Bath, S.C. — Carrie Clemmons chose the bright pink dress Bonnie Wynkle wore to her grave. And even though the women weren't blood kin, Clemmons told the minister the kinds of stories family members offer for a eulogy — about how Aunt Bonnie enjoyed sitting outside under the shade trees and staying up late watching cowboy movies.

"Whatever you done for her," Clemmons said of the woman she called Aunt Bonnie, "she was pleased."

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Carrie Clemmons chokes up with emotion as she thinks about her 'Aunt Bonnie,' who died in 2000. Clemmons now takes care of Bonnie Wynkle's dog, Flower Mae. Wynkle lived with Clemmons in her Bath, S.C., home for many years, until she died in 2000. Wynkle and her three sisters were involuntary sterilized.

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Bonnie Wynkle is shown at age 84, a year before she died. She, along with her three sisters, was involuntarily sterilized while a patient at Gracewood State School and Hospital in Augusta.

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Fitter Families contestants are shown at the 1924 Georgia State Fair in Savannah. Few questioned a commitment to a suprior race and preventing people thought to be inferior from reproducing. At the same time, families that were judged to be superior were encouraged to reproduce. (Photo courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.)

RELATED STORY • About eugenics

About this article The Atlanta Journal-Constitution pieced together Georgia's role in a nationwide eugenics campaign by searching through records in state and county depositories and interviewing scholars, officials and relatives of mental patients. The newspaper acquired more than 1,600 case files, dating from 1939 to 1962, from the Georgia Department of Human Resources under the state open records laws.

Bonnie — the sister of Clemmons' stepmother — had no children of her own to plan her funeral when she died in July 2000. The state of Georgia saw to that.

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As part of an international movement called "eugenics" that eventually spread to Germany and influenced the Holocaust, the state surgically sterilized Bonnie and her three sisters. The goal of eugenics was to perfect the white race.

"They fixed 'em where they couldn't have children," said Clemmons, who took Bonnie into her home just across the border from Augusta for the last decade of her life.

Now, 70 years after the Georgia Legislature passed an involuntary sterilization law, lawmakers are revisiting the issue by considering an apology for the state's sterilization of the Wynkles and some 3,300 other Georgians.

Three members of the state House last week introduced a resolution that expresses "profound regret" for the sterilizations that occurred while the state's law was in effect from 1937 to 1970. The resolution has been assigned to the Health and Human Services Committee.

Several states already have issued apologies for their programs, including California, Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Oregon. A state representative in North Carolina, which sterilized about 7,600 people from 1929 to 1974, is pushing for reparations.

After Indiana passed the country's first sterilization law a century ago, an estimated 65,000 Americans in more than 30 states were rendered incapable of reproducing.

"When you're a little girl, what do you want?" said Elaine Riddick, who was sterilized in North Carolina at 14 after giving birth to a son as the result of a rape.

"You want to be a mommy," said Riddick, a custom housepainter in Paulding County. "To find out that's been taken away from you is devastating."

Georgia's resolution calls for educating the state's citizens about the eugenics movement "in order to ensure that a more enlightened population repudiates the intolerance and bigotry that formed the basis of American eugenics laws."

Paul Lombardo, a Georgia State law professor who encouraged introduction of the resolution and also pushed apologies in Virginia and California, said the effort "is about reminding us that things have happened that are unconscionable."

"We need to recognize what eugenics looks like," he said, "and look at it as it happens, not 70 years later."

'Ought to be left to God'

When they were enacted, sterilization laws were heralded as part of a progressive movement that included pensions for the elderly, restrictions on child labor and free school textbooks.

The U.S. Supreme Court blessed the concept of involuntary sterilization in 1927, voting 8-1 to uphold a Virginia law.

In Georgia, Augusta Junior League leader Nora Nixon, daughter of a former gubernatorial candidate, persuaded Ellis Arnall, speaker pro tem of the Georgia Senate and a future governor, to sponsor an involuntary sterilization bill in 1935.

One lawmaker objected to legislating "something that ought to be left to God ... ," according to Edward J. Larson, a University of Georgia professor who wrote a history of eugenics in the South.

But that lone legislator was fighting powerful forces. Physicians, civic groups and some of the state's largest newspapers called for the bill's passage.

It passed with the support of Speaker of the House E.D. Rivers and House floor leader Roy Harris.

But Gov. Eugene Talmadge exercised his veto power, joking that he "might go crazy someday" and didn't want doctors "working on" him.

Supporters went back to work.

