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.