- [Male Narrator] Coming up on Reel South.

After local reporters uncover decades of forced sterilization.

- [Begos] I thought I've never heard of this, this must be wrong.

- I am a victim of the eugenics.

I was sterilized at the age of 14.

- [Male Narrator] Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle join the fight for justice.

- We're the ones that perpetrated this hideous crime, we ought to be the ones responsible for it.

- [Male Narrator] Next in The St ate of Eugenics on Reel South.

- [Female Narrator] This program is made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by the following.

(bluesy guitar rock) ♪ - Well, I think that this is one book that actually led me into knowing a bit more about eugenics.

These are records that are with the eugenics board, and they were with the state archives.

But they didn't want us to see these records.

They didn't want us to even talk about these records because they were records that were supposed to have been secret.

You can see that this is for whether or not you wanted to have the person sterilized or asexualized.

- [Dawn] Oh, what's the difference?

- Well, in sterilization, they would just cut the tubes.

But when they asexualize a person, they would remove the testes or they would remove the ovaries, which meant it was much more drastic than just clipping the tubes.

I was given a sheet of paper, and I have a copy of that I want to pass on to you, that says that these records are restricted and that you cannot look into the eugenics records.

It made me start connecting dots all over, and that's where I am now.

Connecting dots.

Connecting dots.

Hmm mmm mmm.

A whole lot of dots.

(mysterious music) - We believe that married people, who have transmissible diseases of feeblemindedness or insanity or epilepsy should not have children.

- [Mike] Compulsory sterilization was used by Hitler and Guerring to pursue their concept of a master race.

- There was shock last month over the revelation that the state of Virginia sterilized thousands of persons between 1922 and '72, in a program aimed at ridding the state of so-called misfits.

Now it develops that similar programs were carried out in some 30 states.

- Sometimes I can be laying in the bed, thinking about it, and I said, nope.

God has healed you from that.

You don't need to think about that no more.

The morning we had to go to the hospital, my mom didn't want to do it.

But she had no choice, okay, so she brought me to the hospital.

My choice was to either let my sisters and brothers starve, or take the surgery.

- When you say eugenics, they think it was way in past, but actually it's well through the 70s.

Now listen, this is the whole ball game.

Reproduction is the whole ball game.

I don't know why economics classes don't start with reproduction instead of production.

This affected poor men as well as women, obviously not as much as women, but it affected men judged to be not socially okay.

- My momma she picked cotton, ya.

She had to do some pickin'.

Oh yeah, me and momma was kinda close, sure was.

♪ Welcome to my world, won't you come on in ♪ Welcome to my world, knock, the door will open, ♪ Step and you will find, ask and you'll be given They operated me when I was 14 years old, you know, this sterilization program, you know.

I do remember waking up the next morning, you know, at the hospital, after they cut me you know, and getting out of the bed and stooping over and I just don't get it, why they want to do something like that for anyway.

♪ Welcome to my world - If anybody asked me where I was raised, I'd tell 'em, I was raised here.

It wasn't nothing wrong with it.

And, I mean, it kept me out of trouble.

I learned how to read, write, add and subtract.

I said if I can do that in life, I can get along fine.

When I had my sterilization, I was in this room right here.

We've done what we was told, and that was it.

I mean, you didn't argue about it, you didn't fuss about it, it was just the way things were.

I didn't want to have the surgery, but there wasn't nothing I could do about it 'cause the papers were already signed.

- North Carolina's a great state, a progressive state.

I've always believed that.

When I started working on this, that whole myth was turned upside-down from what I found out, and that was a very troubling thing to go through.

Here's the grand metaphor for this whole thing.

We thought we weren't some sweaty backroads state, our sterilization victims were driven to their operations on some of the best roads in the south.

- When I first learned about the North Carolina eugenics program I was in Washington DC for the Winston-Salem Journal mostly covering politics.

John Edwards, Jesse Helms and I learned about this program and I thought, I've never heard of this, this you know must be wrong.

- One afternoon, one of my best friends at the paper says, We gotta go out on the loading dock a minute.

