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Melungeon

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Melungeon
Melungeon schoolgirls from Hancock County, Tennessee in front of the Melungeon boarding school in Asheville, North Carolina, c. 1916
Regions with significant populations
United States (East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia,[1][2] North Carolina, and Kentucky[2])
Languages
Southern American English
Religion
Predominantly Protestant Christianity
Related ethnic groups
Lumbee, Atlantic Creole, Turks of South Carolina, Chestnut Ridge people, White Southerners, Black Southerners, Native Americans, Dominickers, Redbone (ethnicity), Mulatto, Coloureds, Griqua people, Basters, Métis, Black Indians in the United States, Garifuna
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Melungeon (/məˈlʌndʒən/ mə-LUN-jən) (sometimes also spelled Malungean, Melangean, Melungean, Melungin[3]) was a slur[4] historically applied to individuals and families of mixed-race ancestry with roots in colonial Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina primarily descended from free people of color and white settlers.[5][6][7][8] In modern times, the term has been reclaimed by descendants of these families, especially in southern Appalachia.[9][10][11] Despite this mixed heritage, many modern Melungeons pass as White, as did many of their ancestors.[12][13][14][15][16]

The Weaver family are one of the many Melungeon families descended from South Asian indentured servants on Virginia plantations. Their paternal ancestors fled and settled in free mixed-race communities in North Carolina.[17]

Most of the modern population have an estimated 1-2% non-European DNA, though jumping up to 20% or more in some groups, such as the Lumbee.[18][19][20] Despite non-European DNA being in the minority for these groups, the impact of the one-drop rule either did, or had the potential to, label them as non-white. This redesignation resulted in some individuals being sterilized by state governments, most notably in Virginia.[21][22][23]

Many groups have historically been referred to as Melungeon, including the Melungeons of Newman's Ridge,[24] the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina,[25][26] the Chestnut Ridge people,[27] and the Carmel Indians.[28]

Free people of color in colonial Virginia were predominantly of African and European descent; however, many families also had varying amounts of Native American and East Indian ancestry.[29][30][31][32][33][34]

Some modern researchers believe that early Atlantic Creole slaves, descended from or acculturated by Iberian lançados[35] and Sephardi Jews fleeing the Inquisition,[36][37][38][39][40] were one of the pre-cursor populations to these groups.[41][42][43] Many creoles, once in British America, were able to obtain their freedom and many married into local white families.[44][45][46][47][48]

In the general US census, Melungeon people were enumerated as of the races to which they most resembled.[49]

Etymology

[edit]

The term Melungeon likely comes from the French word mélange ultimately derived from the Latin verb miscēre ("to mix, mingle, intermingle").[50][49][51] It was once a derogatory term, but is used by the Melungeon people today as a primary identifier. The Tennessee Encyclopedia states that in the 19th century, "the word 'Melungeon' appears to have been used as an offensive term for nonwhite and/or low socioeconomic class persons by outsiders."[51]

The term Melungeon was historically considered an insult, a label applied to Appalachians who were by appearance or reputation of mixed-race ancestry. Although initially pejorative in character,[52] this word has been reclaimed by members of the community.[53] The spelling of the term varied widely, as was common for words and names at the time.

According to the 1894 Department of Interior Report of Indians Taxed and not Taxed within the "Tennessee" report, "The civilized (self-supporting) Indians of Tennessee, counted in the general census numbered 146 (71 males and 75 females) and are distributed as follows: Hawkins county, 31; Monroe county, 12; Polk county, 10; other counties (8 or less in each), 93. Quoting from the report:

The Melungeans or Malungeans, in Hawkins county, claim to be Cherokees of mixed blood (white, Indian, and negro), their white blood being derived, as they assert, from English and Portuguese stock. They trace their descent primarily to 2 Indians (Cherokees) known, one of them as Collins, the other as Gibson, who settled in the mountains of Tennessee, where their descendants are now to be found, about the time of the admission of that state into the Union (1796).

