Thousands Sterilized, a State Weighs Restitution
Andy McMillan for The New York Times
The Eugenics Board of North Carolina sterilized Charles Holt when he was a teenager.
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: December 9, 2011
LINWOOD, N.C. — Charles Holt, 62, spreads a cache of vintage government records across his trailer floor. They are the stark facts of his state-ordered sterilization.
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DOCUMENT: View From the Inside
Questions and Answers on North Carolina Eugenics (N.C. Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation)
Andy McMillan for The New York Times
Mr. Holt, 62, at home with his relatives James Williams Jr., center, and Matthew Williams.
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The reports begin when he was barely a teenager, fighting at school and masturbating openly. A social worker wrote that he and his parents were of “rather low mentality.” Mr. Holt was sent to a state home for people with mental and emotional problems. In 1968, when he was ready to get out and start life as an adult, the Eugenics Board of North Carolina ruled that he should first have a vasectomy.
A social worker convinced his mother it was for the best.
“We especially emphasized that it was a way of protecting Charles in case he were falsely accused of having fathered a child,” the social worker wrote to the board.
Now, along with scores of others selected for state sterilization — among them uneducated young girls who had been raped by older men, poor teenagers from large families, people with epilepsy and those deemed to be too “feeble-minded” to raise children — Mr. Holt is waiting to see what a state that had one of the country’s most aggressive eugenics programs will decide his fertility was worth.
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