And then he goes, Did you know our state had a forced sterilization program?

Yeah, they were forcing these people to get sterilized.

- [Kevin] Basically they were treating human beings like some other cog in a business of quality control.

- [John] I'm callin' everybody and finally, I get led to this African American nurse in her '90s.

She says, Yeah.

There was such a program.

I'm expecting outrage from her.

This was one of the many complexities of this story.

She said, These people kept havin' children.

What'cha gonna do?

- I was in that state archive researching the birth control program which ran under the state board of public health, and I had a conversation with one of the archivists about the work I was doing, and he says to me "Well you know the papers of the North Carolina "Eugenics Board are at the archive."

I remember walking into the reading room of the archive and the archivist hands me three rolls of microfilm.

And I had no idea what was on these rolls.

I threaded the first roll into the microfilm reader and I thought to myself Oh my God.

The stories that are in those files are just really, really awful.

They talk about abuse and neglect and people who are incredibly poor and there's violence in the family and there's rape and there's incest.

And the answer is always one eugenic sterilization after another.

- In the summer of 2002, I'd been researching eugenics, I found some of the background of the story.

I knew what I wanted to do, but a real turning point was meeting Johanna Schoen.

I basically said to her, look, you know.

Give me access to this stuff.

We will do a big series on this.

Essentially, she decided to trust me.

And once she decided to trust me, she let me copy thousands of pages of records.

- [Johanna] I felt that just writing a history book that nobody was going to read was not sufficient to do justice to these stories.

The sterilization victims I confronted in these files, it was like they were.

It felt like they were pleading with me for some form of acknowledgement.

- [Kevin] The paper gave us a room upstairs separate from the whole newsroom.

John Railey, and Danielle Weaver and Scott Sexton and myself were working for about four months, basically in secret.

We thought we had a really great story, but to be honest journalists often think they have great stories that are going to change the world or have an impact, and most of the time the stories don't.

- [John] So we were thinking that Governor Easley might apologize.

- [Kevin] And I said, Oh, he's not going to apologize.

And Danielle says, just make a call.

- So we all go look at it together and it's you know this one paragraph little statement but you know he by god apologized.

And then I'm thinking, what does all this mean though you know?

What does an apology mean?

What does justice mean?

And I realized that was just the beginning of this journey.

- [Narrator] It is better for all the world, if society can prevent those who are unfit from continuing their kind.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

- Eugenics had taken hold in America in the first decade of the 20th century.

It's rooted in the history of science, following the ideas of evolution, and then connecting those ideas of evolution with the ideas of modern genetics, that there were certain traits that you were born with.

- Eugenics has two aspects to it, both positive and negative.

The positive part is promoting childbirth among people who are seen to be socially fit, the pillars of society.

Negative eugenics is programs that seek to deter people who are considered to be socially unfit from having children.

- The vast majority of states had sterilization laws and they were popular partly because eugenics itself was popular.

It appealed to people who were afraid of the changes occurring in American society because of these massive waves of immigration from southern and Eastern Europe.

It appealed to feminists and people who wanted to think in new ways about human reproduction.

And I think, in a really fundamental sense, it appealed to people who imagined making America a more perfect union.

If we can make American laws better, why can't we make American people better.

That story, it has a dark side, and that's the story of eugenics too.

- [Johanna] North Carolina passed its first sterilization law in 1929.

- [Kevin] But 1933 is when North Carolina really started bringing cases before a eugenics board, voting on them, and sterilizing people.

It was the decision of the board that this person was feebleminded, sterilization was ordered.

- The North Carolina eugenics board had tentacles that reached across the state.

It was like this unofficial army of the night.

Somebody's running around, somebody's dressing in boy's clothes, sterilize 'em, get 'em.

- Sterilize 'em, sterilize 'em, sterilize 'em.

- [Kevin] By the time local social workers or doctors had recommended someone, people were on the train and in most cases they couldn't get off.

- The one common denominator was that they were poor and powerless.

- You know why I got dolls?

Because I remember, when we were little, we used to get dolls from the welfare, for Christmas.

