I, too, am stunned---by how all of this has seemingly been kept under wrappers for all these years. Atrocities as horrible as this should be exposed to the light of day--in our schools, to our politicians, and to the public at large. Our black population should be educated from birth to grave about how easily genocide of their race can, and has been carried out.
"I, too, am stunned---by how all of this has seemingly been kept under wrappers for all these years. Atrocities as horrible as this should be exposed to the light of day--in our schools, to our politicians, and to the public at large. Our black population should be educated from birth to grave about how easily genocide of their race can, and has been carried out."
I'm with ya. And am simply floored, that this has been so successfully kept from the public. Most especially Sanger's close ties with KKK.
Don't be stunned it was kept under wraps. You know we're only given the news the left thinks we need. Read the first sentence of the Southern Studies report and weep. Timing is everything for the left. When they're screaming in one direction, we need to look in the other.
http://www.uiowa.edu/~ournews/2003/march/032503schoen-eugenics-prog.html
www.southernstudies.org/reports/ELLISTON.pdf
Eugenics in North Carolina Thousands Were Sterilized by the State By Jon Elliston Southern Exposure 31.1 (Spring 2003)
The furor over Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott’s remarks praising Strom Thurmond’s segregationist presidential bid reminded Southerners that shadows still linger from decades of white supremacy and Jim Crow. So it was fitting that last December, when Lott was on the hot seat, a little sunlight seeped into one of the darkest corners of North Carolina’s history. A five-day Winston-Salem Journal series, “Against Their Will: North Carolina’s Sterilization Programs,” provided the first in-depth account of the state’s eugenics efforts—targeting mostly the poor and people of color—and of the terrible toll, in the form of stunted lives, that those efforts wrought.
The numbers reported in the Journal articles begin to tell the story. Between 1929 and 1974, state government eugenics boards authorized the surgical sterilization of more than 7,600 North Carolinians deemed to be “feebleminded,” “moronic,” “delinquent,” or “promiscuous,” as the administrative papers put it. More than 2,000 of the victims were under age 18. Ninety-nine percent were women. Tellingly, as the civil rights movement gathered steam in the 1960s, the sterilizations, which already disproportionately targeted African Americans, were increasingly meted out against young blacks.
North Carolina, the series reveals, was a hot-bed of private and public support for such so-called “human betterment.” After California and Virginia, the state conducted the third highest number of sterilizations in the country. Enthusiasm for eugenics—even following the disclosure of the Nazis’ horrific endeavors in the field—ran high in the South after World War II. Economic elites, civic leaders, and social scientists saw an aggressive sterilization program as a means to “improve the race” while shrinking the welfare roles and reducing the black population along the way.
The newspaper series goes beyond the numbers and logistics, sharing testimony from several living victims as well as some of the retired doctors, social workers, and state officials who had a hand in authorizing and promoting the practice. The lasting pain left by social engineering run amuck is evidenced by stories like that of Elaine Riddick Jessie, who was an Edenton 14-year-old when she gave birth to her only child in 1968. Hours after she gave birth, a doctor “tied her tubes” on orders of the state. “It is the most degrading thing, the most humiliating thing a person can do to a person is to take away a God-given right,” Jessie told the Journal.
The revelations in the Journal prompted a long-overdue mea culpa. “On behalf of the state I deeply apologize to the victims and their families for this past injustice, and for the pain and suffering they had to endure over the years,” Gov. Mike Easley said December 12. “This is a sad and regrettable chapter in the state's history, and it must be one that is never repeated again.”
Apologies are a good start, civil rights and mental health advocates say. But, as North Carolina NAACP director Skip Alston has argued, some form of restitution for the surviving victims—perhaps reparations—will now be expected. Alston is pushing for the state legislature to hold hearings on the matter, and says the NAACP will hold its own public hearings around the state.
And there’s at least one additional significant step the state can make to come clean on what was long a dirty secret: tell the whole story by publicly releasing the files of the eugenics program. According to the state archives in Raleigh, an estimated 50 cubic feet of records on the programremain under official seal. While state and federal laws forbid disclosing the personal data in the files, such information could be redacted from the documents prior to release, opening up a valuable historical resource and promoting greater accountability.
Meanwhile, other states are also beginning to take a hard look at their former eugenics programs. On January 9, South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges issued the state’s first apology for its program, which led to the sterilization of more than 250 people—again, most of them poor African Americans. A week earlier, the Disabled Action Committee, a national advocacy group, launched a campaign to urge President Bush to apologize for the federal government’s involvement in eugenics programs, which existed in at least 33 states and sterilized an estimated 65,000 people.
The Winston-Salem Journal series may be found online at http://againsttheirwill.journalnow.com.
Jon Elliston is a writer based in Chapel Hill, N.C.
It's been known forever. It's just easy to do when people refuse to educate themselves and turn over their source of knowledge to the left leaning press.
It hasn't been kept under wraps. The County Press (A little suburban Philadlephia weekly) has been shouting it out from the rooftops for a couple of decades.