In November 1925, a deaf Black teenager named Junius Wilson was brought to a state psychiatric hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina. He arrived with no trial, no attorney, and no interpreter. The charge against him was an assault on a white woman’s wife. The jury that committed him was made up of white hearing men.
He was seventeen years old. He would not leave the institution for another seventy-five years, and he would leave only in a coffin. The circumstances that delivered Wilson to that ward reached back more than seventy years before his birth. In 1848, the reformer Dorothea Dix stood before the North Carolina General Assembly and described the state’s treatment of the mentally ill, the cells and cages in county poorhouses, the sick hidden away in private homes.
Eight years later, the state opened its first psychiatric hospital in Raleigh. It accepted white patients only. Black North Carolinians judged insane were kept in jails and poorhouses, or held at home, or shipped out of state. When counties did agree to house them, the state paid one hundred dollars a year per person and asked virtually nothing about what that money bought.
Pressure for a permanent solution built for decades. In 1877, the General Assembly authorized a facility meant exclusively for the accommodation, maintenance, care, and treatment of the colored insane of the state. The word exclusively did two things at once. It promised a hospital and it drew a wall around it.
In April 1878, the state bought 171 acres two miles west of Goldsboro. The site was chosen because it sat near the center of North Carolina’s Black population, selected not for access to doctors or visiting families but for the efficiency of collecting the people it was built to hold. On the first of August 1880, a single patient walked through the door of the Asylum for Colored Insane. The building was designed for seventy-six people.
By Christmas, more than one hundred were inside. Within months, patients were sleeping in corridors. Over the following decades, the institution absorbed every Black psychiatric patient in the state. For eighty-five years, it was the only hospital in North Carolina that would admit a Black patient.
Its name changed repeatedly over time. The brick did not. Reports from the superintendents made the institution’s real purpose clear. The doctrine was custody plus labor.
Patients who could work were sent to the farm, the laundry, and the kitchen. The state called this work therapy. It was unpaid labor performed by people who could not leave. Junius Wilson was born in 1908 in Castle Hayne, North Carolina.
He lost his hearing in childhood after scarlet fever. In 1916, his mother sent him to the North Carolina School for the Colored Blind and Deaf in Raleigh. The teachers did not sign, so the students built their own language among themselves, a system called Raleigh signs. No one fluent in American Sign Language could follow it.
In that language, Wilson had a name spelled by the letter J on the middle of the chest, taking its movement from the sign for happiness and its placement from the sign for pride. In the autumn of 1924, he stayed behind at the school for two nights to watch fireworks and was expelled. He was sixteen, back in Castle Hayne, and no one around him spoke his language. In late August 1925, a neighbor told police that Wilson had attacked his wife.
Wilson was gathering firewood when they came for him. He was handcuffed, which made his hands useless for speech. At the jail, the jailer attempted sign language, but he was signing in the white language while Wilson had been taught the Black one. The jailer decided he was dangerous.
A physician found no clinical evidence of disease, but when the prosecutor reminded him of the charge, the physician said yes. A jury found Wilson insane and unable to defend himself. He had no attorney. There was no trial, ever.
On the twenty-first of November 1925, he arrived at Goldsboro as number 8,229 in the admissions book. His occupation was recorded as criminal. A diagnosis was added later, constitutional psychopathic inferiority, institutional language for the fact that the hospital could not say what was wrong with him. Every other entry that week recorded cause, age, and birthplace.
His line was blank. Six years later, the General Assembly authorized the asexualization or sterilization of state institution inmates. The statute’s word meant castration. Each institution’s head was authorized and directed to have it done.
The superintendent filed the grounds. On the list were the categories of mentally deficient, criminally insane, feeble-minded, promiscuous, syphilitic, and deaf and dumb. Deafness itself was listed as sufficient reason. On the twentieth of January 1932, the superintendent performed the surgery on Wilson himself.
