CARL CROTHERS

It was for their own good, the government said again and again. Nine out of 10 sterilization petitions reviewed by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina during its 40 years of existence were approved — in all more than 7,600 cases. Many were institutionalized mental patients, but most were not. By the time the program was halted in 1974, several thousand citizens had been sterilized under the pretext that it was good for them and good for society.

They were “unfit” to reproduce, according to the government — for being poor and illiterate, hypersexual or homosexual, promiscuous, even lazy. These and other “undesirable” characteristics led them to be classified as “feebleminded.” What followed was swift and irreversible.

That the eugenics movement in North Carolina, as in more than 30 other states, was ultimately ruled by history as misguided does not begin to tell the full story.

Today, the Winston-Salem Journal begins a five-part series, “Against Their Will,” that examines in stunning detail North Carolina’s eugenics program, whose goal was the systematic elimination of undesirable genetic strains in the population.

Journal reporters Kevin Begos, John Railey and Danielle Deaver obtained thousands of documents, reports and minutes pertaining to the eugenics board, many containing chilling exchanges between board members and citizens called before it.

The records, shielded from public view by the state, show that while other states were shutting down their programs after the revelations of Hitler’s crimes in World War II, North Carolina expanded its program to include the general population. Almost two-thirds of the 7,600 North Carolina citizens sterilized had never been institutionalized, and 2,000 were under 19.

Winston-Salem, through the efforts of some of the city’s most prominent citizens and a researcher at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine, led an effort to expand the eugenics program. Indeed, this newspaper endorsed the program with positive stories and editorials.

Perhaps most disturbing, the program took a racist turn in the 1950s and ’60s, targeting young black females with out-of-wedlock children for sterilization over any other group. Those involved deny a racist motivation, but the evidence is compelling that racial attitudes of the period influenced decisions. We expect criticism for bringing these details to light after so many years. But this is an important story, and one we felt obligated to write.

“We Americans tend to ignore our past,” wrote filmmaker Ken Burns. “Perhaps we fear having one, and so burn it behind us like so much rocket fuel, forever looking forward, forever condemned to repeat that which we did not care to examine.”