Rage to Redemption in the Sterilization Age: A Confrontation with American Genocide

By John Railey and Edwin Black

Nial Cox Ramirez, rendered barren in 1965 by one of America's most aggressive sterilization programs, made nationwide news in the 1970s as she fought for redress. Her landmark case fizzled in the early 1980s. Nial went on, raising a successful daughter, the one child she gave birth to before the state got to her. She never surrendered her dream of justice, but what happened to her and more than 7,600 others in "progressive" North Carolina receded into the background, buried under the cheery press releases the state program relied on before it closed down in 1974.

Then, in 2002, a team of reporters at the Winston-Salem Journal gained access to records that exposed, for the first time, the brutal inner workings of this sterilization program that had been backed by their paper. One of those reporters, John Railey, became the editorial page editor of the Journal and made victim compensation his cause. He joined forces with Ramirez, other victims, and state legislator Larry Womble, who kept fighting even after he was almost killed in a car wreck. This is the story of their victory. It's the story of Ramirez and Railey, two unlikely friends joined forever on a faith-based justice journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Feb 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781630878900

John Railey

John Railey has spent much of his life on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. A graduate of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, he is the former page editor of the Winston-Salem Journal, has written for the Coastland Times on the Outer Banks and has won numerous national, regional and state awards for his writing and investigative reporting. He is the author of the memoir Rage to Redemption in the Sterilization Age: A Confrontation with American Genocide.

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Rage to Redemption

in the Sterilization Age

A Confrontation with American Genocide

John Railey

Foreword by Edwin Black

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RAGE TO REDEMPTION IN THE STERILIZATION AGE

A Confrontation with American Genocide

Copyright © 2015 John Railey. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-822-8

EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-890-0

Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Railey, John

Rage to redemption in the sterilization age : a confrontation with American genocide / John Railey ; foreword by Edwin Black.

xvi + 182 p. ; 23 cm.

ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-822-8

1. Eugenics—North Carolina—History. 2. Sterilization (Birth control)—United States. 3. Human reproduction—Government policy—United States. I. Black, Edwin. II. Title.

HQ755.5.U5 R15 2015

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

For Nial Cox Ramirez

and all the rest of the more than 7,600 victims of North Carolina’s program of forced sterilization.

And for Kathleen.

The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.

—Proverbs 28:1

Foreword

When, in 2003, I published War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, I warned that my 600-page overview of the national movement to achieve a white, blond, blue-eyed master race and its organic links to Hitler’s genocide was just the initial clarion in the struggle to chronicle the dark history of this misguided, racist pseudoscience. I asked for fifty more books to be written, one for each state in America where eugenics thrived either under enabling legislation or as a shadowy extra-legal system determined to eliminate the existence of millions of Americans and their descendants. After all, eugenics was a national movement comprised of state actions against their own citizens.

Fifty additional books might well take several decades. Hence, our nation would be well into the twenty-first century before it came to grips with the enormity of its genocide in the first half of the last century. Even then, the vital aftermath would be unexamined.

John Railey, in Rage to Redemption in the Sterilization Age, has short-circuited those decades with an indispensible volume that unifies the two centuries. He focuses on the one state where those centuries constituted a historic glissando—from crime commission to crime admission to crime compensation. Railey tells the twenty-first-century saga of North Carolina’s victims, who fought extraordinary odds to learn the truth about how their own elected officials committed a long-outlawed act of genocide—calculated hindrance of group reproduction—against them with a Nazi-style coercive sterilization program. Then he follows the gripping story right through a cavernous political process that began with official state recognition of the nightmare it had inflicted, continued through the hard-won public apology, and then culminated in the heartbreaking and then heart-pounding decision to finally grant compensation to the surviving victims. In doing so, the last state to halt its genocidal eugenic program became the first state in the union to make a token gesture of reparation. Obviously, a cash settlement is a mere molecule against the monumental transgression North Carolina committed. But it represents a historic achievement for victim justice everywhere, and especially in the realm of eugenic crimes. The saga of North Carolina’s crime and self-punishment, as told by Railey’s book, will surely inspire other eugenic strongholds—Virginia, Connecticut, and California come to mind.

