Elaine Riddick's small frame heaves, her rapid, shallow breaths whistling in her throat as she forces the words out between her sobs.
"So what am I worth?" she asks the five people seated at the long table before her. "The kids that I did not have, COULD not have. What are THEY worth?"
"Priceless," Tony Riddick whispers as he gently rubs his mother's back.
Elaine Riddick has been asking these same questions, in one forum or another, for the past 40 years. This most recent appearance in late June was before the Governor's Task Force to Determine the Method of Compensation for Victims of North Carolina's Eugenics Board.
As far as Riddick is concerned, she tells the panel, she was raped twice. Once by the man who fathered her son, and again by the Eugenics Board of the State of North Carolina, which deemed her, at age 14, unfit to procreate.
"I am NOT feebleminded," she shouts, turning to face the packed hearing room. "I've never BEEN feebleminded."
"No," says her son, standing beside her behind the podium.
Tears streaming down her face, she says, "They cut me open like I was a HOG."
Between 1929 and 1974, North Carolina sterilized more than 7,600 individuals in the name of "improving" the state's human stock. By the time the program was halted, the majority of those neutered were young, black, poor women – like Riddick.
In many ways, Riddick's has become the face of the movement to compensate victims of what most now acknowledge as a dark, misguided era in the state's – and nation's – past. From her decision to sue the state in federal court nearly four decades ago to this most recent baring of her soul, she has refused to simply fade from view.
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