Mixed Race Studies

Seeking Roots in Shifting Ground–Dr. Laura Tugman’s topic for 18th Union, June 28

Melungeon Heritage Association: One People, All Colors
2014-05-20

18th Melungeon Union
Vardy, Tennessee and Big Stone Gap, Virginia
2014-06-27 through 2014-06-28

Dr. Laura Tugman will discuss her doctoral dissertation, entitled Seeking Roots in Shifting Ground: Ethnic Identity Development and the Melungeons of Southern Appalachia. Her research examined the experience of Melungeon ethnic identity development through ethnographic interviews with Melungeon individuals in Southern Appalachia. Her study concluded that the identity development process and group dynamics occurring within the Melungeons present challenges to the current multicultural psychology literature regarding ethnic identity development. As recently as the early 1990s, many believed that the Melungeons would soon be completely assimilated into mainstream white America. More recently, the formation of the Melungeon Heritage Association has renewed ethnic pride for many Melungeons who have either previously concealed their heritage—or were not even aware of it—due to a long-standing generational practice of concealing Melungeon heritage. Dr. Tugman examined the ethnic identity development process and life experiences of Melungeons, particularly the impact of social dynamics, both within and outside the group, on self-identification.

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A Study of Tri-Racial Isolates in Eastern United States

Human Heredity
Volume 6, Number 3, 1956/1957
DOI: 10.1159/000150862
pages 410–412

C. J. Witkop
National Institute of Dental Research, National Institutes of Health, Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A.

There are known to exist in the eastern part of the United States some 28 well defined tri-racial isolates. These groups represent gene pools of various proportions of Caucasian, Negro, and American Indian races. These groups are known as mixed bloods in their own communities. They are not accepted into the white community and do not consider themselves Negroes. As a result, they maintain their racial integrity by in-marriage within a few family names. They all represent the remnants of eastern Indian tribes.

A preliminary survey of each group was made by a questionnaire letter to the county health officer in whose district these groups reside. On the basis of subsequent studies it has been shown that about 10% of the genetically determined conditions that actually exist in these groups are reported by this method. One of these groups was selected for a detailed genetic study.

Detailed Study

A detailed study of the medical, dental, mental health, and social aspects of one of these groups comprising 5 000 living members is in progress in southern Maryland. We are trying to determine all of the hereditary pathological traits present in the group. This group was selected for study for the following reasons:

1. This group marries for the most part within only 14 family surnames. 2. Records indicate that the group has in-married for nearly 250 years. 3. These people reside in a limited geographic area of 2 counties of…

Read or purchase the article here.

Written records agree with Melungeon DNA results

Jack Goins’ Melungeon and Appalachian Research
October 2013

William E. Cole
University of Tennessee

Joe Stevenson Looney
University of Tennessee

Written records agree with Core Melungeon DNA Results. The Core Melungeon DNA Project was formed with Family Tree DNA on July 25, 2005. The goal of the project was to determine the origin of the Melungeons and to find matches in the data base. Our project results were submitted to a peer review board and published April 24, 2012 in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy and published by Associated Press reporter Travis Loller in May 2012, the results of the first generation are offspring of Sub-Saharan African men and white women of Northern and central European origin. http://www.jogg.info/72/files/Estes.pdf.

The majority of the male core groups were haplogroup E1b1a Sub-Saharan African and the maternal mtDNA group was European. The first mixed generation was the children from Sub-Saharan African men and white women of Northern and central European origin, the exact date of this mixing is unknown. Some from this first mixed generation eventually intermarried with white settlers in colonial Virginia and took their names. Part of this tri-racial clan may have remained in Colonial Virginia and others migrated to North Carolina who would eventually become known as Melungeons (Calloway Collins told Will Allen Dromgoole the Collins and Gibsons, had stolen those names from white settlers in Virginia where they were living as Indians, before migrating to North Carolina”). Calloway Collins was a great grandson of Benjamin whose origin was African and we also know all Africans took English surnames, even the ones who became slaves…

Read the entire article here.

Analysis of a Tri-Racial Isolate

Human Biology
Volume 36, Number 4 (December 1964)
pages 362-373

William S. Pollitzer
Department of Anatomy
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Based on a paper presented at the meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Philadelphia, May 2, 1962

A relatively isolated population in the state of North Carolina, composed of persons who call themselves Indian but who appear to be of tri-racial origin, provides a model for the study of analysis by gene frequencies of a mixed population of White, Negro, and Indian ancestry.