W.L. Funkhouser, a doctor from Atlanta, delivered a speech called "Human Rubbish" that was reprinted in a medical journal. If medical science did not enforce sterilization and birth control among the South's "poor white trash," he warned, "the time may come when it will be necessary to resort to euthanasia ..."

His colleague and fellow Atlantan, Avary Dimmock was disturbed that Germany seemed to be surpassing the United States in eugenics.

"We, the doctors of this country, cannot sit by and do nothing," he wrote in the Journal of the Georgia Medical Association.

When the bill passed again in 1937, Rivers, then governor, signed it.

The Atlanta Constitution editorialized that it provided a "scientific and humanitarian method of checking the increase in insane, feeble-minded, physical, human derelicts."

Georgia was the last state to adopt a eugenics law, but ranked fifth in the country in total number of people sterilized.

Performing the procedure on multiple family members, such as the Wynkles, was not unusual.

Authorities "would find hillbillies in the hollers, declare them potentially mentally retarded and take the entire family," said Edwin Black, author of "War Against the Weak — Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race." Many were simply illiterate and impoverished, he said.

Dr. Norman Pursley, superintendent for 35 years of Gracewood State School and Hospital in Augusta, an institution for the developmentally disabled, said he was never "a big advocate of wholesale sterilization" but looked at it "from a rehabilitation standpoint."

Pursley, just 24 when he became superintendent, said he thought patients who couldn't reproduce stood "a better chance of getting a job and making it in society" after they were released.

Now 81, retired and living in Lincolnton, Pursley reflected on the sterilization program in light of the proposed legislative apology.

"Probably we didn't do right in some situations," he said. "In other situations, we did right. That was the way the country felt at the time."

He said he now thinks sterilization "ought to be more voluntary."

Sisters were in first group

Bonnie Wynkle, whose real name was Lavina Bell Wynkle — along with her sisters Lizzie, Janie and Vida Inez — were in the first group of patients sterilized at Gracewood, which had opened in 1921 as the all-white Training School for Mental Defectives.

The sisters were among 23 patients approved for sterilization on April 28, 1939, at the organizational meeting of Georgia's Board of Eugenics, a state panel that determined which patients in state mental institutions should be prevented from reproducing.

Although sterilization apparently was first used most aggressively at Gracewood, by 1950 the state hospital at Milledgeville accounted for the majority of cases approved by the board. With more than 12,000 patients, the hospital boasted of being the world's largest mental hospital.

Whereas mostly women had been sterilized at Gracewood, the number of vasectomies at Milledgeville was generally twice the number of salpingectomies, the procedure used on women.

And, a sampling of about 1,600 case files obtained by the Journal-Constitution under the state's open records laws shows another trend. Although the records are incomplete, they seem to show a racial shift from heavily white in the early days to heavily black in the 1950s.

None of the 18 cases from 1939 reviewed by the Journal-Constitution listed patients designated as black. But a review of 110 cases from 1957 indicated 78 of those patients were black.

Patients in the Journal-Constitution's sample ranged in age from 8 to 57. The patients' names are unknown, obscured by officials at the Georgia Department of Human Resources before their release to protect patient privacy.

Doctors often put how many children patients had, the case records show. Some said a patient was "oversexed" or had a "sexual perversion." Occasionally, the patient was noted as a criminal.

Form letters let family members know the Eugenics Board would be considering an application for sterilization of their relative, telling them they need not be present.

Grading human stock

Sterilization wasn't the only goal of the American eugenics movement.

The Eugenics Society of the United States, an organization funded by some of the country's wealthiest — John D. Rockefeller and George Eastman of Eastman Kodak — didn't just want to prevent people thought to be inferior from reproducing. It also encouraged progeny among those seen as better human stock.

Part of the effort: "Better Baby" and "Fitter Family" contests at state fairs.

"Margaret Berry Is Champion Girl Baby," the Savannah Morning News announced in the fall of 1923 after a contest at the Tri-State Exposition.

The next year, the Savannah Press carried a picture of the area's fittest family, Mr. and Mrs. James A. Kelley of Isle of Hope, both teachers, and their daughters Elizabeth and Priscilla. Each Kelley was graded in 12 categories, including eugenic, social, medical and dental. Family members were also evaluated for "temperamental defects" and "special talents and gifts."

"We expect to look for the weak points and build up," Papa Kelley promised in the newspaper article.

