This award-winning series led to an apology from the North Carolina governor and the first legislation in the nation seeking to compensate victims of eugenics, or involuntary sterilization. For more than 40 years North Carolina ran one of the nation's largest and most aggressive sterilization programs.

Nial Cox Ramirez, rendered barren in 1965 by one of America's most aggressive sterilization programs, made nationwide news in the 1970s as she fought for redress. Her landmark case fizzled in the early 1980s. Nial went on, raising a successful daughter, the one child she gave birth to before the state got to her. She never surrendered her dream of justice, but what happened to her and more than 7,600 others in ""progressive"" North Carolina receded into the background, buried under the cheery press releases the state program relied on before it closed down in 1974. Then, in 2002, a team of...