By the dawn of the 1920s, about 2,500 people in the state had been sterilized against their will. More than half of those forced into a procedure to end their bloodline were labeled “mentally deficient,” a term broad enough to include “idiots, imbeciles, and degenerates” but also “epileptic persons” and the highest grade of legal inferiority—“morons.” The law was finally struck down by the state supreme court in 1921, though a new statute was drafted soon thereafter and became a top priority of the Klan.
