Between 1929 and 1974, the state of North Carolina forcibly or coercively sterilized approximately 7,600 people. The program was administered by the North Carolina Eugenics Board, a five-member state government body that included the attorney general, the commissioner of public welfare, and the secretary of the state board of health. It operated for forty-five years. It sterilized men and women, white and Black, though its targets shifted dramatically over time — by the late 1960s, approximately 60 percent of those sterilized were Black and 99 percent were female, in a state where Black residents comprised roughly 25 percent of the population. A recent Duke University study concluded that the state had worked systematically to eliminate Black reproduction during this period. North Carolina ranked third in the nation for total sterilizations, behind only California and Virginia. The program was not a secret. The attorney general of North Carolina sat on the board that approved every sterilization order.
The intellectual framework for the program came from the eugenics movement — a pseudoscientific ideology developed in the late 19th century that held that human beings could be improved by selective breeding, that certain traits were inheritable, and that society had both the right and the obligation to prevent people deemed “unfit” from reproducing. The Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization in its 1927 decision Buck v. Bell, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Thirty-two states passed eugenics sterilization laws. North Carolina’s first such law passed in 1919, was revised in 1929, and was made constitutionally enforceable through the creation of the Eugenics Board in 1933. The categories targeted were defined as mentally ill, mentally deficient, and epileptic — but the application of those categories was shaped by race, class, and gender in ways that the data make unmistakable. North Carolina exchanged eugenics theory and practice with Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. After the war, as most states wound down their programs, North Carolina accelerated its own.
What made North Carolina’s program unique was its use of social workers — not just doctors in institutions — as the primary source of sterilization petitions. North Carolina was the only state that extended this authority to county welfare workers. This meant that the program reached into homes and communities that other states’ programs could not touch. Social workers visited poor families, assessed their fitness for reproduction by standards that were never scientifically valid and were demonstrably racially biased, and referred them to the Eugenics Board for sterilization. In Mecklenburg County — where Charlotte is the county seat — welfare director Wallace Kuralt referred 485 people for sterilization, three times more than any other county in the state. The board approved 95 percent of all petitions it received. A 12-year-old girl was sterilized — her file described her as “often away from home” and “constantly talks about boyfriends.” She was 12.
Elaine Riddick was 14 years old when she was raped by a neighbor in Winfall, North Carolina. She became pregnant and gave birth in 1968. While she was on the operating table, without her knowledge or meaningful consent, she was sterilized by order of the North Carolina Eugenics Board. The board had classified her as “promiscuous” and “unable to get along with others.” The consent form was signed with an X by her grandmother, who could not read and did not understand what she was signing. Riddick did not discover she had been sterilized until she was 19 years old and was trying to have more children. She later testified before the state legislature, filed a lawsuit, and became one of the most prominent advocates for recognition and compensation for eugenics victims in North Carolina. The board that ordered her sterilization included the attorney general of the state of North Carolina.
North Carolina’s eugenics program operated into the 1970s — after the Civil Rights Act, after the Voting Rights Act, after the formal dismantling of Jim Crow. The sterilization of predominantly Black women accelerated as desegregation got underway, which is not a coincidence. The eugenics program was one mechanism by which white supremacist social control was reasserted after the Civil Rights Movement forced changes to the legal architecture of segregation. In 2003, Governor Michael Easley signed legislation overturning the eugenics law and issued a public apology. In 2013, North Carolina became one of the only states in the country to pay reparations to verified victims — $20,000 per person. A Winston-Salem Journal investigative series titled “Against Their Will,” published in 2002, broke the story for modern audiences and drove the political pressure that produced the apology and the reparations. The program had been documented in state records for decades. No one had been made to answer for it. The records existed. The accountability did not. The $20,000 payments — for a lifetime of stolen reproductive autonomy — were the reckoning the state was willing to offer.