It did not happen on arrival as punishment for the accusation. It happened six years later under a statute on a form signed by a doctor. North Carolina’s Supreme Court would strike the law down for lacking any appeal, and the state would then create a eugenics board and sterilize more than 7,600 people before the program ended. Afterwards, staff noted that Wilson withdrew, his eyes down, no longer touching people.
The state that had given him a language had now entered that language in his file as a symptom. For roughly three decades, Wilson worked on the hospital farm as a water boy, unpaid. Because he had never been paid, he had never paid tax, and because he had never paid tax, he did not qualify for Medicare, a fact the hospital later cited as a reason he could not be discharged. Later still, when he earned small wages washing cars on the grounds, those wages put him over the income limit for Medicaid.
He was too poor to leave. Then he was too rich to leave. He saved seven thousand dollars anyway. He stood at a corner of Old Smithfield Road and Highway 581 selling fishing worms to locals and bought himself a Schwinn bicycle.
What finally got Wilson out of the criminal ward was not the Civil Rights Act. It was not deinstitutionalization, which emptied the wards around him through the 1970s. It was not the 1970 letter in which a clerk of court confirmed that the criminal charges had been dropped; he stayed twenty-one years after that letter arrived. It was a form.
In late 1989, a social worker decided that Wilson’s failing health meant he needed a legal guardian. Appointing a guardian requires somebody to read the file. In 1990, a man from New Hanover County Social Services sat down and read it. His name was John Wasson.
What he found was this: Wilson had been castrated, he was not mentally ill, and the hospital had known it. The criminal charges that formed the entire legal basis for holding him had been dropped by 1970. Wasson took the guardianship in March 1991. He was angry.
Being angry turned out to be the qualification that mattered. With his lawyers, Wasson secured a settlement in October 1992: sign language training for staff, interpreters, medical and rehabilitation services, and the possibility of housing outside the ward. The settlement barred further lawsuits, which they did not trust, so they went to the press. The story went national in 1993.
Across the four state hospitals, twenty-six deaf patients were abruptly ordered proper care and interpreters. Wilson, however, was not freed. In February 1994, wearing a new suit, he was driven roughly one hundred yards to a renovated brick cottage on hospital property across the street from where the criminal ward had stood. He remained a patient of Cherry Hospital until the day he died.
The wire copy called him freed at ninety-six after sixty-eight years. He was eighty-five. His file listed his birth year as 1898. It was wrong, and nobody caught it until 1995, when researchers pulled his school records and found 1908.
The hospital had lost track of his age by a decade. In 2001, Wilson developed pneumonia and was moved out of his cottage to a nursing unit, then to a hospital. He died of respiratory heart failure on the seventeenth of March at age ninety-two. His funeral was held six days later in the hospital chapel, with more than one hundred people in attendance.
One floral arrangement was shaped like a fish because he had loved to fish the Little River. He was buried in Wayne Memorial Park, one row in front of the headstone of James McNeill, another deaf Black patient who had been committed and castrated under the same system, spent decades wearing a police uniform on the hospital grounds, and whose medical file had gone missing because staff no longer knew his legal name. The old hospital campus did not close because of a court order or a preservation fight. It closed because of a construction bond and a hurricane.
The replacement hospital opened in 2016, built at a cost of $138 million. Wards inside it sat empty as recently as 2024 for want of staff. The old campus stands sealed, state-owned, patrolled, and closed to the public. In 2002, archaeologists cut trenches across two fields and found grave pits, and estimated that roughly three thousand people are buried on the grounds.
About seven hundred graves are marked. The archaeologists recommended the lower field never be built on. By comparison, the white hospital in Raleigh closed in 2012 and its campus became the city’s largest public park. Goldsboro got a locked gate, a security patrol, and a field experts advised the state not to touch.
In 2013, the state created a ten-million-dollar fund for sterilization victims. To qualify, a person had to be alive on the thirtieth of June 2013. Junius Wilson had been dead for twelve years. North Carolina taught a boy to speak with his hands, then spent seventy-five years calling those hands a symptom.
The state apologized for the surgery. It never answered the question of who, in that arrangement, was the one who could not understand.