Broken arm, broken eyeballs, ain't got no hair.

A raggley doll for somebody to play with.

And I always said "Lord, please, just let me get big, "let me get a good job, good money, I'm a buy my own dolls."

And that's what I did.

That's why I got all the dolls.

Because I got tired of these these raggleyness they gave us.

- Nial loves her people, her friends and her family, and that's why she made the terrible choice that she had to make.

- The doctor, he told me I'd always be able to have another kid, they're just stopping it for now.

That's a lie.

- Her doctor said, "It's reversible."

They lied to her.

Her doctor, who she trusted.

- You don't want to get dusty, do you?

Oh lord, I don't want that dust to get on me.

I got my teddy bears, I got my clowns.

I love my dolls.

I look at my dolls and I say, "Goodnight, good morning."

Very very nice.

- You're playing God over a whole group of people's lives, and I don't think we're supposed to play God like that.

- When we published the series in 2002, Representative Womble really got involved and he started taking a leadership role politically.

- We're the ones that perpetrated this hideous crime, we ought to be the ones responsible for it.

The state ought to be the one to find the money to correct the horrendous wrong that was done by human beings in North Carolina.

- [Kevin] I don't think any of us had any high hopes that there would be actual compensation because there wasn't anybody aside from Womble who was endorsing that.

- Larry is unusual in the sense that he holds himself accountable, not just the community, but he has that kind of discipline as a politician who feels like the owes us something.

His ability to deal with both white and black, republicans and democrats, it's a special kind of skill.

- I kept filing the bill, and every session the bill would get relayed to a committee.

And sometimes depending on what committee it goes to, that serves as a death note to your bill as it relates to the legislation.

- It really grew to feel like the state was never that serious about helping these people.

- Ever since I had a model T4, I started tinkering with it.

It's got 759,776 miles on it now.

But every time it gets to 100,000 it rolls over back to start over at one mile starting to 100,000 miles then she rolls over again.

I love this old car though.

- The eugenics board was designed to just be a review board.

In the years after World War II, they changed from being a review board to being an advocate for eugenic sterilization.

This is correspondence from the case of Willis Lynch who was in Caswell training school.

Willis Lynch was there at the age of 14 along with hundreds of other children.

In August of 1947, the eugenics board secretary reaches out to the training school.

- We are wondering if this is a case which should be considered under the eugenics board program.

- So, this is all written in very gentile language, but really, they've opened the door here.

They've said, you may have this kid here who's not a problem, you haven't contacted us about it, but we're contacting you and saying Did you really consider whether he's feebleminded, or whether sterilization might be a help to him?

And the letters start coming almost every week.

The first letter's August 13th of 1947, then August 19th, then August 24th, then there's another correspondence regarding Willis Lynch.

This is a secretary who's on top of the issue.

And I really get the feeling reading this paperwork that Willis never would have been sterilized without the intervention of the eugenics board.

This was a bureaucrat a couple of hundred miles away, just sending letters that would change this man's life, you know, when he was an adolescent.

- The only thing I remember is that they put me on the hospital bed and the nurse told me to start singing a song and I don't know what song I was singing but all I know was she put the gas mask on my face and that was it.

- It all happened so quickly in the spring of 1948.

On April 28th, the eugenics board approved the operation, and then May 12th, the operation was done on Willis.

So quick for such a life-changing, devastating experience for him.

- [Willis] Whoever was taking care of me, they didn't want me to have no children so they'd have to take care of them too.

- At the same time Willis was being sterilized, there's this whole push to up the number of sterilizations and put pressure on elected officials.

There's also things happening behind the scenes, and one of those was advocates were reaching out to business people and saying this makes business sense.

"Once we can make the businessmen see that sterilization "is a matter of dollars and cents, "I look for much easier and more rapid progress "than in the past."

They're reaching out to elected officials and social workers and saying, This is going to cost you money.

And that's probably what happened in Mecklenburg county with Wallace Kuralt.

- I think this story stands out because what happened was so final.

Once you sterilized somebody, that's pretty much it.

