North Carolina tried to ‘breed out’ black people from 1929 to 1974: US study
- Some 7,600 people, including children as young as 10, were sterilised in a scheme created to prevent ‘feeble-minded’ citizens from becoming parents
- The programme met the United Nations’ definition of genocide, the researchers found
A sterilisation programme that ran in the US state of North Carolina from 1929 to 1974 was explicitly designed to “breed out” black citizens and met the United Nations’ definition of genocide, a study said this week.
Almost 7,600 men, women and children as young as 10 were surgically sterilised under the programme that was created to serve the “public good” by preventing people deemed “feeble-minded” and others from becoming parents.
Most were coerced, but some women who had no other means of birth control sought out sterilisation by having themselves declared unfit mothers.
The new paper was published in the American Review of Political Economy.
It examined the years 1958 to 1968, a period in which more than 2,100 authorised sterilisations occurred across the state’s 100 counties.
The authors found that, for the period they studied, sterilisation rates increased with the size of the unemployed black population – but unemployed whites and other races were not similarly targeted.