From Washington Post
UNSPEAKABLE
The Story of Junius Wilson
By Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner
Univ. of North Carolina. 304 pp. $27.50
On Jan. 20, 1932, white doctors at the North Carolina State Hospital for the Colored Insane carried out a medical procedure that "asexualized" a 24-year-old black male patient. The castration of Junius Wilson was one of more than 18,000 sterilizations of patients that took place in American mental institutions between 1907 and 1940. Though less well known, systematic and widespread than a similar program in Nazi Germany, the involuntary sterilization of individuals deemed "defective" by the government was legal in 30 U.S. states by the early 1930s. And in the Deep South, during the long period between Reconstruction in the 1870s and the slow death of Jim Crow in the mid-20th century, blacks were especially vulnerable to the irreversible procedure.