It was all legal, none of this happened outside the sanction of the state.

- But in Mecklenburg County, this effort was led at our Department of Social Services by people who were very highly regarded in the community as progressives and as advocates for the poor and for women.

- [Tommy] Wallace Kuralt had a long and successful run as a social services director here.

He, I think, considered himself somebody who was looking out for poor people of all races.

- For Wallace Kuralt, eugenic sterilization was not that horrible vision we all have of improving the stock and creating, you know, a purer race.

This was about poverty.

- I think one of the reasons that there were a lot more sterilizations done here than in other places was that Kuralt could make a pretty convincing case.

- [Narrator] Let's look at the thousands of Mecklenburg county families who give birth to more children then their meager earning capacity can support.

These families move closer to poverty with each additional child.

- [Ann] When you read Wallace Kuralt's writings, it's focus is on service to the poor or improving their lives, but he had to deal with local politics as well.

- Kuralt would get a load of the more conservative commissioners in his car and drive them around to the worst neighborhoods in town, and basically the implication was, do you want these folks having more kids?

You know, and he would get his funding.

I think the people who spoke out about this from the very beginning were incredibly courageous, to say this happened to me, and I need some justice.

That's the thing that can only be helped by standing shoulder to shoulder with other people.

- [Robert] North Carolina is now considering compensating its sterilization victims and a state panel heard from some of them today.

- My name is Willis C. Lynch, I'm from Bloomington, North Carolina.

77 years old, and they, I was operated on in 1948 when I was 14 years old.

And it's always been at the back of my mind, what's going to happen to me, and I don't know what else there is to say, other than I wish they would hurry up and do something, whatever, I'm 77 years old.

I ain't got much time left.

I hope before I die I will see something happen.

- It was very powerful, to actually see somebody standing in front of you who had been deemed by the state not fit to reproduce, you could sort of feel the weight of that mistake and see it brought to life in front of you.

- My name is Elaine Riddick.

I am a victim of the eugenics.

I was sterilized at the age of 14.

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.

There's nothing, there's no amount in the world.

- [John] And all of a sudden, it gets a lot of national attention.

- As you watch this next story, you will likely ask over and over, "how could this kind of thing have happened "in this country?"

- It's almost unbelievable, frankly, to imagine this, but the shameful truth tens of thousands of American citizens were sterilized without their consent as part of a eugenics program that operated across more than half the states in this country.

- From the early 1900s to the 1970s, some 65,000 men and women were sterilized as part of a government eugenics program to keep so called "undesirables" from reproducing.

- It's stunning that this happened, and in some places, anyone could suggest that someone else should be sterilized.

- I hope that the legislature, in this case, steps up and compensates these individuals who've suffered such an atrocity.

- There seems to a lot of foot dragging going on, and some of the victims think that the state is trying to wait for them to die.

- Don't think I'm going to die, because I ain't.

I said if they want to die, go ahead.

But I'm not going to die.

Don't even think about it.

Don't even put it on the calendar that I'm going to die.

Because I'm going to be right here until the end.

- [Ed] In the 1950's, for the first time, the Supreme Court of the United States began striking down the old Jim Crowe laws that provided for segregation.

- Segregation had shielded some black women from the eugenicists' scalpel, because they were simply excluded from white healthcare institutions.

- [Kevin] Nobody gave black people anything in North Carolina in the 20s and 30s.

Now they were starting to get some public assistance.

- As African Americans gained access to these services, they then also get to, quote unquote, benefit from eugenic sterilization which they don't before.

- In February of 1965, when Nial was rendered barren, in the hospital in her town of Plymouth, the world was changing, America was changing.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passes.

The Voting Rights Act will come right after that.

But you wouldn't know that in Plymouth with what's happening to Nial.

- So I begin to get the lawsuit going, call the lawyers.

- What happened as I recall, I was sitting in my office at the Reproductive Freedom Rights Project, and Nial Ruth Cox is taken into my office and she handed me a tiny little piece of paper about that big, with the words bilateral tubal ligation on them.

She asked me what it meant, and I told her.

