PLAN FOR MASTER RACE WAS DEAD END

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Following is an excerpt from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (8 July 2007) about Louise Jones, who was sterilized in 1950 at the Gracewood Training School in Augusta as a result of Georgia’s state-imposed sterilization program. Georgia’s involuntary sterilization law was signed into law in 1937 and came 30 years after Indiana’s, the country’s first. The Georgia law authorized a state Board of Eugenics to decide which inmates of mental institutions should be made unable to conceive.

Georgia’s law stayed on the books until 1970, when legislators mandated consent of a patient’s parent or guardian before any sterilization.

Records that Jones requested recently from the Georgia Department of Archives and History show that on May 29, 1950, the acting superintendent of Gracewood applied to the State Board of Eugenics to sterlize Jones, described as an “inmate of the Georgia training school for mental defectives.”

The application described her as a “mental defective, low grade moron” – a term at that time that was acceptable to describe someone with mild to moderate developmental disability.

The letter continued to say that "if released without sterilization," Jones "would be likely to procreate children who would have a tendency to serious mental or nervous disease or deficiency."

After leaving Gracewood in her early twenties, Jones married twice and was widowed both times. Both husbands had been at Gracewood, and both were also sterilized there.

Excerpt

At Gracewood, Jones shared a room with several other girls. She attended classes and worked in the kitchen, shucking corn, snapping beans, shelling peas and serving employees' plates.

She once tried to run away to see her mother in Milledgeville, but a nurse's husband saw her and picked her up. It would be years before she saw her mother again.

After a few months at Gracewood, Jones said, officials took her without warning to the infirmary, telling her she would have to have surgery to tie her Fallopian tubes.

Although some other applications to the eugenics board from the time described patients as "oversexed" or having a "sexual perversion," Jones' file does not indicate that the surgery was justified because of any sexual activity.

The board approved the application on June 13, 1950. Because her mother was institutionalized and her father was dead, notification went to the solicitor general of Henry County.

Jones said she "wanted a baby bad," but she put up no argument.

"Down there you didn't have no says-so," she said. "You couldn't just go up and say 'I don't want to be sterilized.' In their mind, you need it."

Both brothers at Gracewood were also sterilized, she said.

* * * * * * *

Like several other states, Georgia has expressed regret over its involuntary sterlization policies.

An exhibit called "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race," on display at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through August 10, explores the link between the eugenics movement that sterlized Jones and thousands of others in the United States - and the Holocaust that killed millions in Germany and Poland.

The exhibit, which draws on 40 archival sources from around the world, features original artifacts, photographs and Holocaust survivor testimony. On loan from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, it is co-sponsored by the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum.

From the Wimington Journal, July 6, 2007

WHAT NORTH CAROLINA DID TO THESE WOMEN

Excerpt:

From 1929 to 1974, North Carolina saw the forced sterilization of young white
and Black poor women, some as young as 13 and 14, as the "self direction of
human evolution," according to a newspaper editorial cartoon of the time.

Incredibly, no less that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginia's eugenics program in 1927. Researchers say that state deliberately used forced sterilizations to "preserve white racial purity.

What it was, in fact, was a state-sponsored attempt to control certain segments of the indigent populations, using mental illness, physical maladies, anti-social behavior, sexual promiscuity, or even homosexuality as the reason.

"Some people requested sterilization, but many of them were forced against their will," the 2004 NCDHHS Eugenics Study Committee Report noted. "In some cases, victims were children as young as 10 who had no knowledge or understanding of the procedure."

North Carolina's eugenics program is being chronicled and examined in an exhibit titled
"Why Me?" at the N.C. Museum of History. The exhibit will then travel the state, starting in August.

Nial Cox Ramirez, 59, Elaine Riddick, 53, and Mary Frances English, in her early fifties, are three of the over 7,600 people subjected to the state-sponsored sterilizations, who shared their painful story with a museum audience during the exhibit's unveiling on June 19.

In Ramirez's words to the museum audience:

It's wrong to take away what God gave me because they through I was
feebleminded. I worked at the hospital for twelve years. How could I be
feebleminded?

I took care of myself. I took care of my daughter. But they said I'm
feebleminded.

Ramirez was one of the first to come forward publicly and tell how, in 1965, at the age of 17, the Washington Country Dept. of Welfare forced her to be sterlized the day after she had her first and only child. If she didn't, according to Ramirez, the social worker told her that her family would be kicked off welfare. In 1973m Ramirez tried to sue the state for what had been done to her, but the case was thrown out on a technicality.

A sterilization compensation bill which was filed in 2003, and would pay $50,000 in compensation to each verified eugenic survivor, remains stuck in the House Apprporiations Committee.

Whilst money will not make Rameriz, Riddick and English feel better, they say "we should be compensated for what we've been through."