Early uses

[edit]
"A Typical Malungeon" (1890) by Will Allen Dromgoole

The earliest historical record of the term Melungeon dates to 1813. In the minutes of the Stoney Creek Baptist Church in Scott County, Virginia, a woman stated another parishioner made the accusation that "she harbored them Melungins."[51] The second oldest written use of the term was in 1840, when a Tennessee politician described "an impudent Melungeon" from what became Washington, D.C., as being "a scoundrel who is half Negro and half Indian."[51] In the 1890s, during the age of yellow journalism, the term "Melungeon" started to circulate and be reproduced in U.S. newspapers, when the journalist Will Allen Dromgoole wrote several articles on the Melungeons.[54]

In 1894, the US Department of the Interior, in its "Report of Indians Taxed and Not Taxed," under the section "Tennessee" noted:

In a number of states small groups of people, preferring the freedom of the woods or the seashore to the confinement of regular labor in civilization, have become in some degree distinct from their neighbors, perpetuating their qualities and absorbing into their number those of like disposition, without preserving very clear racial lines. Such are the remnants called Indians in some states where a pure-blooded Indian can hardly longer be found. In Tennessee is such a group, popularly known as Melungeans, in addition to those still known as Cherokees. The name seems to have been given them by early French settlers, who recognized their mixed origin and applied to them the name Melangeans or Melungeans, a corruption of the French word "melange" which means mixed. (See letter of Hamilton McMillan, under North Carolina.)[50][49]

History

[edit]
Unofficial Melungeon flag designed by a Melungeon descendant

In December 1943, Walter Ashby Plecker of Virginia sent county officials a letter warning against "colored" families trying to pass as "white" or "Indian" in violation of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. He identified these as being "chiefly Tennessee Melungeons".[55] He directed the offices to reclassify members of certain families as black, causing the loss for numerous families of documentation in records that showed their continued self-identification as being of Native American descent on official forms.[55][56][57]

In the 20th century, during the Jim Crow era, some Melungeons attended boarding schools in Asheville, North Carolina, Warren Wilson College, and Dorland Institution which integrated earlier than other schools in the southern United States.[2]

Civil War

[edit]
Angus Chavis was a Lumbee who joined the Confederate Army as a drummer at the age of 15.[58]

Many free people of color, white-passing or otherwise, served in the American Civil War on both sides of the conflict. Some served in the Confederate military,[59][60] though others resisted the Confederate government, such as Henry Berry Lowry.[61]

Culture

[edit]

There is no uniquely Melungeon culture, though specific groups have formed into their own tribal entities on the basis of ancestral connections to historical Native American communities.[62][63]

Due to the lasting impact of colonialism, the decimation of initial contact tribes, and the legacy of American chattel slavery, culturally these mixed-race groups resemble their white settler neighbors in culture, with few exceptions.[64]

Melungeon cuisine includes chocolate gravy.[65]

Melungeon families

[edit]
Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. is descended from the Chestnut Ridge community of Melungeons.[66]

Definitions of who is Melungeon differ. Historians and genealogists have tried to identify surnames of different Melungeon families.[55][67] In 1943, Virginia State Registrar of Vital Statistics, Walter Ashby Plecker, identified surnames by county: "Lee, Smyth and Wise: Collins, Gibson, (Gipson), Moore, Goins, Ramsey, Delph, Bunch, Freeman, Mise, Barlow, Bolden (Bolin), Mullins, Hawkins (chiefly Tennessee Melungeons)".[55]

In 1992, Virginia DeMarce explored and reported the Goins genealogy as a Melungeon surname.[68] Beginning in the early 19th century, or possibly before, the term Melungeon was applied as a slur to a group of about 40 families along the Tennessee-Virginia border, but it has since become a catch-all phrase for a number of groups of mysterious mixed-race ancestry.[1] Through time the term has changed meanings but often referred to any mixed-race person and, at different times, has referred to 200 different communities across the Eastern United States.[1] These have included Van Guilders and Clappers of New York and Lumbees in North Carolina to Creoles in Louisiana.[1]

Paul Heinegg's research

[edit]

