Against Their Will: North Carolina's Sterilization Program and the campaign for reparations

For more than 40 years North Carolina ran one of the nation's largest and most aggressive sterilization programs. It expanded after World War II with help from a wealthy New Yorker and a Harvard professor who was also an heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, even as most other states pulled back in light of the horrors of Hitler's Germany.
The victims were wives and daughters. Sisters. Unwed mothers. Children. Even a 10-year-old boy. Some were blind or mentally retarded. Toward the end they were mostly black and poor. This award-winning series in the Winston-Salem Journal led to an apology from the North Carolina governor and the first legislation in the nation seeking to compensate victims of eugenics, or involuntary sterilization.
A team of reporters combined original research and interviews with victims with work done by historians Johanna Schoen and Paul Lombardo to produce a detailed expose of the eugenics program.
After the series was published, the Journal's editorial page began a campaign to bring attention to the needs of surviving victims of the program.
Now available as a book for the first time, Against Their Will has drawn praise from civil rights leaders, historians, journalists, and the general public.