Officially, the records of the Eugenics Board of North Carolina are still under seal at the N.C. State Archives in Raleigh. No one has ever been given full access to the records, though some researchers have recently been given small selections.

Around the county, "the history of things has been to put up roadblocks," said Paul Lombardo, the head of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia. "(Officials) make it as difficult as possible for people to find this stuff."

The Winston-Salem Journal was given access to thousands of pages of the North Carolina records by Johanna Schoen, an assistant professor of women's history at the University of Iowa.

Schoen was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the late 1980s when she got permission from the attorney general's office to review the records. She was rebuffed at first by staffers at the archives but continued to work on the small amount of material open to the public.

One day a staff member put a roll of microfilm in her hands. Schoen isn't sure why, but believes that the archives staff wanted the truth about the eugenics board to be known. She was allowed to copy thousands of pages of documents.

Schoen gave the Journal access to the records on the condition that the medical privacy of the people who were considered for sterilization be honored.

The archives denied an oral request by the Journal in August for access to the eugenics board records.