California, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina and
Utah. ‘‘We’re talking about sterilizing populations
that are being seen as hypersexualized or as sexu-
ally inappropriate, as promiscuous, as not having
middle-class sexual respectability.’’
By the 1930s, women became a majority of
the victims, sterilized in mental hospitals and
prisons and under court orders. This shifting
gender pattern resulted from a rising con-
cern about the fi tness to parent, with a focus
on mothering, as well as the development of
a safer, standardized tubal-ligation procedure
for sterilizing women. The movement was cod-
ifi ed in 1927, when the Supreme Court upheld
the right of the state of Virginia to sterilize
Carrie Buck, a 20-year-old white woman. Born
in 1906 to a mother living in poverty in Vir-
ginia, Buck was sent to a working-class foster
home, where at age 16 she was raped by an
extended-family member. Her foster parents
took custody of Buck’s daughter and success-
fully petitioned a local court to confi ne Buck
at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and
Feeble-Minded — though she was neither epi-
leptic nor intellectually disabled. There she was
sterilized without her consent. Writing for the
majority in the landmark Supreme Court case
Buck v. Bell, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
stated, ‘‘It is better for all the world, if instead
of waiting to execute degenerate off spring for
crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility,society can prevent those who are manifestly
unfi t from continuing their kind.’’ He added,
‘‘Three generations of imbeciles are enough.’’
More than 60,000 men, women and children
would be sterilized under these state laws, which
would also inform Nazi Germany: The Third
Reich sterilized approximately 400,000 children
and adults, mostly Jews and other ‘‘undesirables,’’
using a 1933 law modeled after legislation in the
United States. Germany’s Law for the Prevention
of Off spring and Hereditary Diseases focused on
people with a high probability of having a child
with a serious ‘‘defect,’’ including blindness, deaf-
ness and manic depression. The last eugenics leg-
islation in the United States was passed in Georgia
in 1937, and eventually the laws would be rolled
back in a series of repeals. But that didn’t stop
local governments from sterilizing many more
people, mostly women of color. The voting rights
activist Fannie Lou Hamer was given a hysterecto-
my without her consent in 1961 when undergoing
removal of a uterine tumor by a white physician.
The practice of being sterilized, including during
unrelated surgery, grew so common among poor
Black women in the South that it came to be
known as a ‘‘Mississippi appendectomy.’’
‘‘You start seeing people sterilized in the ’40s,
’50s, ’60s and beyond as a population-control
measure, as a means of decreasing the depen-
dent population, which was the same idea the
eugenicists had, but now without the laws,’’ says
Paul A. Lombardo, a professor at the Georgia
State University College of Law in Atlanta, author
of ‘‘Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics,
the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell’’ and editor
of ‘‘A Century of Eugenics in America: From the
Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era.’’
‘‘It generally came down to sex and money,
which means, ‘Who’s having babies that I don’t
want my tax dollars to go to?’ ’’ Lombardo says. ‘‘So
then you start identifying people like the Relfs.’’ He
continues, ‘‘Those young girls represented the per-
fect storm of race, poverty and alleged disability.’’Jessie Bly, a 30-year-old Black social worker, was
working in Montgomery when she received a call
from a local city councilman in 1972. Her employ-
er, the City of St. Jude Catholic Church, was
founded by a progressive Catholic priest in the
1930s to serve as a ‘‘center for the religious, char-
itable, educational and industrial advancement
of the Negro people.’’ Bly was born and raised in
Montgomery; her mother was a housekeeper and
her father a gravedigger. They understood early
that their seventh child was bright and engaged,
and they sent her to private school. She was the
only one of eight siblings to fi nish college. Her
work at City of St. Jude included checking on the
condition of the elderly and the poor to make
sure they had necessities and basic services.
Now the councilman was asking her to take a
ride with him to a poor Black community in Mont-
gomery called Flatwood to go see a family. WhenPhotograph by Hannah Price for The New York Times The New York Times Magazine 31
Jessie Bly in Montgomery, Ala. Opening pages:
A previously unpublished photograph of
Minnie Lee Relf (left) and Mary Alice Relf in 1973,
from The Times’s photography archives.