Award-winning genealogist and engineer[69] Paul Heinegg created a website listing some 1,000 family histories of free people of color, categorized by surname and county. Many families regularly denoted as Melungeon are listed throughout his research, as well as other families listed as being Native American, mulatto, and East Indian. Data is drawn from colonial tax lists and local court from across Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Delaware, and South Carolina.[70]

Claims

[edit]

Anthropologist E. Raymond Evans wrote in 1979 regarding Melungeons: "In Graysville, the Melungeons strongly deny their Black heritage and explain their genetic differences by claiming to have had Cherokee grandmothers. Many of the local whites also claim Cherokee ancestry and appear to accept the Melungeon claim. ..."[71]

In 1999, historian C. S. Everett hypothesized that John Collins (recorded as a Sapony Indian who was expelled from Orange County, Virginia about January 1743), might be the same man as the Melungeon ancestor John Collins, who was classified as a "mulatto" in 1755 North Carolina records.[72] However, Everett revised that theory after he discovered evidence that these were two different men named John Collins. Only descendants of the latter man, who was identified as mulatto in the 1755 record in North Carolina, have any proven connection to the Melungeon families of eastern Tennessee.[73][promotional source?]

Jack D. Forbes speculated that the Melungeons may have been Saponi/Powhatan descendants, although he acknowledges an account from circa 1890 described them as being "free colored" and mulatto people.[74]

Myths

[edit]

Dispute regarding the origin of Melungeons families has led to a large number of ahistorical and dubious myths regarding their origins. Some myths involve physical characteristics and genetic diseases that are claimed to indicate Melungeon descent, such as shovel-shaped incisors, an Anatolian bump, Familial Mediterranean fever, polydactyly, dark skin with bright colored eyes, and high cheekbones.[75][76][6]

Other myths claim that the Melungeons are descendants of lost Spanish colonists, marooned Portuguese sailors,[77] descendants of the ancient Israelites or Phoenicians,[78] Romani slaves, or Turkish settlers.[79]

Genetic testing

[edit]
The outlaw Sam Bass was part of the Bass family of the mixed-race Lost Creek settlement.[80]

From 2005 to 2011, researchers Roberta J. Estes, Jack H. Goins, Penny Ferguson, and Janet Lewis Crain began the Melungeon Core Y-DNA Group online. They interpreted these results in their (2011) paper titled "Melungeons, A Multi-Ethnic Population",[67] which shows that ancestry of the sample is primarily European and African, with one person having a Native American paternal haplotype.

Estes, Goins, Ferguson, and Crain wrote in their 2011 summary "Melungeons, A Multi-Ethnic Population" that the Riddle family is the only Melungeon participant with historical records identifying them as having Native American origins, but their DNA is European. Among the participants, only the Sizemore family is documented as having Native American DNA.[67] "Estes and her fellow researchers "theorize that the various Melungeon lines may have sprung from the unions of black and white indentured servants living in Virginia in the mid-1600s, before slavery. They conclude that as laws were put in place to penalize the mixing of races, the various family groups could only intermarry with each other, even migrating together from Virginia through the Carolinas before settling primarily in the mountains of East Tennessee."[1][67]

Possible Origins

[edit]

Although each group have their own unique admixtures, there have been several points made that might adequately explain a lot of them. On top of this, during the 19th and 20th centuries, many such communities began breaking up and scattering across much of the country, leading to some mixing occurring between many such racially ambiguous groups.

Between approximately 1700-1820, as the Carolinas, Georgia and Appalachia began to be settled, America solidified its interest in the slave trade. As a large part of their attempts to justify Slavery of blacks, they cited their inability to read and write, among other aspects that made them less advanced or Civilized than Europeans. But, this wasn't always the case- some of the people who were enslaved were able to read and write in Arabic, which upset and confused many American colonial settlers at each instance they were discovered. Several such people were known to have escaped, disappeared into Appalachia and may have taken refuge amongst Native Americans or formed their own communities. These slaves were most likely related to the Songhai people, neighbors to Benin, the nation where the American colonies sourced their African slaves, who were and still are today a Muslim majority people. If so, this would explain both the black ancestry and the claims of Turkish ancestry amongst some groups. There is well documented evidence showing those Melungeons who lived near Native American communities, particularly between Virginia and South Carolina, came to be very deeply ingrained into these communities, whether they intermarried or not. [81]

