waging such unusual warfare against Third World populations. Gray knows how these
things are done.
When Boyden Gray was four and five years old, his father organized the pilot project for
the present worldwide sterilization program, from the Gray family household in North
Carolina.
It started in 1946. The eugenics movement was looking for a way to begin again in
America.
Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz had just then seared the conscience of the world.
The Sterilization League of America, which had changed its name during the war to Birthright, Inc., '' wanted to start up again. First they had to overcome public nervousness about crackpots proposing to eliminate inferior '' and `` defective '' people. The League
tried to surface in Iowa, but had to back off because of negative publicity: A little boy
had recently been sterilized there and had died from the operation.
They decided on North Carolina, where the Gray family could play the perfect host.
Through British imperial contacts, Boyden Gray's grandfather, Bowman Gray, had
become principal owner of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. Boyden's father, Gordon Gray,
had recently founded the Bowman Gray (memorial) Medical School in Winston-Salem,
using his inherited cigarette stock shares. The medical school was already a eugenics
center.
As the experiment began, Gordon Gray's great aunt, Alice Shelton Gray, who had raised
him from childhood, was living in his household. Aunt Alice had founded the `` Human
Betterment League, '' the North Carolina branch of the national eugenically sterilization
movement.
Aunt Alice was the official supervisor of the 1946-47 experiment. Working under Miss
Gray was Dr. Claude Nash Herndon, whom Gordon Gray had made assistant professor of
`` medical genetics '' at Bowman Gray Medical School.
Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Proctor and Gamble soap fortune, was the sterilizers'
national field operations chief.
The experiment worked as follows. All children enrolled in the school district of
Winston-Salem, N.C., were given a special `` intelligence test. '' Those children who
scored below a certain arbitrary low mark were then cut open and surgically sterilized.
We quote now from the official story of the project:
In Winston-Salem and in [nearby] Orange County, North Carolina, the [Sterilization
League's] field committee had participated in testing projects to identify school age
children who should be considered for sterilization. The project in Orange County was
conducted by the University of North Carolina and was financed by a `Mr. Hanes,' a