John Railey was part of a team of reporters at the Winston-Salem Journal who in 2002 revealed the inner workings of the state’s eugenics program.
From 1929, when the legislature established the program, to 1974, when it was ended, North Carolina sterilized more than 7,600 men, women and children.
Though it’s been more than a decade since the Journal published its findings, Railey has never let go of the story. He became the Journal’s editorial-page editor in 2010 and advocated for compensation for the victims. Now he has written a book that traces the victims’ fight for reparations, “Rage to Redemption in the Sterilization Age”
Railey, 54, grew up in Virginia, graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and has worked at the Journal since 1997. He said he wrote the book to remember the victims, including his friend Nial Cox Ramirez, who was sterilized in 1965 when she was 18 years old and living in rural Washington County. She was unmarried, had just given birth to a child and was found by the N.C. Eugenics Board to be “feeble-minded.”
Related on the SLP
After Nazi experiments on humans were discovered in the 1940s, many states backed away from their eugenics programs. But not North Carolina, which had one of the nation’s most aggressive.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: New book remembers N.C. eugenics victims
