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 befrom the operation.cause of negative publicity: A little boy had recently been sterilized there and had died
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. BoydeGray (memorial) Medical School in Winston-Salem, using his inherited cigarette stock shares. Then's father, Gordon Gray, had recently founded the Bowman
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, wthe North Carolina branch of the national eugenical sterilization movement.as living in his household. Aunt Alice had founded the `` Human Betterment League, ''
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@s3@s7: In Winston-Salem and in [nearby] Orange County, North Carolina, the [Sterilization League's] fieldcommittee 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 friend of Clarence Gamble and supporter of the field work project in North Carolina. The Winston-Salem project was also financed by Hanes. '' [ Hanes '' was underwear mogul James Gordon Hand treasurer of Alice Gray's group].... anes, a trustee of Bowman Gray Medical School
The medical school had a long history of interest in eugenics and had compiled extensive histories
of families carrying inheritable disease. In 1946, Dr. C. Nash Herndon ... made a statement to the
press on the use of sterilization to prevent the spread of inheritable diseases....
The first step after giving the mental tests to grade school children was to interpret and make public
the results. In Orange County the results indicated that three percent of the school age children were
either insane or feebleminded.... [Then] the field committee hired a social worker to review each
case ... and to present any cases in which sterilization was indicated to the State Eugenics Board,