curate:

On March 8, 2011, Governor Beverly Perdue established the five-member, Governor’s Task Force to Determine the Method of Compensation for Victims of North Carolina’s Eugenics Board. The following is the testimony of Elaine Riddick who was sterilized at the tender age of 14 when she became pregnant after being raped by a much older neighbor.  Not only was she sterilized but she was deemed promiscuous.

Transcript

Elaine Riddick: I had to have a child at the age of 14 and when I had my son, they went into me at the same time they gave me a cesarean birth and they took my child they sterilized me.  What do you think I’m worth? What do you think I’m worth?
Reporter: Elaine Riddick was just 13 when a neighbor raped her, then she endured what she refers to as her second rape.  State officials declared Riddick feebleminded and unfit to have children.
Elaine Riddick: The main reason, reasons is because I was poor and out and Black. I believe that with all of my heart.
Reporter: Based on the pseudo science of eugenics, over 30 states passed laws regarding the sterilization of so-called defectives. The goal was to rid society of certain undesirable traits.
Charmaine Fuller Cooper (victim advocate): Some of those traits that they listed were epilepsy, feeblemindedness, promiscuity, criminal mentalities.
Reporter: Researches believe that as many as one hundred thousand Americans were victimized. By the time that North Carolina ended its own eugenics program in 1974, it had taken away the reproductive rights of 7,600 people - most like Riddick were poor. Tony Riddick still lives close to his mother’s town in the coastal plane. He says she doesn’t come home often.
Tony Riddick: They used to call it little Korea, yeah little Korea. The reason why is cause it was very violent you know, coming up.  She grew up in a very very abusive home. My mother’s life and my life by any measure would have been, should have been, could have been totally written off, but the fact of the matter is God still prevails and I’m grateful for that, very grateful.
Reporter: Riddick’s mother would be grateful for justice. She drove from her adopted home in Georgia to testify before a North Carolina task force considering compensation for sterilization victims.
Elaine Riddick: There’s nothing that the state of North Carolina can do to justify what they did to me, what they did to these other victims.  You know, it’s not my grandmother’s fault that she uneducated. It’s not my mother’s fault that she was abused by her husband. It wasn’t my fault that my environment that I was raised in - that I was brought up in this kind of environment; I had nothing to do with that. I was a victim. God said, be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth in his image you know.  I always told everybody, “how can you ever get to see the image of God when you are killing it off”?
Reporter: Riddick is tired of feeling like the victim but she’ll have to wait until next February to see if the tar heel state will give her and 2, 000 other eugenics survivors justice.