North Carolina moves to compensate sterilization victims
As many as 2,000 people forcibly sterilized under a past North Carolina program should be compensated $50,000 each, a panel voted on Tuesday, the first time a state has moved to pay victims of a discredited human selection program.
North Carolina has 1,500 to 2,000 living victims of the program, meaning that up to $100 million could be paid out in compensation, said Charmaine Fuller Cooper, executive director of the North Carolina Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation, a state agency.
The five-member task force voted 3-2 in favor of the $50,000 figure. The two dissenting members supported a floor of $20,000, Fuller Cooper said.
Governor Bev Perdue said she backed the compensation proposal and creation of a permanent exhibit “so that this shameful period is never forgotten.”
Fuller Cooper said the vote marked the first time a state had gone beyond apologies and taken steps to compensate victims.
Nearly 7,600 people, mostly women, were sterilized from 1929 to 1974 under a “eugenics” program aimed at improving society by weeding out people seen as undesirable such as those convicted of crimes and the mentally handicapped, according to a task force report in August.
About 40 percent of those sterilized were non-white, and some victims were as young as 10, the report said. The largest number of procedures were in Charlotte’s Mecklenberg County.