OBSCURE FOOTNOTE UNCOVERS STATE EUGENICS PROGRAM

by Kevin Begos

Editor’s note: In December 2002, the Winston-Salem Journal ran a five-part series on a North Carolina state eugenics program that was responsible, from 1929 to 1974, for the sterilization of over 7,600 individuals. The reaction to the series was dramatic and included an apology from the North Carolina governor, a review panel from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, and the first state commission in the nation to consider reparations for victims of involuntary eugenic sterilization. SW asked NASW member Kevin Begos to comment on how he and his colleagues brought this story to light. The series can be found at againsttheirwill.journalnow.com.

In one sense, the thread that led to “Against Their Will” began last summer with a talk at the National Academy of Sciences on eugenics and pre-natal testing; in another, it sprung from an obscure footnote in a law journal.

I admired the investigative reporting by Peter Hardin of the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Virginia’s eugenic sterilization program and asked him, in July 2002, if he knew of any North Carolina connections. He said in passing that there might have been some mention in a special issue of the Albany Law Review devoted to the 66-year-old Pioneer Fund (which played a role in the publication of The Bell Curve) and Nazi eugenic science.

That issue of the Albany Law Review is just 87 pages long-but has 543 footnotes. With eyes glazing over, it seemed a blessing when footnote number 229 indicated that Wickliffe Draper, a notorious patron of racist science, had funded, in the 1940s, the department of medical genetics at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wake Forest University.

When I later showed that footnote to someone in the newsroom their response was, “That’s it?”
That response sums up very well the great distance between the reality of developing this project and the tempting notion that it was like a prospector who unearths a huge gold nugget and shouts out, “Eureka!”

In the case of “Against Their Will,” the series didn’t come from one huge nugget that was broken into pieces. It came from a whole series of nuggets that were found and put together by a team of three reporters.

The footnote led to Paul Lombardo, of the University of Virginia, author of the Albany Law Review article. Lombardo dug around in filing cabinets and sent me a package of letters from a researcher who’d made a failed attempt in the 1960s to get access to records of the Eugenics Board of North Carolina.

That led to my first look at the Human Betterment League of North Carolina-a group of wealthy citizens who bankrolled a publicity campaign for eugenics-and to hints that doctors at Bowman Gray had a major role in the sterilization program.

And those threads led to Johanna Schoen, an assistant professor at the University of Iowa.

She had gotten access to thousands of pages of records from the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, and wanted a wider public audience to know of the terrible abuses that took place during the sterilization program.

The eugenics board records are at the state archives in Raleigh, but were sealed, supposedly because of “medical confidentiality.” But in the mid-1990s the archives allowed Schoen to copy many records (with names blacked out)-and then later reversed position and decided the material was off-limits to the public. Schoen had the only copies.

But Schoen had refused to give other reporters or historians access to the material. She had devoted much of her professional life-the last 13 years-to research on the North Carolina eugenics program, and was worried about getting burned.

“I was basically waiting for the right person to come around,” said Schoen. “I kept going back and forth between, politically, ‘I have to do this,’ and thinking, ‘Oh no, I’m deluding myself.’ Usually you work with a journalist and what comes out of it just isn’t quite right.”

Schoen added that releasing the records was “a big risk” on her part, both in terms of reputation and legal liability. She was worried that a careless journalist might reveal the names of victims that had not been properly deleted, use other identifying factors in the records to trace a person, or might simply do a superficial job on a very complicated issue.

For a period of several weeks in late July and early August, I bombarded Schoen with scores of questions via e-mail and phone. I apologized for taking so much of her time. Months later, I found out that Schoen had been reassured by the diligence. She told me she didn’t mind what, by the end of the project, amounted to hundreds of queries. She was, in fact, leery of reporters who didn’t ask enough questions.

In the end Schoen asked me for a very specific agreement on how the records could be used, with the goal of protecting the medical privacy of the victims. With that final assurance, she gave me access to thousands of pages of records.

By mid-August my editor, Carl Crothers, was excited enough about the project to put a whole team of reporters on the story. Danielle Deaver, the Journal’s medical reporter, started searching through thousands of records at the Wake Forest University Medical School Archives, and uncovered eugenics research that had long been hidden by the school. John Railey, the paper’s religion reporter, took a lead Schoen had provided about two sterilization victims who had filed an unsuccessful lawsuit in the 1970s-and found the two women, who are both now living in Atlanta. Railey later tracked down doctors, eugenics board members, and politicians who had played a role in the faulty crusade.

Railey started researching other angles on how various parts of North Carolina society either helped or ignored the sterilization program, and Deaver started looking into the parallel history of birth control. State editor Scott Sexton handled logistics, editing, graphics, and many other details.

I read and re-read thousands of pages of eugenics board records, as well as records from the Human Betterment League of North Carolina. I also researched how the newspapers of North Carolina had supported the eugenics program with editorials and feature stories-but no hard look at the junk science of eugenics.

Six months after I first read that obscure footnote, the series appeared.

Looking back on the project, most of the success came from old-fashion detective work. I learned if you have a hunch, keep hammering away at it from different angles. And while new developments in science and technology are fascinating, don’t ignore history.

I also learned if you do uncover a good story, stay organized. I wish I’d bought a huge new filing cabinet at the beginning of this project, and created a system of cross-reference to keep track of the many different leads.

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Kevin Begos is the Washington correspondence for the Winston-Salem Journal. Science writing is an important part of his beat, but Begos has also reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan. He was a CASW New Horizons Traveling Fellow in 2001.