As a new employee of the state attorney general's office in 1960, Chris Coley represented his agency at meetings of the Eugenics Board of North Carolina.

"It was the grunt's work," Coley, 68, said recently.

For 40 years, in a rather routine fashion, the eugenics board made major decisions for more than 7,600 North Carolinians. Five people met in a small conference room in Raleigh and worked through up to 30 cases each month, usually voting to sterilize strangers scattered across the state.

"Later in life, I questioned the fact that I had something to do with sterilizing young women," said Coley, who lives in Raleigh.

Greenhorns such as Coley served on the board, but so did seasoned agency heads. In some years, the board members set the pace; in others, a strong executive secretary did so. But through it all, the board kept quietly working, an empire unto itself, attracting little attention from either governors or average citizens.

As the board neared its end in 1974, members increasingly expressed reservations about its work. But that wasn't the case through most of the board's history. In fact, if there's one common thread that runs through that history, it is the belief of members that they were doing good.

"We thought we were doing a legitimate thing," said Dr. W.A. Robie, 83, of Cary. "I didn't have any idea that anybody was railroading any of them." Robie was a member of the board in the mid-1960s while working for the state Department of Public Health.

The board played its role far from the field, where social workers often pressured women into sterilizations. And by the 1960s, the majority of sterilization petitions were for young black women whom social workers and psychologists often labeled "feebleminded" on the basis of scant evidence.

"This was not the understanding I had of it (the board)," Robie said.

Jacob Koomen of Cary, a former state director of public health, was a eugenics board member from 1966 to 1974. He said that neither governors nor the general public seemed to know much about the workings of the program.

Koomen said that he regularly met with governors Terry Sanford and Dan K. Moore to talk about public-health issues but did not discuss details about the eugenics board. "I would be doubtful they ever knew," Koomen said.

Until two women filed lawsuits against the board in 1973 and 1974, Koomen noted, the press was mostly silent, too. "I don't remember seeing an article about the function of the eugenics board, or someone pointing one out to me. I don't remember a single clipping," he said, even though his agency used a professional service to scan the state's newspapers.

Koomen said he felt that all the decisions he made were justified and that the program was a benefit to many people.

Other former board members echoed his thoughts, saying that the sterilizations the board ordered were beneficial.

"At the time, it was considered good for society," said Gerald White, 76, of Elizabeth City. He served on the board as a representative of the attorney general's office in the early 1950s.

"It protected society and it protected the individuals, as well as their families, who might fall into the role of having to care for a child if the mentally retarded person had a child," he said. "And most of them would be illegitimate."

The records of the eugenics board tell a different story - one of warning signs that were ignored.

In 1955, board member Dr. C.C. Applewhite criticized one of the core foundations of eugenics - that feeblemindedness was inherited. "Suppose this baby soon to be born turns out to be a genius," he said when considering a sterilization petition for a 21-year-old woman. "I have been talking with some of these psychiatrists - some pretty smart boys among them. They have their doubts about this matter of heredity."

White's memory is of a program that benefited society, but another person who represented the attorney general's office during the 1950s said that his boss had doubts.

Attorney General William Rodman was not "too friendly toward the program," wrote board member Worth H. Hester in 1955.

The eugenics board was part of the Department of Public Welfare. Members were not appointed by governors. A state law passed in 1933 set the board membership at one representative each from the attorney general's office, Dorothea Dix Hospital, the state Department of Public Welfare, the state Department of Public Health and the state Department of Mental Health.

Sometimes the directors of these organizations served on the board themselves. Other department heads sent an ever-rotating round of junior staff members to represent their agencies.

"I was new and naive and hadn't done anything like that," said Robie, the doctor from Cary.

State employees sent to the meetings didn't get crash courses in child behavior or the effects of environment on IQ before joining. But at meetings that lasted at least two hours, board members would take up petitions for sterilization that touched on a wide range of other issues, albeit briefly.

The board often voted to sterilize people who were mildly retarded, as well as some people of normal intelligence who were classified as feebleminded because of flawed IQ tests. Results of IQ tests were included in sterilization petitions that came from county departments of public welfare across the state. As the board's executive secretary got these petitions, she would condense them to one-paragraph summaries for the board's consideration.

While the full file on each case was available in the board's meeting room, members have said they sometimes voted on the basis of the summary alone. Though evidence of some dissent among board members is plain in some board records reviewed by the Winston-Salem Journal, several former members said the process was smooth.

They emphasized that they didn't always vote to sterilize. "I remember I thought there were some better off sterilized that didn't pass," Robie said. "It wasn't a carte blanche thing."

But sterilization was ordered in more than 90 percent of cases. A network of surgeons across the state, usually in private practice, carried out the board's orders.

Ralph Potter of Fayetteville, who served on the board in the early 1960s while with the attorney general's office, noted that the board functioned in a different era.

"By the nature of the times, it probably didn't draw the attention that it probably deserved," said Potter, 65.