Why Georgia Republicans don't want to apologize for eugenics and sterilizations

There's a good reason Republicans in the Georgia Assembly are scared to death of a resolution by Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, D-Decatur, that would apologize for the state's participation in a "eugenics" program that sterilized about 3,300 people between 1937 and 1970. Nationally, more than 64,000 people were sterilized, and eugenics advocates had plans to do the same to as many as 10 million "unfit" Americans.

Eugenics was a pseudo-science that blended well with the South's white-supremacy credo. As University of Georgia professor Ed Larson wrote in his 1995 book, Sex, Race and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South: "So long as southern Whites did not expect African Americans to contribute substantially to the intellectual progress of civilization, the need for eugenic improvement of Blacks lost urgency."

Applied, this meant that upward of 60 percent of those sterilized were black. And most were women, many accused of lascivious behavior.