THE US state of Virginia agreed on Thursday to compensate victims who were forcibly sterilised by state officials decades ago under a eugenics programme.

Survivors won their three-year fight when the Virginia General Assembly budgeted $400,000 (£258,000) to compensate them at the rate of $25,000 (£16,000) each.

It was welcome news for 87-year-old Lewis Reynolds, who was among more than 7,000 Virginians forcibly sterilised between 1924 and 1979 under the barbaric provisions of the Virginia Eugenical Sterilisation Act.

“I think they done me wrong,” he said. “I couldn’t have a family like everybody else does. They took my rights away.”

Eugenics was a deeply reactionary movement that sought to improve the genetic composition of the human race by preventing those considered “defective” from reproducing. 

Virginia’s Sterilisation Act became a model for similar legislation around the country and the world, including nazi Germany. 

Nationwide, 65,000 US citizens were sterilised in 33 US states, including more than 20,000 in California alone, said Christian Law Institute executive director Mark Bold, whose organisation has been pressing the case of the Virginia victims since 2013.

Virginia is only the second state to approve compensation for victims of the eugenics programme. 

North Carolina approved payments of $50,000 (£32,000) for each victim in 2013.

But the money from the state comes too late for most of those who were sterilised in Virginia, Mr Bold said. 

There were only 11 known surviving victims and two have died in the past year, he noted.

The Virginia sterilisations were performed at six-state institutions, including what is now known as Central Virginia Training Centre in Lynchburg. When Mr Reynolds was sterilised there, it was called the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feeble Minded.

Mr Reynolds was presumed to have had epilepsy. 

As it turned out, he was exhibiting temporary symptoms which arose from having been hit in the head with a rock.

The Virginia eugenics law was upheld in the 1927 US Supreme Court case of Buck v Bell, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously declared: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”