Robeson County officials made a seemingly simple request in 1938. They wanted to send two girls they had labeled as "delinquent" to a state training school.

But there was one big problem - the girls were Lumbee Indians, then segregated from whites and blacks and kept out of most state training schools. The question about whether they should be admitted festered into arguments about racial purity and Indian attitudes toward sterilization, operations that often happened at the state schools. Almost 65 years later, the admissions controversy sheds light on the tension surrounding the eugenics movement, the sterilizations that resulted from it and the state program's preoccupation with race.

It is emotion-laden terrain, particularly so for American Indians. More than 50 Indians were sterilized in North Carolina, a small portion of thousands sterilized nationwide as the eugenics movement kicked in during the first half of the 20th century. Today, many American Indians freely speak out about that time, seeing it as part of a pattern of physical and cultural genocide that they long faced. But in 1938, whites often did the talking for them.

"We have failed to secure any evidence that the Indians have hope of preserving their own race as a distinct one or of preserving any item of their culture," psychologist Harry Bice wrote in a report to state officials about the admissions controversy over the Lumbee girls.

The girls, ages 14 and 15, were being considered for admission to Samarcand Manor at Eagle Springs, also known as the State Home and Industrial School for Girls. White workers with the Robeson County Department of Public Welfare said they were sexually active and of borderline intelligence, according to state records. At the time, blacks were still barred from training schools for whites. A 1933 state law required that Indians be admitted to Samarcand and a training school for boys, but law and practice were separated by inevitable foot dragging.

In his report to the state, Bice quoted a few Indian leaders from Robeson County. "If Indian girls at Samarcand were sterilized, it would be a good thing - the unfit should be sterilized," a public-school principal identified only as "Mr. Lowry" said. "The lower class and the Holiness people would fight it, but there is no teaching of the Indians as a race to oppose sterilization."

Much of the admissions controversy dealt with questions about the purity of the Lumbees, who were once called "The Cherokee Indians of Robeson County." Glenn Ellen Starr Stilling of Appalachian State University, the author of The Lumbees: An Annotated Bibliography, notes that eugenicist Arthur Estabrook of the Carnegie Institution of Washington studied the Lumbees. In the 1920s, Estabrook co-wrote a thinly veiled account of the Lumbees as an example of a race that had become impure by mixing with blacks.

In a chapter of Mongrel Virginians, Estabrook and Ivan McDougle called Robeson County "Robin County, N.C.," and called the Lumbees the "Rivers" tribe.

As Bice prepared his report in 1938, he touched on similar issues. He wrote that the 14-year-old he had recommended for sterilization had a broad nose and dark color. "Whatever the race of this girl may actually be, she would not be accepted by the girls at Samarcand, nor by white people in general, as anything but a Negro.... She is reported to have kept company with a boy that is recognized as a Negro."

Throughout the history of the eugenics program in North Carolina and across the country, evidence of interracial relationships was often a justification for sterilization.

Today, the obsession that whites had with the Lumbees and race seems bizarre to some Lumbee leaders. "It does appear to be folly, less than petty, insane almost," said the Rev. Mike Cummings of Robeson County. "But that marked our lives 50 or 60 years ago. And it does linger."

The Lumbees have fought for years to have the federal government recognize them as a tribe. Some Lumbees are still prejudiced toward blacks and don't acknowledge their own black blood, Cummings said. But what defines them as a people more than bloodlines is a long history of shared experience, he said.

Boiling the definition down to blood carries the threat of erasing the Lumbee people's history as distinct group, Cummings said.

The Lumbees, lacking tribal status, never had a reservation like the Cherokees have in Western North Carolina. In the early 1950s, the eugenics board explored the possibility of ordering sterilizations on some of the residents of the reservation. A lawyer with the attorney general's office advised the board that it lacked authority on the reservation.

Before that advice was given, some sterilizations were performed on the reservation, according to eugenics board records, but it is unknown whether those operations were by order of the board. Board records do not indicate the tribes of the Indians sterilized in North Carolina.

The records don't indicate whether the girl was ever sterilized. Nor do they indicate if the 15-year-old underwent the operation. But the older girl was sent to Samarcand.

"We will admit this girl, against protest, believing that it will be hard for her to make proper adjustment in a school with white girls," the school superintendent, Grace Robson, wrote in a letter to Robeson social workers.

• John Railey can be reached at 727-7288 or at jrailey@wsjournal.com