Indeed, that inspiration is proffered by a journalist with both a front-row seat and a front-door access to the history as it unfolded. There is no better man in the nation to tell that story as both a warning and a reminder to humanity of the victimization the best and brightest can commit when they are convinced they alone carry the burning truth and are willing to immolate all who stand in their way.

Railey does more than just a superb job of reporting; he positions us next to some of the pivotal personalities in the struggle. This includes victims such as Nial Cox Ramirez, sterilized at age eighteen under threat of her family losing welfare benefits; crusading state legislator Larry Womble, who pounded the pavement, the corridors and the gavels until he set compensation in motion; and Railey himself, who tirelessly advocated for and reported on the historic reparation.

In the final analysis, Railey has raised both hands to lift the bar for all such efforts to follow. In one volume he has chronicled the contemporary history, illuminated the hazy record, and waved a torch of illumination for all to see the way forward. Never again is a vow. Compensation is a down payment on both the crimes of our past and the caution of our future.

Edwin Black

March 8, 2014

Edwin Black is the author of War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race.

Prologue

Legality and morality are not, of course, in any way related. What Hitler did to the Jews was strictly legal according to the German laws he created . . .

—Hal Crowther

Raleigh, North Carolina, March 14, 2003

She is part of a story as old as the Crucifixion. Innocents on the cross.

She’s come all this way and prayed all this way. She has to speak. Nial Cox Ramirez slowly rises to a podium in the bland conference room. Committee members in plush suits and plush seats lean forward, waiting. Female photographers not much older than Nial was when this started tiptoe around the room, trying to find the best angle, the best light. The conference room is silent save for the soft clicking of their cameras. Everyone watches and waits, wondering what this woman will say in her debut appearance before the committee.

She’s a large and graceful black woman in a dark blue pantsuit, a retired nurse’s aide with gray hair cropped short. Her hard, dark eyes aren’t without a trace of innocence, a reminder that she was just eighteen when this started. She looks around the room at the strange faces staring at her.

The words won’t come, even though she agonized about what to say as she flew in from Atlanta the night before, her stomach doing flips as the plane roared to her home state of North Carolina, a place she hates. Flying back in time.

On another cold afternoon thirty-eight years ago, in another state chamber of bureaucracy just a few miles away, a few strangers walked into a room, closed the doors and voted to have her sterilized. She’d wondered who these people were who could make this decision about her life.

The North Carolina Eugenics Board hadn’t known anything about her. It acted on the basis of a form petition, several pages typed out by a social worker. The consent she gave came after she and her mother had been repeatedly threatened.

At eighteen, she was a minor under the law at the time. She and her mother signed a consent form, but officials noted in their paperwork that neither appears to be capable of understanding the sterilization procedure. The members of the board probably didn’t read those words, Nial’s life having been reduced to a one-paragraph summary by the board’s executive secretary, a few lines trailing off to a diagnosis of feeble-minded.

Nial (pronounced just like the soap, as she sometimes tells folks) didn’t get a chance to say she wasn’t feeble-minded or crazy or any other label they wanted to pin on her.

A clerk of the board had folded up the document, put it in an envelope, licked it shut and mailed it to a social worker at the welfare department in Nial’s hometown, Plymouth, an all but forgotten spot on the Roanoke River that was a three-hour drive down a two-lane highway from bustling Raleigh. The letter and several other orders of sterilization were sent out to the far reaches of the state. Nial’s order eventually made it to her social worker, who gave it to her boss, who in turn notified the proper medical authorities, who in turn made their plans without Nial.

And so it was that in the winter of 1965, shortly after the birth of her only child, Nial went to the Plymouth hospital, just a couple of miles from her home, and underwent that thing. She didn’t get any counseling.

