Deliver on promise to help the victims of sterilization

Willis Lynch says he was sterilized by the state when was 14 and living at the Caswell training school in Kinston.

"I remember getting up the next day. Yeah, I was hurting," Lynch, now 75, told me last week from his Warren County home. "I didn't know what was going on. It's just like cutting on a hog. They do a hog that way, you know what I mean."

Twenty years after Lynch underwent his operation, Elaine Riddick was also sterilized by the state when she was 14. Her operation happened in 1968 in an Edenton hospital, where she'd just given birth to a son. "The pain is always there," she said from her Georgia home.

Lynch is white and Riddick is black. What they share, along with so many of the more than 7,600 victims of North Carolina's sterilization program, is that they were poor people who were pushed into sterilization by an under-the-radar program, based on the junk science of eugenics, that lasted from 1929 through 1974.

Men, women and children were sterilized, often after being determined to be "feeble-minded" on the basis of faulty intelligence testing.

Others were sterilized for no more reason than they had premarital sex. Misguided believers in the program thought that were "bettering" society.

Now, after years of prodding by this newspaper and state Rep. Larry Womble of Forsyth County, the state finally may be getting close to helping the surviving victims of this program.

Five years ago, after a Journal team that I was part of revealed the workings of the state sterilization program, Gov. Mike Easley approved a committee's recommendations that the sterilization victims receive health-care and education benefits, that a memorial be set up to them and that information about the sterilization victims be included in the state's history curriculum.

About the only thing the state has done is create a traveling history exhibit, even as the sterilization victims are suffering and dying off.

Lt. Gov. Bev Perdue, who won election Nov. 4 as the state's next governor, ought to lead the way in finally delivering help to these victims. There's reason to believe that she will.

As she ran for the Democratic nomination for governor, Perdue promised to financially compensate the victims through a foundation, and indicated that she wanted to make the health-care and education benefits a reality. Now, Womble and others on a state House committee are studying compensation and benefits for the victims.

North Carolina may not be able to afford financial compensation, although it would certainly be justified. But the state has a moral obligation to finally deliver on the other benefits. It should also put up that memorial to the victims, and get their stories told in its history books, lest the state ever veer into playing God again. Whether the originators thought the program would "better society" by creating a purer strain of humanity or by cutting welfare costs, the program was a nightmare from the start.

As just one part of that colossal nightmare, try to imagine what Willis Lynch and many other youth went through at state training schools, at least one of which made sterilization a condition of release. "None of the inmates of Caswell Training School should be released before being sterilized, except in the few instances where normal children have been committed through error," according to the 1935-36 biennial report from the state eugenics board.

Almost 600 sterilization operations were done on residents of the Caswell training school from 1929 to 1968.

"It's always been on the back of my mind why this happened to me, as good as I love kids," said Lynch, a retired handyman.

For many of the victims of this program, the pain is never-ending. The least the state can do is try to ease some of that pain through health-care and education benefits. "It's time for them to start doing what they said they were going to do," Riddick said. "I'm what, 54 years old. This happened to me 40 years ago."

As the state's first woman governor, Bev Perdue should show the rest of the world that North Carolina really is a progressive place by delivering the help that this state has long owed these victims. North Carolina won't ever leave this dark chapter behind until that happens.

■ John Railey writes editorials for the Journal. He can be reached at jrailey@wsjournal.com.