I said, I think we have a lawsuit, and we wanted to bring a class action.

- One of the things that's fascinating about Nial Ruth Cox's case is that it was part of the early work of the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project.

- Reproductive rights was not a spectrum then.

The whole idea of reproductive rights didn't really exist.

- Their hopes got up.

I mean that was some pretty serious legal talent lining up behind it.

And those were all good lawyers, but essentially what they got done is they got the eugenics program shut down but they weren't ever able to get any compensation for the victims.

- They fought very hard for me to get the compensation, so I don't understand why.

- It was 25 years after Nial Ruth Cox that I walked into the North Carolina State Archive and got handed the microfilm with the material that would essentially allow us to prove class action.

- I was a girl and they was afraid I might wind up like mama having children without being married you know.

Back then, it was a sin, of course it still is a sin, but you know, they don't put it down and call children bastards like they used to.

Course I was never called one, 'cause I never did tell anyone much that I was born out of wedlock.

This thing don't want to cooperate with me.

I got a letter that said "Dear Ms. Grant, thank you for contacting the North Carolina "Justice for Sterilization Victims foundation "to request a search of the North Carolina."

I don't know that word.

- [Dawn] Eugenics - Eugenics board program records.

Momma figured we'd be better at the school in the wintertime when it was cold.

She said at least we would be warm.

I was eight years old, almost nine, when I went, in January of '49.

- [Johanna] Caswell Training School is the very first attempt in North Carolina to bring kind of a progressive vision to the treatment of people with intellectual challenges, but it becomes a dumping ground for young people and children that nobody else wants.

- I do hereby give my consent for the performance of such operation and it's got Deborah Campbell Austin signed it, which is my mother.

I can see her name on here several times, but yeah I think she was trying to protect me from having a whole bunch of children like she had, without being married.

- So getting admitted to Caswell essentially was a pathway to a eugenic sterilization.

- If I had said no, they probably would have gone ahead and done it anyway.

- It was very hard for people to push back on.

Many of the people who were sterilized were hardly aware of what was happening until right before they would go into the hospital.

- It is our hope that Dorothy Mae returns to live a simple way of life outside of the institution eventually.

It's got the woman's name that signed it, Margaret M. Lang, assistant social service director.

- The eugenics case clearly shows that when government has been involved in the past in producing a problem, you cannot come to a point somewhere and say government get out of the way.

- I told Representative Womble, I like a good parade, but I really like getting into the game.

- So for years, Representative Womble, was introducing these bills, he got virtually no support, a handful of support, and that changed in 2011 with Speaker Thom Tillis.

- Really, it's amazing to me, the victims that I've met, how gracious they are.

I'd be mad as hell.

And I tell all my members, you've got three ways you need to vote on a bill.

You never vote against your conscience.

If your conscience isn't driving you on a bill, you never vote against your constituents, and if neither of those are real drivers, then vote with your caucus, but never let your party affiliation ever trump your conscience or your constituents because that's what you're here for.

- Thom Tillis was elected in late 2010 by the republican caucus as speaker, which was pretty unusual.

Here's a guy who had only been in politics for about six or seven years at that point, and then all of a sudden-bam, he gets elected speaker by the caucus.

- So when we started doing the stories on eugenic sterilization, I thought let's get comment from this person and I just remember feeling like he was interviewing me as much as I was interviewing him, I mean he was just really curious about what is this and what happened and then what did it mean, and then after, he started really pushing for compensation for the victims.

- I guess there's something to be said for perseverance.

We're closer, for the first time to bring this before the state legislature in North Carolina.

- The next part of our meeting is really oh good morning.

We have the great pleasure to be joined the speaker of the North Carolina House.

- I think I share Representative Womble's concern that this is the third or fourth task force that's looked at the issue, so from that point forward, I was like "okay, let's getter done."

And frankly, for the life of me, I don't know why this wasn't dealt with 10 years ago.

I've discussed with Representative Womble that we may establish a select committee to focus on this.

I think the thing that was remarkable to me in the task force meeting to see that most other states moved on after the second world war, and there was in fact a spike in the '60s and '70s in North Carolina.

