Lewis Reynolds didn’t understand what had been done to him when he was 13.
Years later, after getting married, the Lynchburg man discovered he couldn’t father children. The reason: He had been sterilized by the state.
Reynolds was among more than 7,000 Virginians involuntarily sterilized between 1924 and 1979 under the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act.
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“There was a growing consensus that we needed to act while we still had the opportunity to look these people in the eye and acknowledge the wrong that was committed against them so many years ago,” Cline said.
The original legislation called for payments of $50,000 each. Even that amount was inadequate to address the wrong that was done, in Bold’s view.
“But it’s symbolic,” he said. “Now the healing and forgiveness can begin.”