Among the Scots-Irish and German immigrants who settled Appalachia, there were also a fair minority of both who had the ability to tan. Amongst the Scots-Irish, descendants of the people around where Scotland, England and Wales meet, these are referred to as the Black Irish, despite no such people existing amongst the actual Irish. Amongst the Germans, they are usually just referred to as Black or Swarthy, but a new term sprang up in both Australia and Appalachia- Black Dutch. As many mixed Australians began identifying heavily as Black Dutch to avoid discrimination, some mixed persons in Appalachia followed suit. But, over time, the connotation of being Black Dutch started leading to just as much discrimination and a will amongst white Appalachians to shun anyone they thought might be mixed off into their own separate groups. This caused some people of Native American ancestry (although rare) and authentic Black Irish or Black Dutch ancestry to all merge into one group. In some cases, other misaligned groups of recent immigrants who ended up in Appalachia, such as Italians, were also shunned into these same communities.

Many such people with alleged Native ancestry claim to either be Cherokee or Blackfoot. Cherokee derives from the slang use of Cherokee in early West Virginia and Kentucky to mean Native American in general, with many records from these places showing all tribes encountered occasionally referred to as Cherokees. Blackfoot is more confusing, as the term is clearly as old as pre-1830, when the Indian Removal Act forced the actual Cherokee off their land, but is nonsensical.

Racial laws and court cases

[edit]

Melungeon ancestors were considered by appearance to be mixed race. During the 18th and the early 19th centuries, census enumerators classified them as "mulatto," "other free," or as "free persons of color." Sometimes they were listed as "white" or sometimes as "black" or "negro," or even "Indian."[citation needed] One family described as "Indian" was the Ridley (Riddle) family, as was noted on a 1767 Pittsylvania County, Virginia, tax list.[citation needed] Another tri-racial family described as “Indian” was the Butler family, as was noted in the 1860 census for Whitley County, Kentucky, with the family patriarch (named Simon Butler) being born in Tennessee around 1776.[citation needed]

Ariela Gross referenced the 1846 State v. Solomon, Ezekial, Levi, Andrew, Wiatt, Vardy Collins, Zachariah, Lewis Minor, Hawkins County Circuit Court Minute Book, 1842–1848, Hawkins County Circuit Court, Hawkins County Courthouse box 31, 32 and the Jacob F. Perkins vs. John R. White, Carter County, July 1855 Abstract of depositions to support her conclusions made about identity and citizenship in 19th-century United States.[82]

Confederate General Randall L. Gibson was the great-grandson of free black Revolutionary War veteran, Gideon Gibson Jr.[83]

In 1924, Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act that codified hypodescent or the "one-drop rule, suggesting that anyone with any trace of African ancestry was legally Black and would fall under Jim Crow laws designed to limit the freedoms and rights of Black people.[84] Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States were not declared unconstitutional until the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case.[85]

Modern identity

[edit]

By the mid-to-late 19th century, the term Melungeon appeared to have been used most frequently to refer to the biracial families of Hancock County and neighboring areas.[citation needed] Several other uses of the term in the print media, from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, have been collected by the Melungeon Heritage Association.[2]

Since the mid-1990s, popular interest in the Melungeons has grown tremendously, although many descendants have left the region of historical concentration. The writer Bill Bryson devoted the better part of a chapter to them in his The Lost Continent (1989). People are increasingly self-identifying as having Melungeon ancestry.[86][page needed][better source needed] Internet sites promote the anecdotal claim that Melungeons are more prone to certain diseases, such as sarcoidosis or familial Mediterranean fever. Academic medical centers have noted that neither of those diseases is confined to a single population.[87]

Literature

[edit]

Author Jesse Stuart's 1965 novel Daughter of the Legend, set in Tennessee, depicts a love story between a Melungeon girl and a timber cutter from Virginia, and explores socioeconomic and racial tensions among mountain-dwelling families.

