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Banished: The Hidden Lives of Virginia Eugenics Survivors

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The esteemed journalist Mary Carter Bishop shares her experiences speaking with thirty survivors of Virginia’s eugenics movement, most of whom were only elementary-age children of impoverished families when they were abducted and abused. 

Presenters

  • Mary Bishop

    Mary Carter Bishop was a reporter at five newspapers, big and small. While at The Philadelphia Inquirer, she was on a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Later, she was a Pulitzer finalist and winner of a George Polk Award for a Roanoke (Va.) Times & World-News series on pesticide poisonings and fraud by exterminators. Beginning in 1985 and continuing for years, she interviewed survivors of Virginia’s eugenics movement and published more than a dozen newspaper stories. In 2018, her memoir, Don’t You Ever: My Mother and Her Secret Son, inspired in part by her eugenics encounters, was published by Harper. She is retired and lives in Roanoke, Virginia.