In the fullness of time, she learned that the procedure was irreversible, that her doctor had lied to her. She learned that the state and its façade of legality had been behind it, that it was part of a nationwide movement, an international movement. Back in the 1970s, she’d stood up against the system, despite the whites back home who’d called her stupid. While living just outside New York City, she made national headlines by becoming the plaintiff in the ACLU’s first lawsuit against a state sterilization program. Gloria Steinem, with her long brown hair and chic style, stood with her at a packed press conference announcing the suit. Other speakers at the conference sought to tie the fight against forced sterilization to the one for abortion rights, a cause Nial wanted no part of.

She sought $1 million in damages but lost, ending up with just a few thousand dollars from one of the parties, who didn’t want Nial’s lawyers to appeal. Nial withdrew into her broken self. When I’d tracked her down a few months before, she’d been reluctant to reenter the fray.

But now she was again becoming a major player in the battle for compensation.

She’d learned that hers was not an isolated incident, that she was one of more than 7,600 men, women, and children of modest means often bullied into sterilizations by the state of North Carolina from the dawn of the Great Depression through the fall of Nixon, one of at least 65,000 people sterilized nationwide, including some who died during the operations, and many more sterilized in Hitler’s Germany and other countries throughout the world.

North Carolina had one of America’s most aggressive programs. The Carolina victims had been coerced into having operations in bustling cities like Winston-Salem and in rural hamlets like Nial’s Plymouth. The victims included prison inmates, patients in mental hospitals, troubled teenagers in reform schools, runaways. They were whites, Indians, and blacks, adults and children, including boys who were castrated—poor folks like Nial.

North Carolina had ramped up its program even as other states downsized theirs in the post-World War II era. North Carolina had roared on until it was number three in the country in annual sterilizations, behind only California and neighboring Virginia.

North Carolinians didn’t seem to care, despite the state’s large number of abortion-hating Christians, who talked of the sanctity of life. The program, once publicly embraced by progressive leaders and the powerful and rich and carried out by doctors both black and white, retreated into the shadows toward the end, carrying out its business with cool, cruel precision even as its foundation, the junk science of eugenics, caved under academic challenges. The program’s unofficial policy became racism and reducing the welfare rolls.

The Eugenics Board released little information about its work other than cheery press releases. It sterilized its story. Most of the people involved want to be sterilized, one of the board’s executive secretaries, Sue Casebolt, claimed in a newspaper interview in 1966. She once advocated not reporting to the public the race of those sterilized to avoid questions. Gullible reporters turned the board’s press releases into their own stories. Hundreds of unhappy lives were averted and tremendous costs to the state were saved as the result of the application of the state’s eugenic sterilization law during the last biennium, a reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal wrote in a 1949 story that also said those sterilized were protected from parenthood.

The program was a betrayal of the picture North Carolina was presenting to the world, that of a Southern state forward-thinking on business, transportation and race relations, more progressive than its neighbors Virginia and South Carolina, more enlightened than Mississippi or Alabama. North Carolina was the good-roads state, not some sweaty, dirt-road place.

Many of the victims of the North Carolina program, including bewildered children, were quietly driven to their operations on some of the best roads in the South.

Nobody had cared about Nial and the others—mostly black women and girls at the end.

Until now. Maybe. At least that’s what they were saying. North Carolina, one of the last states to end its program, could become the first in the country to compensate victims.

Nial looks around the room.

There’s Elaine Riddick, sterilized in 1968 in a county that neighbors Nial’s home county. There is Carmen Hooker Odom, a friend of Governor Mike Easley and the head of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. She’s an attractive blonde about Nial’s age who’d greeted her warmly.

I’m there as a reporter from the team started by Kevin Begos at the Winston-Salem Journal that had revealed the brutal inner workings of the sterilization program in the investigative series Against Their Will a few months before, a package that led to this Raleigh meeting. My job was the victims. I’d spent months tracking them down, interviewing them and writing their stories. Nial was one of the first I’d found.