That was very surprising to me, honestly I didn't know that before that meeting this morning.

- [Tommy] I'm Tommy Tomlinson with the Observer.

- Hey Tommy How are you?

I've never met ya but I'm a big fan.

Get bill drafting, legislative resource folks, constitutional experts, all the folks that we would need to build the legislative agenda.

- And when could that happen?

When theoretically.

- Very soon.

- The whole purpose of government should be to do what we can't do alone.

The only reason for power, political power, is this good of the whole, not the whims of a few.

- This 10 year journey has a tendency sometimes to get frustrated you get sometimes despondent.

When you're going against the state, you have to be in this for the long haul.

You have to have a positive attitude that maybe one day, and I may not see it, but those people will receive their compensation.

- [Robert] From NPR news, All Things Considered, I'm Robert Siegel.

North Carolina is trying to make amends for an ugly chapter.

- [David] How does a state begin to make amends for the wrongs that it committed against its own people.

- I get readers telling me, "We're sick of hearing about this."

I've had friends suddenly tell me "You might want to back off this, "you're making a fool out of yourself."

But you know, go down fighting.

I'd rather have a majestic failure than a mediocre going-through life, never trying anything.

- People seem to forget about sterilization abuse very quickly.

It flashes through the headlines once every few years, and then it's forgotten.

- I think our state's in need of redemption.

We were the worst of the worst, so now we can be the best of the best by being the first state to compensate victims.

Thom and I probably disagree about most other things but we share this commitment and we talk about it.

I said well, how firm is your commitment to this?

And he said, I'll consider it a personal failure if I don't get it passed this year.

- You know we're lining up for a political year, presidential election year, so we're even more political than we would normally be.

The last task force recommended 50,000 dollars.

A lot of people were only thinking about that event of I've identified this victim, they're entitled to this amount, we send them a check.

But it's a lot more complicated than that.

Safeguards, protections, scope, language in the statutes that we need to make sure that we get that right.

- Are we going to make a bill that survives judicial scrutiny?

- They may have guardians?

They may need guardians appointed.

- Is this bill constitutional?

- I would be concerned if it came out at resolution that there was no cause of action.

- And then, from a kind of policy standpoint, is this bill going to be accomplishing what the state is after?

- The difficulty is going to be to verify who the victims are.

- One of the goals would be to keep it simple so that.

- They're not going to be extremely savvy about getting paperwork together so we'll have to work together.

- No, they're not.

The Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation can help in.

- Give the victims a 1,000 dollar tax credit.

- [Gloria] Supporting them and getting them compensation.

- What else?

- If I had a choice between memory and anger about what's going on in the present, I would choose anger about what's going on in the present because nobody gets radicalized by gratitude.

You get radicalized by the injustice that you feel.

- I had a brief discussion with the Senate Chief of Staff today and he thinks Senator Berger's behind it, so it's a matter of working out the mechanics.

- That's my understanding as well.

- I think if we have language we're all comfortable with, I'd like to get it introduced tomorrow.

- I think Tillis can get the House to pass it, and we've still been working on the leader of the Senate, Berger, Phil Berger to pass it and for whatever reason, he won't give it the guarantee that Tillis will, but I think it'll take on a life of it's own if the House passes it.

- Legislators' supposed to come up with a meeting on it and do it this time around too, to compensate people you know they've done it for, but I don't know if it's gonna pass, if they're gonna pay up or whatever you know.

- I think all little kids should have their own dolls, you know, they should have good dolls to play with.

Like I said, I want to give some of dolls to St. Jude's, to little kids that got the cancer and things, to give something back to somebody else, some other child.

- Representatives Womble, Tillis, Parmon, and Stam.

House bill 947.

A bill to be entitled An Act to Provide Monetary Compensation to Persons Asexualized or Sterilized under the authority of the Eugenics Board of North Carolina.

- [News Anchor] North Carolina house speaker Thom Tillis conceded defeat Wednesday after the state senate rebuffed appeals to compensate victims of forced sterilizations.

