RALEIGH

North Carolina has become the first state to officially consider paying reparations to victims of a eugenic sterilization program.

Gov. Mike Easley has appointed a committee to examine the subject, to be headed by Carmen Hooker Odom, the secretary of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.

"We need to emphasize the fact that we consider this to have been a dark, dark time in the history of North Carolina and to make sure that people who suffered from those actions are aware of that. Whether there is anything else the state can do to meet the needs of those individuals is something we will look at," Hooker Odom said yesterday.

Hooker Odom said that the committee will look at what other states have done in response to similar sterilization programs, and at information about North Carolina's program before deciding what to recommend to the governor. The committee will include Hooker Odom, her department's general counsel, a representative from the Division of Mental Health and two representatives from the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources, which is responsible for the state archives that house most of the information about the eugenics program.

The first meeting of the committee will be this week.

"I applaud the governor for taking that step," said Skip Alston of Greensboro, the president of the North Carolina Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "Sterilization is the No. 1 priority on the North Carolina NAACP's agenda, and the governor knows that."

Easley apologized for the sterilizations last month in response to a series of stories in the Winston-Salem Journal that provided details about North Carolina's program for the first time.

About 65,000 sterilizations were carried out nationwide as part of the eugenics movement, which claimed that mental illness, genetic defects and social ills could be eliminated by sterilization. In North Carolina, children as young as 10 were sterilized under a state program often characterized by coercion and flawed intelligence testing.

By the 1960s, the program was mainly targeting young black women. The North Carolina program sterilized more than 7,600 people between 1929 and 1974 and was the third largest in the country, after California and Virginia.

Victims of the program were grateful to learn that the state is taking more action.

Bertha Dale Midgett Hymes, 52, of Dare County was sterilized when she was 17. Upon hearing about the committee, she said, "Thank the Lord for that."

Nial Cox Ramirez, 56, of Riverdale, Ga., was sterilized in 1965 when she was 18. Ramirez filed a lawsuit against the state's sterilization program in 1973, but it was later dismissed on technical grounds. "I feel real good about this, because somebody needs to do something," she said.

Legal experts said that the idea of reparations for sterilization victims makes sense.

"My initial reaction is I think it's a very positive step," said Arnold Loewy, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. "It's an effort by the state to undo the wrong that was done, and to the specific people the wrong was done to. I feel the state ought to pay for the wrongs it does to people, and this one's pretty high on the list."

The issue of reparations for slavery is more debatable, Loewy said, in part because the people who were directly wronged under slavery are no longer alive.

Alston said he has talked to Rep. Earl Jones, D-Guilford, and Rep. Larry Womble, D-Forsyth, about drafting a bill asking for reparations.

Womble said he and Jones may co-sponsor the bill. "I don't know how far it's going to go, but I'm going to be drafting legislation.... These people need to be compensated in some way," Womble said.

Though there have been no successful lawsuits over eugenic sterilization in the United States, the provincial government in Alberta, Canada, has paid out more than $142 million (Canadian) to about a thousand victims of its sterilization program. The settlements in Alberta came after a woman won a lawsuit in 1996 and was awarded $740,000 for wrongful confinement and wrongful sterilization.

Paul Lombardo, the director of the program in law and medicine at the University of Virginia Center for Biomedical Ethics, who has written extensively about eugenic sterilization, said he was surprised and encouraged by North Carolina's action.

Virginia was the first state to issue an apology for a eugenics program early last year, followed by Oregon and North Carolina in December. South Carolina followed suit last month. In other places "there have been concerns voiced about opening the state to legal liability," Lombardo said. "I know of no state that has offered compensation, or set up a commission to look into it. Sweden, Germany, and Alberta have, and British Columbia just had a brand new lawsuit."

Lombardo said that more than a dozen states have laws to pay people who have been wrongfully imprisoned. "So it wouldn't be strange that we admit to a mistake and attempt to find some way of addressing the compensation," he said.

• Kevin Begos can be reached in Washington at (202) 662-7672 or at kbegos@mediageneral.com

• Danielle Deaver can be reached at 727-7279 or at ddeaver@wsjournal.com

• John Railey can be reached at 727-7288 or at jrailey@wsjournal.com