We’re slowly getting to know each other. The governor when Nial’s sterilization petition was processed, the late James Terry Sanford, had been a friend of my family, a man who, my father says, was one of the pioneer liberal leaders of the South. Terry, as he was known throughout the state, has loomed large throughout my life. He was the one Southern governor who pioneered peaceful integration. He ran for the Democratic nomination for the presidency and went on to serve with distinction in the U.S. Senate.

Had he known about the program? Those close to him were telling me he didn’t. I want to believe them.

Why had my once mighty newspaper supported the program?

As Nial stands to speak, I hear myself whispering, Go Nial! And I’m thinking, Goddamn North Carolina—my state, which I had loved—for what it had done to her and the others.

Also in the room is Larry Womble, a state House representative and retired educator from Winston-Salem, a bedrock of the program. Soon after our newspaper series ended, Larry took the compensation cause and ran with it. We’re becoming allies in the fight. Larry is spending almost as much time talking to the victims as I am. He’s a tall man who sports a neatly clipped mustache. As usual, he is nattily dressed in a tailored suit. He identifies with the victims as an underdog who had his own share of troubles. When he was a city alderman back in the 1990s, he was one of several charged in a corruption scandal. He was wrongly accused, but was rightly acquitted. In several terms in the House, Womble, a Democrat, has fought for social justice but has a hard time getting his bills to the floor. The white power structure in his party gives him lip service.

But Governor Easley, who apologized for the program the day our investigative series ended, appointed a committee to study compensation. It is that committee, which has made national headlines as the first of its kind in America, that Nial is facing.

The Democratic governor is a bantam, handsome man who raised himself up from prosecuting cases in rural courtrooms to the attorney general’s office along the way to leading the state. The governor, who speaks with a soft drawl, is a paradox, a silver-haired, natural politician liked by everyone from blue-collars to bluebloods. But he doesn’t like politicking, preferring instead to work on carpentry projects in a backroom of the governor’s mansion—his bunker. He relied heavily on the black vote to win office just a few years ago, and he comes from the same region of North Carolina as Nial—the poor but beautiful coastal plain. Appearing at the hearing would have been a headline-grabbing moment for the governor, who faces reelection next year.

Nial doesn’t care that he’s not there. The most important person in the room to her is Deborah Chesson, the daughter she gave birth to just a few months before the state got to her.

The program was based on eugenics, which sought to create a master race by sterilizing undesirables. Eugenics had said that Nial wasn’t fit to reproduce, that she’d only give birth to, in the words of some of the sterilization supporters, morons.

But the one child the state allowed her to have is a college graduate who works in the computer industry. And that grown child often says she owes whatever she’s accomplished to her mom’s nurturing.

Nial looks at her daughter. Deborah smiles at her, nudging her on.

Nial glances out a window, focusing on some point far beyond the late winter day. She is back in the dark place, feeling the old emptiness, once again missing the children she never got to have, wondering what they might have done with their lives and what comfort they might have brought her. She worries about what will happen when she gets old, with Deborah having to look after her by herself, no help from brothers or sisters.

She wipes at another tear. From somewhere, the words come. Her tenor voice has lost most of its Southern inflection and sounds almost Northern. It’s direct and strong.

I tried so hard to bury this, but it just won’t go away. It’s like a cancer that eats you and eats you and eats you.

part i

Another Place, Another Time

All the cruel and brutal things, even genocide, start with the humiliation of one individual.

—Former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan of Ghana,

2013

1

The Girl

Years later, Nial would sit in her small, neat apartment outside Atlanta and wonder at the trajectory: from her dirt-poor childhood to making it on her own in the 1970s in New York, meeting the man from South America who became her husband and learning to speak Spanish, converging with the lawyers, Gloria Steinem, and all the rest. Then finally returning to the South, not to her hated hometown but to a new South that she and so many others had helped craft.

She drew strength from her Christian faith. And from her unshakeable belief that she’d one day get justice. She watched sermons on TV, her favorite being that skinny but handsome white preacher with the animated style, the well-dressed one with the curly black hair who always started off with a joke, Joel Osteen. And she watched CNN, which often reported on cases of overdue justice finally delivered. Brothers who’d spent lifetimes in prison for rapes and