In the summer of 1976, Forsyth gave in to repeated requests from her financial advisers to cut off monetary support to the program. The foundation sent a letter to the Stouffer alumni announcing the termination of the foundation. Ehle, the foundation’s executive director, began winding down the operation, writing students to ask about their college plans. With 20 prep schools newly open to blacks, Ehle also commissioned a study of the students at those schools who might have been affected by a program he called “the quietest, most successful integration program carried on in our country.” The Stouffer Questionnaire on Social Tolerance, as the survey came to be called, was designed to measure whether exposure had benefited students’ attitudes on race. It posed questions like:

I am no longer conscious of the race of students in prep school: Agree or Disagree?

I would object to a black student dating my sister: Agree or Disagree?

I believe another five years of social change may result in a greater degree of integration than we have now: Agree or Disagree?

In their answers, the students seemed to point out the implicit flaw in the Stouffer experiment. “I think that this test was a waste of time,” one student wrote. “There really aren’t enough blacks in this school for us to be able to answer the questions fairly.” Another echoed the same sentiment, criticizing not the project itself but its size. “Why the questionnaire on black students when there are only three in the whole school? Seems rather ridiculous. I hope something was gained by this because I think it’s silly.”

The Magnificent Seven hadn’t heard of the study until I told them about finding the dot matrix printouts in the University of North Carolina’s archives. I asked them whether they cared that their educations — and the personal costs some of them paid — had been an afterthought in this larger experiment in conditioning white Southerners to tolerate black children from a young age. “No, I never felt that way,” Bill told me. “I think I benefited from the V.E.S. educational experience. Did we contribute to changing the culture of the school? Sure.”

Some of their white classmates told me that knowing the seven changed them. But how do you quantify that? What’s easier to see is how the black students used the Stouffer experience to position themselves for success. As their lives progressed, each of them in his own way had to bring the bad that happened to accord with the good. I believe that’s a common refrain of many high-achieving black people in this country. In order to fully inhabit the bright parts of life — their educations, the friendships, the knowledge, the doors opened, the growth — they must own the darkness. Johnny told me I was the first person he had ever explored his feelings with. By the last time we spoke, he said he had made peace with what happened to him.

Whenever Jerrauld’s life takes him near Lynchburg, he visits V.E.S. for a walk around campus. “They were kids,” he told me, speaking of his white classmates. “I’m not giving them a complete pass on the bad things they did to us. But once they were put in the position of knowing that we were just like them or better than them academically, once they saw that, I think they had no other choice but to deal with us as people. There was this begrudged respect for us.” With time, the experiment became theirs, an attempt to wrest control from a world that didn’t always want to give it to them. “We were soldiers,” Jerrauld said, “on that little bitty battlefield.”