Many towns and cities pride themselves on how welcoming and inclusive they are to our people,

even calling themselves havens.

And yet, they all hide heinous secrets that inevitably reveal themselves.

This is two-minute black history, What You Didn't Learn in School.

Imagine being a young mother with a small child trying to survive in a home for the disabled.

Your fate is in the hands of doctors who believe

your very existence is wrong. What do white doctors do with a black woman they view as flawed

who's already had one child? They forcefully sterilized her. When we speak of eugenics today, 1930s Germany is what most imagined. Images of

Nazis and the Aryan Brotherhood fill the mind. However, Germany learned all of their tricks

from America. More specifically, they learned from how doctors in the Carolinas experimented on us.

From 1929 to 1974, North Carolina treated black people, especially black women, as lab rats, sterilizing

them without their knowledge or consent.

Why?

Because white supremacists wanted to create a race of perfect people.

Black men and women, especially those with disabilities, were far from perfect in their

eyes. Today, North Carolina is known as one of

the havens for black people and black wealth in the country. In fact, many of the cities in the

state rank highest in the nation for black economic success. But was the price those before us

paid worth our current riches?

From slavery to forced sterilizations and forced births, anti-blackness has tried to find ways to eliminate us.

It's so ingrained in mainstream society that doctors are blind to it. We must continue to fight for

ourselves, our bodily autonomy, and the truth of our history. In order to move towards the future,

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