A people considered Indian is known to have occupied this territory by the mid-eighteenth century; they spoke English, tilled the soil, and owned slaves. English, Scotch Highlanders, and French Huguenots migrated into the area in the eighteenth century also. Planters from neighboring states settled in this vicinity, often bringing slaves and a few free Negroes with them. The most common names of the free Negroes are the same as those of the present-day mixed population.

The origin of the Indian component of this hybrid population is open to speculation; three ideas have been advanced. The most colorful theory is that the people of the present isolate are the descendants of Raleigh’s famous “Lost Colony” who mixed with the Croatan Indians, an Algonquin-speaking tribe on the coast. Some similarity in the names of the colonists and the names in the present population, plus a few cultural traits, have been construed as evidence for this view. Another suggestion is that the Cherokee, a powerful Iroquois-speaking tribe who had general overlordship in the Western Carolinas, contributed the Indian genes to the hybrid group. Finally, the view has been advanced that the Siouan-speaking tribes who lived in the Piedmont Carolinas, e.g., the Catawba, were the Indian stock involved.

Considerable phenotypic variation is found within the isolate today, with extremes of skin color from light to dark and of hair form from very curly to straight- The morphology of the face also suggests broad racial backgrounds. It is therefore of interest to learn what the blood factors and hemoglobins tell of the composition of this population of multiple racial origins.

In 1958, in cooperation with Dr. Amoz Chernoff, blood samples were…

Becoming Melungeon: Making an Ethnic Identity in the Appalachian South

University of Nebraska Press
2013
232 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-7154-8

Melissa Schrift, Associate Professor of Anthropology
East Tennessee State University

Appalachian legend describes a mysterious, multiethnic population of exotic, dark-skinned rogues called Melungeons who rejected the outside world and lived in the remote, rugged mountains in the farthest corner of northeast Tennessee. The allegedly unknown origins of these Melungeons are part of what drove this legend and generated myriad exotic origin theories. Though nobody self-identified as Melungeon before the 1960s, by the 1990s “Melungeonness” had become a full-fledged cultural phenomenon, resulting in a zealous online community and annual meetings where self-identified Melungeons gathered to discuss shared genealogy and history. Although today Melungeons are commonly identified as the descendants of underclass whites, freed African Americans, and Native Americans, this ethnic identity is still largely a social construction based on local tradition, myth, and media.

In Becoming Melungeon, Melissa Schrift examines the ways in which the Melungeon ethnic identity has been socially constructed over time by various regional and national media, plays, and other forms of popular culture. Schrift explores how the social construction of this legend evolved into a fervent movement of a self-identified ethnicity in the 1990s. This illuminating and insightful work examines these shifting social constructions of race, ethnicity, and identity both in the local context of the Melungeons and more broadly in an attempt to understand the formation of ethnic groups and identity in the modern world.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race, Identity, and the Melungeon Legend
• Chapter 1: Inventing the Melungeons
• Chapter 2: Melungeons and Media Representation
• Chapter 3: Playing the First Melungeons
• Chapter 4: Becoming Melungeon
• Chapter 5: The Mediterranean Mystique
• Chapter 6: The Melungeon Core
• Closing Thoughts
• Appendix 1: Melungeon Questionnaire
• Appendix 2: Media Articles
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

News Release: Lectures in Edenton and Raleigh this weekend

Chowan Discovery Group
2013-05-15

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director

This weekend, the Winton Triangle’s history will be presented at special events in Edenton and Raleigh.  On the morning of Friday, May 17, the town of Edenton is observing its 300th anniversary. Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director of the Chowan Discovery Group, is one of two speakers lecturing on Edenton area history.
 
The next day, Saturday, May 18, Jones recounts the Winton Triangle role in the Civil War.  The venue is the United States Colored Troop Symposium at the North Carolina History Museum in Raleigh.  Jones will be speaking at 2:30pm.
 
The Winton Triangle is the 260 year-old landowning community of color that traverses the triangle formed by Winton, Ahoskie and Cofield.  In the past year, the Chowan Discovery Group (http://www.chowandiscovery.org/) has made presentations in New York City, Chicago, Greensboro, Durham and Washington, D.C. 

