State Sen. Wilbur Jolly's voice thundered as he spoke at a public hearing in the legislature on April 1, 1959. Out-of-wedlock births were soaring and he had a solution. After an unmarried woman gave birth for the third time, he said, she should be sterilized.

A group of blacks was in the audience, and Jolly shook his finger at them as he made his points. "You should be concerned about this bill," said Jolly, a white Democrat from Franklin County. "One out of four of your race is illegitimate."

The blacks stood up and demanded to be heard, but in a state and legislature controlled by whites they were ruled out of order.

Jolly's bill never made it to the Senate floor, but in a sense it didn't matter. For years, the Eugenics Board of North Carolina had been quietly ordering sterilizations for unwed mothers. And beginning in the mid-1950s, the board had begun a pattern of sterilizing a disproportionate share of blacks.

"I relate that whole way of thinking to a way that Hitler would think during Nazi Germany," said Tony Riddick of Winfall, whose mother was sterilized when she was 14.

The sterilization program happened in a state whose leaders - then and now - congratulated themselves on their progressive attitude on race relations. In 1960, the year after Jolly introduced his bill, students from N.C. A&T State University would begin the sit-in movement and a moderate named Terry Sanford would beat back a segregationist challenge and become governor. And yet in 1960-62, the eugenics board ordered 467 sterilizations -284 were for blacks. This in a state where minorities were only a quarter of the population.

JOHN MENDEZ

Now, as the details of the board's work - about 7,600 sterilizations over more than 40 years - are becoming public, many activists are outraged. "It's clearly genocide," said the Rev. John Mendez of Winston-Salem, the president of the Ministers' Conference of Winston-Salem and Vicinity. "Genocide is the last stage of racism; it's where you start exterminating people when all other things fail ... just to make room for your race and your race only."

The Rev. Jerry Drayton, another local civil-rights activist, said he was frustrated by revelations about the sterilization program. "It's so much unfairness in the behavior of human beings that certain things just don't surprise me," he said.

Tom Lambeth of Winston-Salem, the administrative assistant to Sanford in the early 1960s, said he didn't even hear about the eugenics board until he was told about it by the Winston-Salem Journal. "Using a medical procedure for any racially motivated purpose, I don't think you can defend that in any way. A racial bias is what we should be ashamed of. And maybe we didn't do it as much as others, but I have no idea," Lambeth said.

TOM LAMBETH

Jolly, 86, is still practicing law in Louisburg. He said he has no regrets about his bill. "I doubt very seriously it was constitutional, but something needs to be done to prevent the burden of … there's certain people who just can't wait to have a child in order to get a check so they won't have to work, they live off welfare," he said recently.

The Rev. W.W. Finlator of Raleigh attended the hearing on the Jolly bill. He was one of the first whites to join blacks in the civil-rights movement, and he now regrets not having taken a stand against sterilization that day or later.

"There's a phrase that Martin Luther called 'wicked silence,'" said Finlator, 89. "There was a time when I was guilty of wicked silence."

Finlator may not have been alone.

Loaded issues
Race and procreation have always been loaded issues in the South. Throughout slavery, whites encouraged their slaves to reproduce to create more bodies to work and sell. But by the 1950s, some whites were fretting about supporting blacks through welfare.

During that time, the numbers of black girls and women ordered sterilized by the eugenics board increased. An emphasis on targeting poor blacks for sterilization seeped into the state's network of welfare departments. According to records from the eugenics board, few of the heads of these agencies objected to the eugenics program, and many bought into it.

"These superintendents were neither petty autocrats nor fanatics, but they generally agreed on the value of eugenic sterilization in reducing both general relief and ADC (Aid for Dependent Children) payments," Joseph L. Morrison wrote in a 1965 article in The Social Service Review, a trade magazine for social workers.

"Since Negroes accounted for a disproportionate share of illegitimate births 'subsidized' by ADC, the racial aspect of the superintendents' intent was clear enough," wrote Morrison, a faculty member at the journalism school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Some blacks remember women being threatened with the loss of their welfare benefits if they didn't submit to sterilization.

