline Parmon said, according to the AP.
“I’m appalled that the North Carolina Senate today took no action to compensate the victims that we as a state robbed of their rights to reproduce and to have children,” she said.
Victims are even more disappointed, according to leaders of a state-funded advocacy program.
"Many are angry, many of them are just distraught and devastated," said Charmaine Fuller Cooper, executive director of the state-funded N.C. Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation. "Everyone had gotten their hopes up."
"It was never about money," she said. "It was about restoring dignity to people who had that dignity stripped away at a very young age." The organization has verified the claims of women throughout the state who were unwittingly sterilized after the state labeled them undesirable as mothers.
The lawyer for Elaine Riddick, 58, one of the victims who interviewed by ABC News, said his client wants justice. The victim of a rape at the age of 14, she was sterilized after a state social worker labeled her "promiscuous" and "feebleminded" at the hospital where the child that resulted from the rape was delivered, ABC News reported a year ago.
Riddick's attorney, Willie Gary, said Riddick was "hurt" and "in tears" after hearing the state senate's decision June 20 and plans to file a class action lawsuit seeking compensation from the state.
Opponents of funding for the compensation program said no amount of money would fix the wrongs committed by the eugenics program.
"We all agree with the fact that an apology is certainly appropriate," said Republican state Senator Chris Carney. "But I don't think that makes us any more sorry because we attach a dollar figure to it."
The Winston-Salem Journal first exposed North Carolina’s eugenics programs ten years ago in a investigative series.
For more information, people who believe they are victims of the sterilization program are urged to contact the state-funded victims’ foundation through an information hotline 877-550-6013 (toll-free) or 919-807-4270 (local) which operates Monday through Thursday from 10a.m. to 4p.m.