A Melungeon character is the titular protagonist and narrator of Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, which was a co-recipient of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel takes place primarily in Lee County, Virginia and environs.

See also

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References

[edit]
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Further reading

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  • Ball, Bonnie (1992). The Melungeons: Notes on the Origin of a Race. Johnson City, Tennessee: Overmountain Press.
  • Berry, Brewton (1963). Almost White: A Study of Certain Racial Hybrids in the Eastern United States. New York: Macmillan Press.
  • Bible, Jean Patterson (1975). Melungeons Yesterday and Today. Signal Mountain, Tennessee: Mountain Press.
  • Brake, Katherine Vande. How They Shine: How They Shine: Melungeon Characters in Fiction of Appalachia. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
  • Brake, Katherine Vande. Through the Back Door: Melungeon Literacies and Twenty-First Century Technologies. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
  • Cavender, Anthony P. "The Melungeons of Upper East Tennessee: Persisting Social Identity," Tennessee Anthropologist 6 (1981): 27–36
  • Goins, Jack H. (2000). Melungeons: And Other Pioneer Families, Blountville, Tennessee: Continuity Press.
  • Dromgoole, William "Will" Allen (1891). The Malungeon Tree and Its Four Branches, Melungeon Heritage Association.
  • Hashaw, Tim. Children of Perdition: Melungeons and the Struggle of Mixed America. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
  • Heinegg, Paul (2005). FREE AFRICAN AMERICANS OF VIRGINIA, NORTH CAROLINA, SOUTH CAROLINA, MARYLAND AND DELAWARE Including the family histories of more than 80% of those counted as "all other free persons" in the 1790 and 1800 census, Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing, 1999–2005. Available in its entirety online.
  • Hirschman, Elizabeth. Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
  • Johnson, Mattie Ruth (1997). My Melungeon Heritage: A Story of Life on Newman's Ridge. Johnson City, Tennessee: Overmountain Press.
  • Kennedy, N. Brent (1997) The Melungeons: the resurrection of a proud people. Mercer University Press.
  • Kessler, John S. and Donald Ball. North From the Mountains: A Folk History of the Carmel Melungeon Settlement, Highland County, Ohio. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
  • Langdon, Barbara Tracy (1998). The Melungeons: An Annotated Bibliography: References in both Fiction and Nonfiction, Hemphill, Texas: Dogwood Press.
  • Lister, Richard (July 3, 2009). "Lost people of Appalachia". BBC News Online.
  • McGowan, Kathleen (2003). "Where do we really come from?", DISCOVER 24 (5, May 2003)
  • Offutt, Chris. (1999) "Melungeons", in Out of the Woods, Simon & Schuster.
  • Overbay, DruAnna Williams. Windows on the Past: The Cultural Heritage of Vardy, Hancock County, Tennessee. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
  • Podber, Jacob. The Electronic Front Porch: An Oral History of the Arrival of Modern Media in Rural Appalachia and the Melungeon Community. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
  • Price, Henry R. (1966). "Melungeons: The Vanishing Colony of Newman's Ridge." Conference paper. American Studies Association of Kentucky and Tennessee. March 25–26, 1966.
  • Reed, John Shelton (1997). "Mixing in the Mountains", Southern Cultures 3 (Winter 1997): 25–36.(subscription required)
  • Scolnick, Joseph M Jr. and N. Brent Kennedy. (2004). From Anatolia to Appalachia: A Turkish American Dialogue. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
  • Vande Brake, Katherine (2001). How They Shine: Melungeon Characters in the Fiction of Appalachia, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press.
  • Williamson, Joel (1980). New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States, New York: Free Press.
  • Winkler, Wayne. 2019. Beyond the sunset: The Melungeon drama, 1969-1976. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
  • Winkler, Wayne (2004). "Walking Toward the Sunset: The Melungeons of Appalachia", Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press.
  • Winkler, Wayne and Estes, Roberta (7/11/2012). "For Some People of Appalachia complicated roots", Tell Me More. National Public Radio. npr.org accessed 12 June 2023
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