"When basically your only income is welfare, your livelihood is welfare, they (women) did what they had to do. And that's sad," said the Rev. Lee Faye Mack, 70, of Winston-Salem.

The sterilization program was whispered about in black communities, but evidence of its racial bias was not publicly scrutinized at the time. There is little if any record of Sanford - revered for his work in race relations - even mentioning the program, and Lambeth doubts that Sanford realized the turn the board had taken toward sterilizing disproportionate numbers of blacks.

"Who knew?" Lambeth said. "My guess - and unfortunately he's not here to ask - is that it never came across his desk."

Newspaper editorials and stories praising the program left out details about children and their parents fighting sterilization orders in vain. They left out references to people of normal intelligence being termed "feebleminded" as a justification for sterilization. And they left out statistics showing that more blacks were being sterilized than whites.

Those factors and others, including the complicity of some blacks, allowed the work of the eugenics board to proceed with few obstacles. "They (some mothers) weren't taking care of their children like they should," said Lula Morrison of Winston-Salem, a black who worked as a nurse for the Forsyth County Health Department. "It had to be some way for them to stop having them."

"Anybody that keeps having children and can't stop having them, it's something wrong with them," said Morrison, 95.

Another black who worked as a nurse for the county, Ida Ruth Staplefoote, agreed, adding that that those sterilized were mentally handicapped. "We just didn't want a lot of unwanted, uncared-for children," said Staplefoote, 91, of Winston-Salem.

"Of course, it's a different ballgame now. Some of them have as many as they want to."

Black doctors performed some of the sterilizations, the nurses noted.

When blacks targeted for sterilization resisted, they were often subjected to intense pressure. In Sterilization in North Carolina, published in 1950, Moya Woodside wrote that nurses and social workers found that "the Negroes tend to resist more than the whites which may be due to ignorance and superstition which is more prevalent among the Negroes than the whites. The very ignorant of both races are very suspicious of this type of operation."

While at Shaw University in Raleigh from 1968 to 1972, Mendez said, he and other student activists tried to educate blacks across the state about issues including the threat of sterilization. But they lacked details about the program, he said.

Even if more details had been known, it is doubtful that this issue of women's rights would have been a high priority in a civil-rights movement led by men who already had a long list of demands.

"I guess it was so many other things going on," said the Rev. Juanita Tatum of Winston-Salem. "During the '60s, we were trying to get our foot in the door to sit down at a restaurant or to get a job."

Weighing the costs
The 1959 hearing on Jolly's bill was one of the few points where the issue of sterilizations erupted into public debate. The bill - and a similar one in the House sponsored by Rep. Rachel Davis, a Democrat from Lenoir County - would have mandated that a woman who had more than two children out of wedlock prove that she was not "grossly sexually delinquent" or face sterilization by order of the eugenics board. The health committees of both the House and the Senate held the public hearing.

Jolly said recently that he doesn't regret his outburst at the blacks. "It wasn't the proper thing to say probably politically, but it was the truth. Even now."

But his bill wasn't racist, he said. He said he didn't know that the eugenics board was already ordering the sterilizations of women who had children out of wedlock, and said that more action was needed on the issue of illegitimate births. "One (generation) right on top of another, and they use this as a means of livelihood."

Finlator said that money shouldn't be a consideration. "This guy Jolly and others were thinking about the costs … of all these little black babies coming into the world. They were thinking not so much about the families of these people, but how much it was going to cost."

The legislature finally disbanded the eugenics board in 1974, 15 years after Jolly pushed his bill. "Sterilization is a vicious atrocity - gruesome, cruel, dehumanizing, degrading, barbaric, unethical, un-Christian and unconstitutional," Rep. Joy Johnson, a black preacher from Robeson County, told a House committee shortly before the end of the eugenics board.

By then, the culture of the South and the nation was changing as blacks and women were being heard more and more. They were beginning to share in power, although respect didn't always come with that. Prejudice lingered, and many activists say that it lingers to this day.

"The mistreatment of people is an attitudinal thing, and that attitude has not changed," Drayton said.

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

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