Girls' mother objected

A few miles down the Georgia coast, Bonnie Wynkle and her sisters were living on rented land in Camden County. The 1930 census describes the occupation of their mother, the twice-widowed Alice Wynkle, as "pauper." The girls picked cotton and vegetables, even plowing behind a mule.

A state eugenics board file from 1939 appears to apply to the Wynkles. It documents four sisters committed to Gracewood by Camden County in 1932 because of low intelligence. The names on the file are blacked out, but the dates, location and initial of the last name are consistent with the Wynkles.

In the file, doctors noted that the patients' mother was "mentally deficient, living with a notorious character," and that their home was a "one-room shack."

The file contains two letters of objection.

"Just a line to let you now (sic) I object to my children being sterilized," said a typed letter dated May 5 — after the Board's approval. "So please semd (sic) them home to me."

A reply says that the patients' release "will depend entirely upon the sterilization operation."

Others over the years also tried to challenge the board.

In 1955 and 1957, lawyer Frank Fuller, county guardian for Fulton County mental patients, filed formal appeals to the eugenics board on behalf of two male Milledgeville patients and their wives. Fuller wrote that the "practical application of eugenics ... to human beings by radical surgery is contrary to the beliefs, customs and religious tenets of the great majority of civilized people throughout the world."

No response was recorded in the scant files of the eugenics board now kept at the Georgia Department of Archives and History.

Some patients' relatives filed suit in Georgia courts to stop sterilization of family members.

One was Jennie Kindon of Thomas County, who sued in Baldwin County Superior Court to stop the sterilization of her daughter Mary Ann, a patient at Milledgeville, in 1949. The court upheld the board's decision and ordered Kindon to pay court costs.

Leo Kindon, a nephew of Mary Ann who lives in Jacksonville, said she committed suicide in the mid-1960s.

"I did hear she'd been sterilized," he said. "I thought it was disturbing."

Some family members approved of the sterilization plans, trusting the wisdom of the physicians.

"I received your registered letter, and will gladly give my consent for sterilization operation on my son ... and any thing that you think needs be," an Atlanta mother wrote on June 5, 1952, to Dr. T. G. Peacock, superintendent of Milledgeville State Hospital. "Thanking you and your skilled workers from a grand institution where mentally sick patients may be cared for when mothers have done all that can be done by them."

Use waned in 1960s

In a 1959 Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé of problems at Milledgeville State Hospital, The Atlanta Constitution raised the issue of involuntary sterilization only briefly — reporting that doctors' practice of treating employees and their relatives was consuming operating room time that could be used for sterilizations.

Nevertheless, fallout from the Constitution reports resulted in an investigative committee that raised questions about the use of sterilization, especially on schizophrenic patients. By the 1960s, its use was waning.

Georgia's involuntary sterilization law stayed on the books until 1970, when legislators mandated consent of a parent or guardian.

The 1970 law was unanimously overturned by the Georgia Supreme Court in 1983 on the grounds that it failed to require "clear and convincing evidence" that a person proposed for sterilization was "irreversibly and incurably mentally incompetent."

Sterilizations still happen, but they are rare. Under current state law, a parent or guardian petitions a county probate court to have someone sterilized. The potential patient must be examined by both a court-appointed team and the medical staff of the hospital where the sterilization will be carried out before a hearing can be held. The would-be patient has the right to a lawyer throughout the legal proceedings.

Related by love, not genes

The Wynkles lived out their lives, explaining when asked, that they were childless because of the state.

Janie married Homer Bridges, a carpenter. Lizzie and Bonnie remained single. Inez married Ralph Ferguson, a widower with five children including Carrie Clemmons.

For years Bonnie and Lizzie lived near Inez, her husband and his children in a cluster of houses near Kingsland. They raised vegetables and drove the country roads collecting metal and glass to sell for recycling.

After Lizzie died in 1980, Bonnie moved in with the Ferguson family, eventually returning with them to the Augusta area. She cooked big meals of chicken, peas, collard greens and mashed potatoes with gravy.

Although Inez was their stepmother, the Ferguson children felt closer to Bonnie.

Ralph Ferguson died in 1990, and Inez returned to South Georgia. She stopped communicating with the family.

Bonnie moved in with Clemmons and her husband, continuing to clean house and make melt-in-your-mouth biscuits.

"I believe if she had had children, she would have been a great mother," Clemmons said.

In a way, she was a mother, said Clemmons' brother, Jesse Ferguson, nicknamed "Doodle" by Bonnie.

"I considered Bonnie my mama," he said. "We loved each other. That's what family is."

News researcher Alice Wertheim contributed to this article.