North Carolina is distributing the first compensation payments to victims of the state’s Eugenics Board program. North Carolina is the first state to compensate victims, who were sterilized under orders of state officials over several decades against their will by force or coercion, by setting aside $10 million.
Critics of the program claim poor individuals and black women were targeted. Between 1929 and 1974, approximately 8,000 men, women, and children — mostly poor, black, disabled and uneducated — were forcibly sterilized in North Carolina.
The state is scheduled to send out 220 checks totaling $20,000 apiece this week, according to Graham Wilson, a spokesman for the N.C. Department of Commerce.
But many of those who were sterilized could get nothing. About 30 percent of the 731 compensation claims submitted had been approved by September. Approximately 7,600 people deemed ‘feeble-minded’ or otherwise undesirable were sterilized by counties and the state over 45 years.
In the 1940s, the state Department of Public Welfare started to promote more sterilizations to help address “solutions to poverty and illegitimacy,” the sterilization victims foundation’s site reports. The Eugenics Program considered sterilization as a tool to combat poverty and welfare costs. Its original purpose was to oversee the practice of sterilization as it pertained to inmates or patients of public-funded institutions that were deemed ‘mentally defective or feeble-minded’ by authorities.
There was a point in American history where 31 states had government-run eugenics programs. It’s estimated that 60,000 Americans were sterilized without consent over the period the programs were in place.