WASHINGTON — To make amends for a state program that sterilized 7,600 people against their will, North Carolina's governor created a panel last year to probe the history of the effort, interview survivors and consider reparations.
In Oregon, then-Gov. John Kitzhaber last year apologized in person to some of the 2,600 people sterilized there, and he created an annual Human Rights Day to commemorate the state's mistake. On the day Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner apologized, Jesse Meadows and other victims unveiled a roadside marker.
"It felt pretty good to be there, even though it was so late," said Meadows, 80.
Some historians and advocates for the disabled had a mixed reaction to the apology issued Tuesday by Gov. Gray Davis for California's policy, the most aggressive in the nation, which sterilized an estimated 20,000 mentally disabled people and others from 1909 through the 1960s.
Davis offered his apology in a press release. No survivors or disability groups were on hand to accept it. There was no order to probe for more details of a history that, according to scholars, is still largely unexplored and not fully understood.
"It's like a preemptive apology.... We don't know yet who to apologize to," said Alexandra Stern, a University of Michigan historian who is writing a book about California's sterilization program.
"An apology with no attempt to find the people who deserve to receive it is meaningless," said Stephen Drake, research analyst with Not Dead Yet, a national disability rights group. "If the governor is serious about wanting to understand this shameful chapter of California history, then you need an effort to study the records of just how this was done."
"I think it's premature," said Paul Lombardo, a University of Virginia historian who revived interest in the state policy when he lectured Tuesday to a California Senate committee. The lecture, which some officials said was the first time they had heard of the sterilization policy, triggered a statement within hours from Davis and a separate apology from state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer.
Lombardo and Drake said the apologies were welcome as acknowledgments of past abuse. "But if they don't try to understand the history, then I don't know what it's worth," Lombardo added.
Historians have only recently begun to explore California's sterilization effort. Primarily at institutions for the mentally ill and the developmentally disabled, the state sterilized thousands of people under the premise that the "unfit" should be removed from the gene pool so their children would not burden society.