- I said that if compensation for eugenics didn't occur, it'd be a personal failure, and at this point it is, it's something I'll continue to work on.

- They're liable to drag things out you know, like they've done dragged things out, for 10 years now and still draggin'.

- [Clerk] All say aye.

- [Reporter] The measure overwhelmingly cleared the State House, but yesterday, the State Senate announced a budget without money for victims.

- The House bill was designed to give a kind of fixed payment of 50,000 dollars per victim, with an unlimited number of victims.

And this had the obvious appeal at least of promising justice for everyone who could come forward.

I think that the downside of the bill was that there was an unlimited amount of potential money that the state would have to pay out.

I think that frightened a lot of people off.

- There was no ability to develop consensus on one particular path forward with reference to eugenics.

- A lot of people are gonna be in a huff.

They get their hopes all up and then somebody comes along and dashes them, you know.

It's just the way things are.

You just have to, like I say, go along with the flow, whether you like it or not.

- I told John Railey, I told him the other day, I said tell the I'm gonna be stubborn, I'm gonna keep living.

Just like North Carolina be stubborn with paying me.

I'm going to keep going.

He got a kick out of that.

- Maybe I'm just a cynic, you know, a hard-boiled reporter but I always had my doubts.

It was very clear in North Carolina that the governor was behind this, the Speaker of the House was behind this.

The Senate was too silent.

Frankly it's not going to become a law unless the House and the Senate and the Governor are all behind it.

- [Rachel] In 2012, this past election cycle.

Republicans succeeded in taking it all back.

Republicans in North Carolina won back the Governor's mansion, and both the House and the Senate, they can govern at will.

- [Earline] Mr. Speaker, thank you so much.

- Welcome back!

Did you miss it yet?

- I do, I really do.

- Well it turns out, I just broke protocol.

I'm not supposed to call him Speaker Pro-Tem unless he's up at the podium.

I thought I was supposed to call him Speaker.

I've got to start paying attention to these rules.

We have the strongest majorities that the General Assembly's had for over 100 years - It takes a lot of time for legislation to gain traction in the state.

You introduce something and then you introduce it again and you introduce it again and you introduce it again, I think that's definitely true with the eugenics compensation package.

- Again, I'm making the assumption that we have no issues within the Democratic caucus and we've got good support, majority support within the republican caucus.

- One tactical point, but I need to say this to Sen. McKissisck and Parmon, when you get the bill, the temptation will be to get every Democrat as a co-sponsor on the bill, but I would limit it to the number of Republicans you can get.

- [McKissick] Last year, it was challenging to get them to sign on as primaries.

- Every single aspect of this bill needs to be perfectly choreographed.

Every single interaction with the Senate, every step through committee, every piece of it we want to make sure that we're getting it straight down to the talking points.

- [John] If it doesn't pass this year, the game's over.

It's never going to happen.

So it's a now or never moment for our state.

- With the compensation for eugenics victims, then Republican super majority today, I have to reach out to conservative groups.

A very well-regarded conservative think-tank in North Carolina is the John Locke Foundation, and the president of the John Locke Foundation and I have met, and he's agreed to come with me and do briefings with the caucus to explain why this is a good conservative measure that we should support.

- Well, when the government actually imposes harm on individuals, the government does usually compensate those people.

That didn't occur here.

- We're in a moment right now with all this poverty and all this hurt that we see, that we don't need so much republicans and democrats as we need statesmen and stateswomen - Placing a price on a contemptible evil, like eugenics, is equivalent to trying to rectify something that by its very nature is unrectifyable.

In addition, demanding me, and North Carolina taxpayers like me, to sanction this involuntarily through our tax dollars, is also morally wrong.

I had nothing to do with this.

I should not be punished or have to pay for the crimes of other people.

- People are afraid that if you compensate sterilization victims that you will then lead to other kinds of claims, and you end up with this endless variety of demands for reparations and a grievance industry that never goes away.

- How do you deal with this?

When society has done something so despicable, how do you fix it?

And can you fix it?

- I wish that someday god will give me enough money.

