Madison Grant was a lawyer and wildlife conservationist who advocated for eugenics policies in the US during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History, Grant argued that what he called the Nordic race, which originated from northwest Europe, was biologically and culturally superior to all other people, including other Europeans. Grant drew from his now-discredited claims to lobby for laws in the US that restricted immigration, legalized sterilizing people against their will, and prohibited interracial marriage. Adolf Hitler referred to Grant’s book as his Bible and it was listed during the Nuremberg Trials in the late 1940s as evidence that eugenics did not solely originate in Germany. Grant’s advocacy of eugenics shaped policy that restricted reproductive freedom and immigration in the US and helped legitimize genocide in Europe.

In 1916, eugenicist Madison Grant published the book The Passing of the Great Race; or The Racial Basis of European History, hereafter The Passing of the Great Race, where he claimed that northern Europeans, or Nordics, are biologically and culturally superior to the rest of humanity. Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York City, New York, published the volume. Grant claimed that the Nordic race was at risk of extinction and advocated for the creation of laws in the US to decrease the population of people he considered inferior. According to Grant’s biographer Jonathan Spiro, Grant’s book synthesized a range of racist and pseudoscientific eugenics claims in prose that was accessible to the public. In the US, The Passing of the Great Race was praised by politicians, including former presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, and cited as justification for laws that restricted immigration based on ethnicity and nationality. Adolf Hitler referred to The Passing of the Great Race as his Bible, and during the Nuremberg Trials in the 1940s, Nazi leaders who were prosecuted for war crimes committed during World War II presented the book as evidence that eugenics did not solely originate in Germany but rather had deep roots in the United States.

In 1933, an act of the North Carolina legislature created the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, or EBNC, to oversee the practice of sterilization, which is the removal of an individual’s ability to reproduce, in the state. Beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the US eugenics movement involved both state and non-governmental entities attempting to improve human populations through selective breeding, which included sterilization of those labeled as genetically inferior. In North Carolina, the EBNC headed the state government’s eugenics program and oversaw decisions related to the sterilization of poor and disabled people. By the time of the dissolution of the EBNC in the late 1970s, an estimated 7,600 people had undergone forced sterilization under the board’s approval. Some of them later received funds in the 2010s from the state government in one of the first programs to provide compensation to involuntarily sterilized individuals. The EBNC presided over the sterilizations of thousands of people in North Carolina, prompting one of the first attempts at eugenics reparations in the US.