JOHN RAILEY: A victory's lesson

Sunday, Feb. 18, 2018 -- So it was that final checks of $10,454.54 went out to the eugenics victims. I talk about that final figure with my friends, the victims. We've been through this long war together. All the money in the world can never replace what was taken from them. But money is the way we settle scores in this country, if only symbolically. The resolution is far from perfect. But as the Robert Redford character said in "The Sting," it's close.

Posted 11:46 a.m. Feb 18, 2018 — Updated 12:00 p.m. Feb 18, 2018

EDITOR'S NOTE: John Railey is editorial page editor of The Winston Salem Journal, where this column originally appeared.

At the end of the iconic 1973 movie “The Sting,” two con men pull off a righteous sting on the mob boss who has had one of their friends murdered. The con man played by Robert Redford tells the one played by Paul Newman that he was right, that the payoff is not enough, “But it’s close.”

I felt much the same way a week ago Thursday when the state let me know that the final checks had been sent out to the victims of North Carolina’s forced sterilization program that ran from the Great Depression through the fall of Nixon, a brutal program soaked in sad secrecy that may well have robbed us of some of our best and brightest. I called several sterilization victims who have become my friends in the compensation fight to relay the good news of the final checks. Hell yeah, we told each other, even as they finished our chats by telling me their total compensation — $45,454.54 each — was not enough.

They were right, as always, these wise folks our state deemed “feeble-minded” in its rush to sterilize them.

Maybe the story of our 15-year battle for compensation, an underdog fight, will resonate in terms of lessons on fighting back against unjust actions by government in a bipartisan way. This damned program robbed more than 7,600 men, women and children of their God-given right to reproduce.

Several of these victims courageously told their stories in the Winston-Salem Journal and in my book, Rage to Redemption.” Those storytellers — Nial Ramirez, Elaine Riddick, Bertha Dale Hymes, Ernestine Christie, Annie Buelin, Willis Lynch and Charles Holt — sterilized as teenagers fought back against huge odds. One key advocate, Lena Dunston, died waiting for compensation.

North Carolina, when it was ruled by Democrats, ran a con game on the sterilization victims, bullying many of them into thinking they were mentally and/or physically unfit to reproduce based on flimsy evidence. In some cases, doctors whom women and girls trusted told them the operations were reversible. The victims were devastated when they later found out the operations were no such thing, that they’d been rendered permanently barren.

The program drew at first from the junk science of eugenics, but it was also about thinning the welfare rolls. And, near its end in the 1960s, as it targeted African American women and girls of modest means, it was about rank racism.

But unlike the “Sting” movie, the victims didn’t respond with a con of their own. Instead, they told their stories in 2002 to a Journal team made up of Kevin Begos, Danielle Deaver, Scott Sexton, Ted Richardson and me. None of us, the journalists nor the victims, realized then that our investigative series, “Against Their Will,” would set off international headlines and lead to North Carolina becoming the first in the country to compensate victims of a state sterilization program, and that Virginia, and possibly other states, would follow. We followed our series with many more stories over more than 15 years.

State Rep. Larry Womble of Winston-Salem picked up our cause early on, for years arguing in vain for compensation for the victims. I backed him in editorials and columns. Womble’s fellow Democrats held the governor’s mansion and the legislature, but they gave him nothing but lip service on this cause.

Republican Thom Tillis, then the state House speaker and now a U.S. senator, finally pushed reparations through, consulting with Larry, who’d retired from the legislature after a car wreck that almost killed him. Sitting by Larry’s hospital bedside, I drew inspiration for the fight. The final package was a $10-million pool to be shared equally among the qualified victims. And so it was that final checks of $10,454.54 went out to the victims.

I talk about that final figure with my friends, the victims. We’ve been through this long war together. All the money in the world can never replace what was taken from them. But money is the way we settle scores in this country, if only symbolically. The resolution is far from perfect. But as the Robert Redford character said in “The Sting,” it’s close.

And maybe our fight leaves lessons that resonate. The fight could be a call to action against current and future government abuses. And it could serve as a reminder that we should recognize injustices sooner and fight back sooner and harder.

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