I would take and deliver it myself.

I would make sure each kid gets what they want, each family has a house of their own.

Be a child, let them be children, grow up and be good grown adults without a whole bunch of problems.

I have faith in God, that something is going to come out of this good.

I don't know what it is, for me or somebody else, but somebody is going to get something good out of this.

God don't let things happen to you for no reason, there's got to be a reason.

- Isaiah's one of my favorite prophets and one of the things Isiah said one time is Lord, I'm a sinner, and I live in a midst of a people with unclean lips.

And even though he was the prophet, he asked God to forgive him and the whole nation, so my hope is that we'll do enough to try to make it right, that perhaps somewhere in the great divide, God will look on us and say, they got it.

- [Thom] The question before the House is the adoption of the conference report for Senate Bill 402.

64 having voted in the affirmative and 52 in the negative.

The motion passes.

♪ My pretty little snowflakes ♪ Oh a change in the weather has made it better for me ♪ Hey hey hey snowflakes my pretty little snowflakes (happy music) - In July 2013, when I learned the state legislature had appropriated money, I have to say, I was really positively impressed and surprised because I did not really think that was going to happen.

- [John] Money's a funny thing in relation to this.

It doesn't mean anything because there's no way in hell you're ever going to compensate these people for what you took from them.

On the other hand, money is how we settle scores in this country.

Tillis decides, let's not put it in a bill, let's put it in a budget because there might be people who say, "I'll never go for that.

"I don't want to be on record for that, "I don't believe it, whatever."

- When you come down to the final steps of the budget, as the speaker of the House I have a fair amount of say over whether or not we say we're done.

- [John] From everything I understand, it came down to the wire, and he's wrestling it out.

He's horse-trading with his counterpart in the Senate, Phil Berger.

- There's this final piece where the leader of the Senate and the leader of the House really get together and make the final decisions, and I made it very clear in that process that this was something we felt very strongly about, and that we want it done.

- It's a simple strategy.

The budget's going to get through.

If your party's in power, your budget's going to get through.

- That was our time, and if we had not done it I'm pretty convinced it wouldn't be done today.

- In early 2015, Virginia became the second state in the nation to pass compensation for victims of forced sterlization, and we're hoping this will be a domino effect and other states will follow.

- She didn't even put it in my mailbox, I got it right from the car from her.

20,000 dollars, paid to the order of Willis Cleveland Lynch.

Check from the eugenics board of sterilization program for what the state did to me when I was 14 years old.

Well I'm gonna put it in the bank today, you know, along with whatever I got in the bank now, and just let it stay in there.

I ain't going crazy over it like some folks do.

Some folks just crazy about money now.

- A lady told me one time, she said, you should have had a dozen children.

I said No I shouldn't.

I think about it sometimes, what it would have been like it I could have had a couple of children, maybe a girl and a boy - First Citizen bank, put my check in the bank.

You know, see if I got.

I have it in my pocket I believe.

Make sure I got my check.

- You know, the government, the state, has some awesome powers over your life and what you can do and what you cannot do.

- It's not reparations but it's the kind of compensation in which we're saying more than I'm sorry.

I know oftentimes we say that we simply want to know about history so we won't be fools to repeat it, but in some cases, there needs to be something that is so powerful and something that is such a reminder that you say nmm-nmmh.

- It is going to help, you know, but I'm still the same, and what happened don't phase me too much.

- [Dawn] Would you trade the money to be able to have a kid?

- Oh yeah, I love kids now.

To have my own kid, yeah.

- I hope she feels proud of her own honesty and bravery and how important that is, you know nothing happens unless we tell the truth.

(upbeat music) ♪ But I won't kneel down ♪ No I won't bow for the king ♪ Right about now ♪ All these systems are failing ♪ Brokenhearted and the devil's at my door ♪ He done robbed me of my reason and I can't feel anymore ♪ Lost in all this ruin ♪ Lost in all this pain ♪ But I won't kneel down ♪ No I won't bow before the king (bluesy guitar rock) ♪ - [Narrator] This program is made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by the following.