The seven boys are old men now, if they're all still alive. They are senior citizens who may well carry haunting memories about what happened to them while they were at the Stonewall Jackson Training School in 1948. Most of them were all set to be released, but before they could leave the school outside Concord, the state of North Carolina wanted to sterilize them.

Harry Truman was president and the thousands of veterans who had fought in World War II had returned home and were pushing the United States toward its boom years. There was order in the land, and those who trespassed against that order were dealt with firmly in a time when neither capital punishment nor corporal punishment were subject to debate.

Across North Carolina, boys and girls who broke the law - as well as ones who were simply promiscuous or truant - were sent to reform schools such as Jackson. The fat folders on these schools at the state archives in Raleigh are full of yellowed letters in which state officials praise each other for their efforts to help these children. Tucked away amid all those images of backslapping are a few pages that tell grimmer stories, ones of children crying unheard, lost in the shadows of a system where being beaten and locked in closets was not all that unusual.

During a 1938 hearing before the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, a 13-year-old girl was asked why she wanted to go home from a county institution.

Patient: 'Cause I don't want to stay up in the lockup all time.
Mrs. Bost: What do you mean, lockup?
Patient: They call it bread and water room...
Dr. Stimpson:They keep you locked up in this room.
Patient: Yes.

For hundreds of youth among the thousands in North Carolina institutions, being sterilized by the state was also a fact of life. For these young people, who were categorized as "feebleminded," the operation was a prerequisite for release. The eugenics board urged it, and the social workers the board kept in contact with often insisted that institutionalized students be sterilized before returning to their counties.

"We would say this person is ready to return to the community ... the community would say, 'No, we can't accept her back because she'll get pregnant and there'll be another child on welfare," said Vernon Mangum, who headed the O'Berry Center, a training school in Goldsboro, from 1959 to 1978.

Only a few girls were sterilized at his school, he said, and they were all mentally retarded.

Asked if any students ever complained about the operations, Mangum said, "Not to me.

"I was at the top of a ladder. I would always see these people and review the cases and would talk with them, but I never approached the subject itself with them. This was a legal type of thing, and I was not about to get involved with the legal part of it, other than following the laws of North Carolina."

Mangum said that no boys were sterilized at O'Berry. "They didn't bear the children."

For the most part, boys in institutions were not sterilized, just as men in the general population were not forced to undergo the operation. But that was about to change at Stonewall Jackson, a boys institution in a farmland setting.

"Most of these boys are ready for discharge but cannot leave until action is taken on the authorization of the eugenics board," according to a memo in the school's file.

The sterilizations of the Jackson boys - whose names were blacked out in eugenics board records reviewed by the Winston-Salem Journal - were delayed.

The surgeon, according to Dr. King, hesitates to perform the operations fearing some of the boys might be psychotic and later return to Concord to do physical harm to him.
¯ Memo from the eugenics board

There was a quick solution to that problem, though. The eugenics board authorized a different surgeon to perform the operations.

The first surgeon's reluctance was not the only factor holding up the operations. A memo suggested that a change in superintendents at Jackson may have slowed the process, as well as uncertainty about the mental evaluations. The eugenics board urged that a psychiatrist "visit the school at the earliest possible date."

The boys were soon deemed "feebleminded" by intelligence tests of the era, but some of the one-paragraph descriptions that the eugenics board voted on hardly seem to justify a sterilization operation.

Single boy, 15 years of age, who was admitted to the training school ... because of delinquency. He repeatedly stayed away from home a number of days at a time and would not obey his parents. His mother, who has epilepsy, feared leaving him alone with his sister. In the institution he has been found to be tempermental (sic), untruthful, and requires constant supervision.
¯ Eugenics board minutes,February 1948

Another 14-year-old, also sent to the school for delinquency:

Has a marked speech defect and for a period of time was a student at the State School for Deaf.... His family are known to a number of social agencies and have received intermittant (sic) help from DPW since 1936.
¯ Eugenics board minutes, February 1948

As the process moved forward, the consent of one father was "signed by mark," indicating he was illiterate. And along with the hot days of summer came more cryptic hints of trouble.

A visit was made to Stonewall Jackson Training School ... in an attempt to clarify misunderstandings regarding sterilization operations authorized in that institution.
¯ Eugenics board minutes, June 1948

The records show that six vasectomies were carried out on Jackson students from July 1948 to June 1949 - the first and last such operations in the history of the institution. More details about what happened at the Jackson School may be under seal at the state archives, or they may have been lost.

Six boys had their lives changed forever, while one, for unknown reasons, managed to avoid the order sent down from Raleigh.

In the years ahead, the focus of the eugenics board would shift from girls and women in institutions to girls and women outside the walls of reform schools and hospitals, and the number of boys and men sterilized would continue to decline.

• Kevin Begos can be reached in Washington at (202) 662-7672 or at kbegos@mediageneral.com