This has the telltale marks of Margaret Sanger thinking all over it. Nowhere in the article is the ethnic background of the subject mentioned, but given the times and the location, almost certainly he was of African descent.
Margaret Sanger was a great proponent of curbing or even eliminating the “taint” of African blood from America, and confining any who were still “tainted” to Africa. Which was probably one of the great motivations for creation of the country of Liberia on the west coast of Africa.
Liberal “progressive” ideas appear to resemble mental derangement more and more all the time.
I’m a North Carolinian born and bred, lived here most of my life and know the family names pretty well. Holt is and was a prominent name in the Alamance County region. Textiles. If there are any black people with that surname there aren’t a lot of them. They weren’t notable for slaveholding in the antebellum era.
In any old, large family, even a prominent, wealthy one, there will be branches that fell into poverty, some hanging on as genteel poor but some just ground into the dirt by circumstance with the attendant ignorance, destructive behavior and all the generational consequences of that. The Civil War and the depressions that followed certainly helped the process along. So, I’m not at all certain Mr. Holt is black.
The state eugenics board in NC did not focus solely on black people. There were homes for “wayward girls” run by or affiliated with the board and the state mental institutions had a hand as well. I would be surprised if it even showed a preponderance of sterilizations among black people on a percentage basis.
NC was one of the early “leaders” if you can stomach calling it that, trying to shed the Rip Van Winkle image of the state as a sleepy backwater that time had passed by. This they did with a vengeance. But, California put the efforts of NC to shame. Many other states were avidly into eugenics as well.
Liberia was created for/by the freed slaves willing to return to Africa. I'm not sure what Sanger had to do with that, unless she dates back before 1847.