N.C. governor apologizes to sterilization victims

Posted 9:17AM on Friday 13th December 2002 ( 22 years ago )

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Gov. Mike Easley has apologized for North Carolina's role in sterilizing more than 7,600 people through a eugenics program that lasted from 1929 to 1974. ``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,'' Easley said in a statement to the Winston-Salem Journal, which ran a series of stories on the program. ``This is a sad and regrettable chapter in the state's history, and it must be one that is never repeated again,'' he said. Children as young as 10 were sterilized under the state program, which was often characterized by coercion and flawed intelligence testing. By the 1960s, it mainly was targeting young black women. The North Carolina program was the third largest in the country, after California and Virginia. Last May, Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner apologized for Virginia's forced sterilization of thousands of people from 1924 to 1979, calling it ``a shameful effort.'' Nial Cox Ramirez, 56, of Riverdale, Ga., who was sterilized at age 18 in 1965, thanked Easley for the apology. ``That is good, that is very good. I appreciate that, I really do. That makes me real happy. What a long time. A long time coming, but it came,'' Ramirez said. Elaine Riddick Jessie, 48, of Atlanta, who was sterilized at age 14 in 1968, said that the apology was ``fantastic,'' but still had her doubts. ``They are embarrassed I mean, they should be. I'm glad that they apologized, but do they really mean it?'' Jessie asked. Skip Alston, president of the North Carolina branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said that an apology might not be enough. ``The state, if they allowed this to happen, they should do more than apologize,'' Alston said. ``They should seek other remedies to correct that wrong in as much as possible ... reparations and whatever else might be deemed necessary or satisfactory to the victims.'' State Health and Human Services Secretary Carmen Hooker Odom, said while reparations are something the state should consider, she's not sure what that would involve. ``But these people were harmed irreparably through a policy that may not have been endorsed by the governors of that time or the state agencies,'' Hooker Odom said. ``My heart says that these people were greatly harmed.'' The Wake Forest University School of Medicine has formed a committee to investigate the school's role in the state eugenics movement in response to queries from the newspaper. The eugenics movement made exaggerated claims that mental illness, genetic defects and social ills could be eliminated by sterilization.

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