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Bill Would Allow Four Counties To Pay Victims Of NC Eugenics Program

Rep. Donny Lambeth (R-Forsyth) is one of four sponsors of the bill. Photo credit: North Carolina General Assembly.

A bipartisan group of local lawmakers has filed legislation that would allow four counties, including Guilford and Forsyth, to compensate victims of an old state eugenics program.

The payments would come from the counties' general funds, and it's not clear if their boards of commissioners will choose to provide the money.

The Winston-Salem Journal reports that the payments would be made at the discretion of each board and would remain confidential.

North Carolina ran a forced sterilization program for 45 years, ending in 1974. As of February of last year, a compensation program had paid about $45,000 to more than 200 victims who were determined to have been involuntarily sterilized.

Most of the victims of the program were found to be in the state's most urban counties, including Guilford and Forsyth.

Two similar bills from previous sessions failed to make it into law.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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