Feb 17, 2002

Historic Test Case: Wrong Done to Carrie Buck Remembered

BY CARLOS SANTOS

TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

CHARLOTTESVILLE

Carrie Buck Detamore, a poor, uneducated, eager-to-please daughter of a welfare mother, may soon be honored by the state that forcibly sterilized her 75 years ago.

The General Assembly is expected to laud her with a resolution honoring her memory. And a historical marker, telling the story of her sterilization, is to be erected in May in Charlottesville, where she was born.

Both events are taking place at the urging of a University of Virginia legal historian and researcher, Paul Lombardo, who has studied and written about her case for more than 20 years.

But in February 1980, just a few years before her death, Carrie Buck Detamore lived forgotten in a one-room cinderblock house off Rio Road in Albemarle County. The house had no plumbing and only a wood stove for heat.  She was a small, shy, pleasant woman.

She was nervous that two reporters in coats and ties had come to visit and ask her about her past in light of revelations about the state's sterilization movement.

She sat at a small kitchen table. Her husband, his leg infected from a ghastly wound, lay groaning on the bed a few feet away. She appeared thin and wan.

"I won't get into trouble if I tell, will I? I don't want no trouble," said Detamore, then in her 70s.

She spoke then of how she had always yearned for children, though she was not bitter about her sterilization.

"I tried helping everybody all my life, and I tried to be good to everybody.  It just don't do no good to hold grudges," she said.

Shortly after that visit, she was taken by local health officials to a hospital and treated for exposure and malnutrition. Later she was moved to a state nursing home in Waynesboro, where she died on Jan. 28, 1983.

Only a handful of people attended her burial at Charlottesville's Oakwood Cemetery.

But she was, in fact, a historical figure.

Detamore was the first American involuntarily sterilized by law as part of a growing eugenics movement to stop race degeneracy. She was then known as Carrie Buck.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell on May 2, 1927, upheld the Virginia Statute for Eugenical Sterilization. That led to Buck's sterilization and to the sterilization of about 8,000 other men and women that the state deemed as imbeciles or feebleminded.

Proponents of the eugenics movement actually had a longer list of those who should be sterilized, including beggars, tramps, alcoholics, prostitutes, the shiftless, criminals, the physically deformed, the blind and deaf and epileptics.

The motive behind the sterilizations was a fundamentally racist idea to improve the world by ridding it of human beings perceived to be flawed. The idea was bolstered by the erroneous thought that intelligence, health and virtue are solely hereditary.

The high court's decision in Buck's case led to the involuntary sterilization of more than 60,000 people in America.

The case's legal underpinnings also echoed through Adolph Hitler's "Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases," a 1933 decree that led the Nazis to sterilize some 2 million Europeans.

Last year, the General Assembly adopted a resolution of "profound regret" over Virginia's eugenics past, becoming the first state to do so. The resolution was authored by Del. Mitchell Van Yahres, a Democrat from Charlottesville.

For the upcoming 75th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Buck v. Bell case, almost 20 years after her death, both the state and Charlottesville are working to honor Detamore's memory.

The House of Delegates last month passed a resolution, also offered by Van Yahres, to honor her memory and remember "the most egregious outcome of the lamentable eugenics movement in the Commonwealth." The Senate is expected to pass the resolution.

"My interest in this was that we not forget the past," Van Yahres said. "I want to keep it in the forefront of the Standards of Learning and as part of our history. . . . We're moving into a world of cloning and other things. . . . We need to remember our past."

Charlottesville Mayor Blake Caravati said the City Council has agreed to erect a historical marker in the city on May 2 explaining Detamore's role in one of the darkest times in the state's history.

"It's important to remember the history of what we used to do to people," Caravati said. "Though she was not as capable as the rest of us . . . it didn't stop her from becoming a great citizen. . . . People with mental or physical disabilities can be just as productive as any of us."

In fact, Detamore was not feebleminded. She was very unlucky.  Carrie Buck, who was taken from her mother as a baby, grew up on Grove Street in Charlottesville, where she was raised by foster parents. She sang in the church choir and attended school until the sixth grade, where she

learned to read and do math. She also learned to write.

An example of her writing comes from the depths of the Depression when she wrote Dr. J.H. Bell, the state physician who had sterilized her: "We live out in the country. We have a pig and a nice garden and are putting up a lot of things this summer. We have a nice garden spot and tell my mother whenever I can do it I will send her some things. We are pretty hard up now for a good many things but still we are thankful for what we have got in this world."

In 1923, when Buck was 17, she was assaulted, apparently by a nephew of her foster parents, and became pregnant. The baby, Vivian, was taken from her and given to a foster family.

The proponents of the eugenics movement, meanwhile, were looking for a test case to legitimize the state's sterilization law.

Detamore, her illegitimate daughter, Vivian, and Detamore's mother, Emma, became the guinea pigs. Emma had several illegitimate children and several scrapes with the law in Albemarle County. Vivian at 7 months was labeled as retarded after a cursory examination.

A few months after the Supreme Court decision - in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" - Dr. Bell removed Detamore's fallopian tubes on the morning of Oct. 19, 1927, in the infirmary of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg.

"All they told me was that I had to get an operation on me," Detamore recalled in 1980. "I never knew what it was for. Later on, a couple of the other girls told me what it was. They said they had it done on them."

Lombardo, who had spent years researching the Supreme Court case, was one of the few people at Detamore's funeral. He was a U.Va. law student then. He is now the director of the Program in Law and Medicine for U.Va.'s Center for Biomedical Ethics.

At the funeral with him was the Front Royal family Detamore lived with as a housekeeper for a few years and her husband, Lombardo said.

"I went because I thought it was history," he said. Lombardo is writing a book on the case tentatively titled "Better for All the World - Carrie Buck, Eugenics and the Supreme Court."

"She was a very, very tired, wary old lady," said Lombardo, who met her once, a few weeks before she died. "She was pleasant but not interested in dredging up the past. My impression of her, she was shy and reserved about visitors, especially those in coats and ties. But she seemed quite normal."  "This was nothing but a welfare law," Lombardo said. "This seemed like a perfect case.

"Nobody testified for her at the trial," he said. "There was lots of bad evidence. Bad timing. Bad lawyering."

Detamore said only one thing at the hearing when asked to speak. "No, it's up to my people," she said, meaning her lawyers.

Lombardo said he writes and teaches about Detamore and the sterilization movement and that "half the students have never heard about it."

Lombardo's desire to turn Detamore into a historical figure is a simple one.  "I think we should memorialize the event and make a point of not forgetting the case. She represents thousands of people victimized by state policies."

Detamore presciently echoed those thoughts when speaking to the two visiting reporters in 1980. "They done me wrong. They done us all wrong," she said.