Tag: melungeons

  • “Of Portuguese Origin”: Litigating Identity and Citizenship among the “Little Races” in Nineteenth-Century America Law and History Review 2007 Volume 25, Number 3 Ariela J. Gross, John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History University of Southern California The history of race in the nineteenth-century United States is often told as a…

  • …Marriage between blacks, whites and Indians was legal in Virginia for most of the 17th century. Genealogist Paul Heinegg found that 99% of all mixed children in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the Carolinas before 1810 came from intermarriages of free blacks with whites. Cases of white masters having children by black slaves were virtually non-existence,…

  • …From the 1620s, in southern British colonies like Virginia, white northern Europeans intermarried with Indians.  They also intermarried with Africans who began entering the American colonies as early as 1619.  Melungeons originate from these red, white and black peoples in this period of American history.  They began forming identifiable separate mixed communities when the first…

  • Children of Perdition: Melungeons and the Struggle of Mixed America Mercer University Press 2006 192 pages ISBN (paperback): 9780881460742 ISBN (hardback): 9780881460131 Tim Hashaw Some oppressed groups fought with guns, some fought in court, some exercised civil disobedience; the Melungeons, however, fought by telling folktales. Whites and blacks gave the name “children of perdition” to…