Among the venues were the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at DePaul University where Jones hosted two panels about Roanoke-Chowan and Appalachian mixed race peoples.  Other occasions were three Winton Triangle presentations at the African American Genealogical and Historical Society Conference in Greensboro.  Since the April 2012 erection and dedication of the Robert L. Vann Marker in Ahoskie, Marvin Jones has given three radio interviews about Vann and the Winton Triangle.  Internet links to these interviews are found on the Chowan Discovery website (“Presentations”).

For more information about the upcoming lectures, contact the Chowan Discovery Group at 202.726.4066 or info@chowandiscovery.org.

Family and Community History of the Winton Triangle

Research at the National Archives & Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
2013-04-22, 21:00-22:00 EDT (2013-04-23, 01:00-02:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Host

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director
Chowan Discovery Group

From Family History to Community History—the Chowan Discovery Group Story with Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director of the Chowan Discovery Group (CDG).

The mission of the Chowan Discovery Group  is to research, document, preserve and present the 400+ year-old history of the landowning tri-racial people of color of the Winton Triangle, an area centered in Hertford County, North Carolina.

Founded in 2007, the Chowan Discovery Group (http://www.chowandiscovery.org/)  co-produced in 2009 its first major presentation, a stage production, scripted by Jones, called The Winton Triangle.  The book, Carolina Genesis: Beyond the Color Line, features Jones’ summary of the Triangle’s history.

In addition to writing articles, Jones has made numerous presentations about the Winton Triangle’s history on national and regional radio, at colleges and universities, museums and to civic groups. The North Carolina Office of Archives and History accepted four of his nominations for highway historical markers.

A native of Cofield, a village in the Winton Triangle, Marvin Jones began this project a decade ago by scanning the photograph collection of relatives and neighbors.  The Winton Triangle digital collection now has over 7,000 files of photographs, documents, maps, audio and video recordings.

Jones is the owner of Marvin T. Jones & Associates, a professional photography company in Washington, DC.  He has  published in well-known magazines and has worked in South America, the Caribbean and Africa.  Howard University and Roanoke-Chowan Community College hosted Jones’ exhibit on Somalia.

For more information, click here.

Mixed bloods of the Upper Monongahela Valley, West Virginia

Washington Academy of Sciences
Volume 36, Number 1 (1946-01-15)
pages 1-13
Source: Biodiversity Heritage Library

William Harlen Gilbert, Jr.
Library of Congress

We are accustomed to think of West Virginia as a racially homogeneous State populated by Old Americans of English, Scotch, and Scotch-Irish descent with an additional contingent in recent years of Poles and Italians in the mining areas. It may come as somewhat of a surprise to many to learn that there exists in the northern counties of the State a racial island of mixed bloods, known locally as “Guineas,” numbering several thousand persons. The origin of this mixed race is unrecorded, and the relative proportion of white, Negro, and Indian blood entering into its makeup is difficult to ascertain. The main seat of this people is in northern Barbour County and southern Taylor County, but small groups are to be found in over half a dozen adjoining counties and in Garrett County, Md. From their homes in the hill country many have gone in recent years to the factory cities of West Virginia, Ohio, and Michigan in search of economic opportunity and social betterment.

It is difficult to find a completely acceptable term to designate these mixed people. Stigmatized by white public opinion as a sort of outcast group, they dislike and resent any designation used by outsiders for themselves. They especially resent the terms “Guinea” or “Guinea Nigger,” which are most generally applied to them by their white neighbors. There are several possibilities in explaining the origin of this sobriquet.

An educated member of this group is said to have worked out a genealogy for them several years ago in which he claimed that an English nobleman went to the Guinea coast of Africa in the early days (possibly as a remittance man), married a native Negro woman, and produced a large family of crossbreeds. Later some of these descendants came to America and became the ancestors of the “Guineas.” Hu Maxwell, in his History of Barbour County (pp. 310-311), asserts that the mixed bloods of that county are called “Guineas” under the mistaken notion that they are Guinea Negroes. They are said, however, to have claimed for many years a descent from one of the Guineas (British, French, or Portuguese) in Africa or from one of the Guianas (British, French, or Dutch) in South America, and that their blood was native Negro or Indian…

Read the entire article here.

