she asked, ‘‘What kind of family?’’ she recalled that
he replied, ‘‘Trust me, in the day that we’re living,
I never thought that we would see anything like
this in the United States of America.’’
In Flatwood, Bly was shocked by what she wit-
nessed. ‘‘I was waiting to see a house,’’ she said,
‘‘but I never saw one.’’ The Relfs, a husband, wife
and six children, were living as squatters in a
fi eld, sheltered in a shanty built from cardboard
boxes. ‘‘They had no running water, no electrici-
ty,’’ Bly, now 80, said, closing her eyes and shaking
her head. ‘‘I was really taken aback, because I just
couldn’t believe that anybody would be living in
those conditions. But they were.’’
Bly, a mother, grandmother, great-grand-
mother and ordained minister who still lives in
Montgomery, said what crushed her heart most
were the girls, teenage Katie and her two younger
adolescent sisters, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice.
Bly couldn’t shake the image of the youngest girl,
who was physically and intellectually disabled.
‘‘She was born with an automatic amputation,
with the umbilical cord wrapped around her
right arm,’’ Bly said. ‘‘She had no hand, and the
arm was just a little stub.’’
Like many Black families at the tail end of
the Great Migration in the 1950s and 1960s, the
children’s parents, Lonnie and Minnie Relf, both
illiterate, were forced out of rural Macon County,
Ala., where mechanization had caused jobs in the
fi elds to dry up. Some former fi eld workers went
North, but others crowded into Southern cities
like Montgomery, the state capital. Census data
shows that in 1960, for the fi rst time, Alabama’s
urban population exceeded the rural population,
in a state that was nearly one-third Black. This
infl ux of rural Black residents, most unskilled and
lacking education, increased poverty in the Black
communities in a number of Southern cities. But
even if Lonnie Relf had been able to fi nd a job
in Montgomery, he was disabled in an accident
and was unable to work.
Bly arranged with the director of the Mont-
gomery Housing Authority for the Relfs to live
in a three-bedroom apartment in Smiley Court,
a public-housing project on the west side of
the city. Once the family moved into their new
home, Bly took them to the Salvation Army and
Goodwill to buy used furniture and put out a
call for donations of linens, cooking utensilsand other household items to the people in her
church and network. She taught Minnie, who
was used to preparing meals on a rudimentary
oil burner in old burned pots, the basics of keep-
ing house and how to use a stove. ‘‘They didn’t
know how people really lived,’’ Bly says. ‘‘Life
had passed them by.’’
The girls had no idea about hygiene, so Bly
showed them how to wash and care for their
bodies and got the two older daughters enrolled
in public school. She took Mary Alice to a pedi-
atrician who specialized in developmental dis-
abilities for evaluation. He declared her ‘‘mental-
ly incompetent,’’ not teachable but trainable, and
recommended the McInnis School for Retarded
Children. Bly worries, years later, that visiting
the government-funded diagnostic facility put
the Relf girls on the radar of the family-plan-
ning clinic that would eventually arrange the
sterilizations. More likely, they were fl agged by
the government services they were receiving:
food stamps, a $156 monthly check from the
Alabama Department of Pensions and Security,
medical benefi ts and a subsidized apartment in
public housing.
These services were administered through
the Offi ce of Economic Opportunity, the fed-
eral agency established in 1964 as part of the32 6.12.22 Photograph by Gary Settle/The New York Times
From left: Minnie Lee, Mary Alice, one of
the girls’ cousins, Katie Relf and Minnie
Relf in 1973, in a previously unpublished
photograph from The Times’s archives.