where I am, so I felt like God wanted me to be
the mouthpiece for them. I was going to do what
I had to do.’’
to a law offi ce in a small, old house on Washington
Avenue in Montgomery, where the Southern Pov-
erty Law Center was founded two years earlier by
two young civil rights lawyers, Morris Dees and
Joe Levin, with the civil rights leader Julian Bond
as its fi rst president. Bly shared the Relfs’ story
with Levin and Dees, who decided to take the case.
In early summer 1973, they fi led a case in Fed-
eral District Court in Montgomery, and then
weeks later refi led the case as Relf v. Weinberger
in D.C. District Court, claiming that government
offi cials ‘‘have failed to promulgate constitution-
ally acceptable guidelines by which federally
funded and directed agencies can determine
who should or should not be sterilized. Further,
there are no constitutionally acceptable guide-
lines to determine what persons are capable of
giving knowledgeable, informed consent to the
administration upon them of any birth control
measures.’’ Caspar Weinberger, the director of
the U.S. Department of Health, Education and
Welfare, now the Department of Health and
Human Services, from 1973 to 1975, who would
later become Ronald Reagan’s defense secre-
tary, was named as a respondent in the suit. The
case also named two former Nixon White House
aides, John W. Dean III and John D. Ehrlichman.
Just before the offi cial fi ling, Levin called Bond
to brief him on the Relf case. Bond immediately
saw it as ‘‘a horrendous attack on privacy, inno-
cence and the right of motherhood,’’ he would
tell The New York Times in an article published
on July 2, 1973. He encouraged Levin and Dees
to contact the news media, and soon articles in
The Times and Time magazine and a report on
NBC News revealed the plight of the Relfs and
the issue of forced sterilization to a national audi-
ence. ‘‘The suit all of a sudden attracted a great
deal of attention,’’ Levin, now 79, remembers.
‘‘And it’s not that we hadn’t had attention, but this
was actually at a scale that we hadn’t seen before.’’
After Bly was interviewed by reporters from
The Washington Post and Jet magazine, she says,
the media attention became too intense for her.
‘‘I couldn’t go home; I couldn’t go to work,’’ she
says. ‘‘Newspaper, magazine people were follow-
ing me around to get information, and I had to
take my kids, and we had to go stay at my mom’s
for a while.’’
As publicity about the case increased, Orelia
Dixon, the director of the family-planning clin-
ic in Montgomery, defended the actions of her
facility. In the July 2 Times article, Dixon insisted
that her nurses clearly explained to Minnie Relf
that the injections for her daughters were no
longer authorized and suggested sterilization as
an alternative. Dixon also claimed that she and
her staff believed sterilization was a proper alter-
native because the girls were not ‘‘disciplined’’
enough to take daily birth-control pills. ‘‘There’s
no doubt in my mind that they all knew what
that meant,’’ Dixon told The Times, adding, ‘‘We
explain everything, and we don’t use words that
people can’t understand.’’
Levin and Dees, the Relfs’ lawyers, would tell
the court that the girls had been targeted for
sterilization because they were Black. (Dixon was
white, as was the physician who performed the
operation, though clinic employees emphasized
in interviews for news articles that the nurses
who took the girls from their home were Black.)
The lawyers also tried to demonstrate that the
sisters did not comprehend that they had been
sterilized, and still dreamed of bearing children
someday. A Times article on July 8, 1973, included
an exchange between Morris Dees and young
Minnie Lee:Q. Are you ever going to get married?
A. Yes.
Q. Are you going to have any children?
A. Yes.
Q. How many?
A. One.
Q. A boy or a girl?
A. A little girl.The news stories caught the eye of Senator
Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts,
then chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on
Health of the Committee on Labor and Public
Welfare, and he asked Levin and the Relfs to
appear at a congressional hearing and tell their
story. Levin accompanied Lonnie, Minnie, Katie,
Minnie Lee and Mary Alice to Washington — the
Relfs’ fi rst and only time on an airplane — to testi-
fy. Levin and the Relf parents agreed that it would
be too diffi cult for the girls to speak in an open
hearing, so on the morning of July 10, 1973, Katie,
Minnie Lee and Mary Alice met with Kennedy
behind closed doors.
Levin recalls that the senator showed them
pictures of his children, spoke to them gently and
listened closely, moved by what he heard. During
the Senate subcommittee hearing on steriliza-
tion abuse, Kennedy challenged Henry Simmons,H.E.W.’s deputy assistant secretary for health and
scientifi c aff airs, and other administrators about
why the federal government was involved in
coercive, nonconsensual sterilizations of Black
and poor women. Then it was Lonnie and Min-
nie’s turn. Speaking in the gentle tone he used
earlier when meeting with the younger Relfs,
Kennedy thanked the parents for appearing and
asked them to describe in their own words what
happened to their daughters. They told their story
haltingly, Minnie explaining how she signed an X
on the form given to her by the public-health-ser-
vice workers. ‘‘I did not want it done,’’ Lonnie
insisted. ‘‘I am still upset about it.’’
‘‘What was your feeling then that they had oper-
ated on your children?’’ Kennedy asked Minnie.
‘‘I felt very bad about it,’’ she said. ‘‘I got mad.’’
‘‘Would you have permitted it if you had
known about it?’’ Kennedy asked.
‘‘No,’’ she said. ‘‘I would not have let them do that.
They said that they was going to give them shots.’’
Kennedy again thanked the Relf family for their
testimony, complimenting their three daughters
and acknowledging their courage. ‘‘We have seen
too many incidents, mothers and fathers that
have been saddened by the kinds of things that
have happened to their children,’’ Kennedy said.
‘‘We are going to do our very best to make sure
that it does not happen again.’’
Levin says that the Senate testimony and Ken-
nedy’s support for the case and the issue had an
enormous eff ect. Though the Relfs’ case would
take years to resolve, it helped uncover a pat-
tern of sterilization abuse, fi nanced by the U.S.
government and practiced for decades. At the
family-planning clinic that executed the steriliza-
tions of the Relf children, 11 adolescent girls had
been sterilized, 10 of them Black. But the practice
turned out to be much more widespread.
In July 1973, the same month Levin and Dees
fi led the Relfs’ case in D.C. District Court, a Black
woman from North Carolina, Nial Ruth Cox, also
fi led a suit against a number of people, including
the doctor who had surgically sterilized her after
telling her, she claimed, that the results would
‘‘wear off .’’ At the time of the sterilization in 1965,
Cox was 18, unmarried and the mother of a baby
girl. Cox lived with her mother, who was a recipi-
ent of government benefi ts. A county caseworker
threatened to strike the family from the welfare
rolls unless the mother agreed to have her daugh-
ter’s tubes temporarily tied. Five years later, Cox
would learn that the sterilization was permanent.
Though Cox — who was represented by sever-
al lawyers, including the future Supreme Court
justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — lost in court, her
suit revealed that her sterilization was part of a
eugenics program, created under state law, that
began decades earlier.
In North Carolina, doctors performed some
7,600 sterilizations between 1929 and 1974,
justifi ed as a way to keep welfare rolls low,
reduce poverty and improve the gene pool34 6.12.22
Jessie Bly
found her way