America’s Oldest Negro Community

Ebony (via The History and Genealogy of the Mixed-blood Descendants of the Native Americans of the State of Delaware and parts of Eastern Shore Maryland and Southern New Jersey)
February 1952
pages 42-46

Gouldtown traces it’s history back 250 years, began with an interracial marriage

The march of history has all but bypassed Gouldtown, N.J., a sprawling farm community 40 miles from Philadelphia, but the Negro townsfolk still preserve their unique heritage and identity and are quietly proud of their past. The continuity of Gouldtown’s main families remains unbroken for 250 years and local legends still abound about how it all started. Today’s generation of Gouldtowners dwell less on tradition than their forebears did. But they know the main facts of their history, especially how their town came to be born. They are aware of Gouldtown’s origins and conversant with the picturesque personalities that shared in its development. But they have refused to be isolated by the sweep of history and the quickened tempo of modern living.

Gouldtown has been called the oldest colored settlement in America, and it may quite possibly be. The New Jersey land on which it stands was bought by its founder, John Fenwick, an English nobleman, in 1675. The community derived its name from a black man named Gould who married Elizabeth Fenwick, granddaughter of the wealthy colonist. The union caused a scandal which rocked the area for miles around and inflamed Fenwick with shame and rage. Intermarriage between Negroes and whites in those days was rare. The couple were subjected to scorn and ridicule but remained together as man and wife and raised children who became the first of a long line of hardy farmers.

All of the Goulds of present-day Gouldtown are their descendants. Today there are over 800 Goulds still living in the five square miles that comprise the community. A total of 1,000 persons bearing the name of Pierce inhabit the section, along with 300 Murrays, 200 Cuffs and 100 Wrights. These are the five principal family names of Gouldtown…

…The Civil War afforded the community of free Negroes an opportunity to show their solidarity with their enslaved brothers in the South. Anti-Confederate feeling was so strong in Gouldtown that all the men offered to fight. The community officially informed President Lincoln that it could raise a regiment of colored men burning with a great zeal to help defeat the armies of the slaveholders. When that offer was rejected by the government, the entire community felt rebuffed. Scores of Gouldtown men quietly slipped away from their homes and joined the Union Army as white men…

Read the entire article here.

The Mixed-Blood Racial Strain of Carmel, Ohio and Magoffin County, Kentucky

Ohio Journal of Science
Volume 50, Number 6 (November 1950)
pages 281-290

Edward T. Price, Professor Emeritus of Geography
University of Oregon

A number of population groups of dark-skinned peoples, recognized as socially distinct in rural localities of eastern United States, are commonly assumed to be tri-racial, mixed from white, Negro, and Indian ancestors. A small example of such a group is mentioned by The Ohio Guide (1) as living in the vicinity of Carmel in Highland County. Aside from another small mixed-blood settlement of very different circumstances in Darke County, this group near Carmel is probably the only one to be found rooted in Ohio.

Carmel is a cross-roads hamlet based on a school, a church, and a country store. Its location on the margin of the Till Plains, half surrounded by the wooded hills which mark the western edge of the Appalachian Plateau, is probably significant for the phenomenon which brings it this notice (figs. 1 and 2).

The “half-breeds” or “Carmel Indians,” as they are locally identified, are well known to the farmers of the vicinity, who, on the surface at least, accept good-naturedly the claim of the former to Indian ancestry. Privately the question of Negro blood also may be raised. Most of the older residents think that both are present and can name families or individuals who they think illustrated each type in the days before the mixing was so thorough. The group look mixed; a few of them are nearly white, but most are identifiable by their brown or tan skin; many of them have curly black hair, and many have straight black hair. Few, if any, really look like Indians, but identifying negroid features are not usual. I consider it likely that Indian and Negro mixtures are both present on the basis that the degree of pigmentation in most of the people otherwise seems inconsistent with their general lack of negroid features (figs. 3, 4, and 5).

The surnames of the members of this group are, with few exceptions, Gibson (Gipson), Nichols, and Perkins. One or two other names have recently been added to the group by marriage. Some of the Gipsons aver that the Gibsons have a trace of Negro blood. In the summer of 1947 their number was determined to be at least 150; the population is said to have been somewhat larger in times past…

Read the entire article here.