MELUNGEONS and Other Mestee Groups (third part)

MISCEGENATION AND GENETICS

There has been prejudice against mixing races, breeds or types of animals and people in many places and times. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this prejudice was the practice of sibling marriage by certain dynasties of Egyptian pharoahs. Since they were divine kings, nobody but their own sisters were worthy of them. James Thurber commented that to him it was less amazing that they were able to rule despite the biological consequences of inbreeding than that they survived having the same set of family anecdotes to share. The fascination with pure breeding becomes nearly a religion among those from aristocratic backgrounds who have fallen on bad times. The economic depression of the thirties gave rise to racist fanaticism in Europe, America and South Africa. The recognition of the detrimental effects of inbreeding and the beneficial effects of heterosis found in crossbred animals and plants has caused people to change their ideas on this subject. The new term hybrid, taken from agriculture, does not carry the stigma of the old term mongrel. Of course, people hold to their old prejudices longer concerning people than with pigs or corn.

Frequently the mixing has occurred through prostitution or enslavement, and while the members of the oppressed group who are forced into prostitution to support themselves or subjected to slave foremen may not be the dregs of their group, the members of the dominant group who use them are more likely to be the least acceptable members of that group. The advantages that heterosis brings to a mixed group at the time it is formed are quickly lost if the group then breeds within itself. The study of the Issues of Virginia (called the Win Tribe in the book) produced by the Department of Genetics of the Carnegie Institute in 1926, titled Mongrel Virginians, is an example of all that is wrong with such studies. The Issues are the descendants of free blacks and remnants of Indian groups. The term is applied both to just the isolated community of Amherst County, the object of this book, and other similar groups scattered over a wide area of central Virginia. The name derives from a term used for a slave who became free. The extreme bias of the authors is shown in the assertion that the separation of the Issues from the slave blacks resulted from the Issues being perceived as inferior because they had no white master rather than superior because they were free. This community is very small and very highly inbred.

This study was made to justify and uphold the Virginia Racial Integrity Law of 1924, to show that racial mixing is disastrous. It does show that extreme inbreeding is detrimental, as have similar studies on the Wesorts of Maryland. It is a shame the authors did not read the excellent (even though written by a white who believed in white superiority) book by Edward Reuter in 1918, The Mulatto in the United States, which documents the contribution mixed race people had made to the black community in America.

As far as the genetics of racial characteristics goes, many of the traits don't really matter since usually no one pays any attention to them. Naturally flat feet (not fallen arches) are found in about one third of the population of West Africa and are not found in Northern Europe or among pure Native Americans. It is a dominant characteristic, so if a child inherits it from either parent, he will show the trait. This makes it one of the most valuable indicators of the presence of African ancestry in a population but of little value for individuals, since two thirds of pure West Africans do not show the trait and few mixed individuals will manifest it. But in practice it is not used because people don't care if someone has flat feet. Lobeless ears are one of the most obvious indicators of African ancestry, but again no one cares.

Skin color is the paramount concern for most people, and yet it is one of the poorest indicators of racial composition of a person or a population. It is polygenic, making its inheritance very difficult to analyze beyond the first generation. There may be dominant-recessive loci, additive loci, partially dominant loci, loci for suppression, etc., among the different genes controling the trait. In common usage, the word gene is used both for loci, such as the ABO blood type locus, and for the different forms of the gene (alleles), such as the allele for A type blood. In general, in evolutionary development, a trait which is developed new (having something) tends to be dominant while a trait which is lost (suppressed) tends to be recessive. Since modern man is thought to have developed in equatorial Africa, one presumes that the original version was dark. Therefore, one would expect light skin color to be dominant or partially dominant if the evolution of light skin color resulted from new genes to suppress pigmentation. What is found in African-European crosses isthat color is mostly additive, that is the hybrid is intermediate, not like one parent or the other, but that this hybrid is somewhat closer to the European in color, indicating that light color is somewhat dominant as expected [FL]. Frank Livingstone has postulated a four loci model which would explain color inheritance [FL]. If all the loci had exactly equal effect and only two alleles, and if the trait were completely additive with no dominance at all,

there should be nine color levels found according to the number of alleles for dark skin in the individual, from zero to eight. This would also mean that all pure Africans would be equally dark and all pure Europeans would be equally light. The four loci model is reasonable, given multiple alleles at certain loci, partial dominance, and influence from other loci such as the albinism - color dilute locus. For considering mixed populations, the important thing to remember is that color is only predictable for the first generation hybrids and that for later generation progeny of mixed parents any shade from darkest to lightest can be expected to occur, though the average color of the population will tend to reflect the average composition of the population. Given selection, and most Mestee populations have been selected by a breeding preference for light skin, even this generalization will fail to hold.

As a population geneticist interested in such things, I would guess the Melungeons from their appearance to be on the average about 1 to 3% Indian, 3 to 9% African and 90 to 95% European in their ancestry. I wish someone would do a modern, extensive blood serum protein or a DNA study on them to actually provide an accurate estimate. There have been studies of the blood antigen frequencies of several Mestee communities [WP].

The one on Melungeons was more thorough than most [P&B], but the results are very inconclusive. This is to be expected with a small, isolated community. Founder effects, in which the genetic composition of a small population is influenced by the peculiarities of the individuals forming the original members of the group, can cause great discrepancies. So can the bottleneck effect of small population size in the past and the resultant inbreeding, both of which accelerate genetic drift. If the studies could be repeated using many more genetic loci rather than just the easily identified blood antigens, something more definitive might be learned.

Pollitzer estimates Melungeons to be 86% white and 14% black, with no American Indian. This is an average of the values found for different loci, with a lot of weight given to the Fya locus. For the Fya allele, blacks were found to have a frequency of .016, English whites of .414 and Cherokee Indians of .547. The low frequency found in Melungeons, .287, would indicate a high level of black ancestry unless the individuals who founded the Melungeons had a lower frequency than was typical of their ancestral populations or unless the frequency was depressed by genetic drift after the group was formed. Computing from these frequencies, using only white and black, the Fya frequency would indicate that Melungeons were 32% black and 68% white.

However, making the same calculations for the O allele of the ABO locus gives -363% black and 463% white, since the Melungeon frequency of .585 lies outside the range from .683 for English Whites and .710 for blacks. This would indicate that the Melungeons were more white than the English, if one could extrapolate from blood antigens to color. Since the O allele frequency for the Cherokee is .973, this low value for the Melungeons does help confirm that there is little Indian in them. The frequencies for the Ro allele of the Rh locus, .414 for English whites, .016 for blacks and .287 for Melungeons, would give a more believable 11% black and 89% white.

The historical evidence for some Indian ancestry, the somewhat Indian appearance of some Melungeons, traits like their small hands and feet, plus the culture being more Indian than black (though admittedly overwhelmingly white), makes me disinclined to accept the total elimination of Indian ancestry. For a "best guess", including the evidence of these blood antigen studies, I would give 90% white, 9% black and 1% Indian for an average racial composition of the Melungeons. This, of course, says little about the composition of individual members of the group and almost nothing about their appearance or the frequency of certain identifiable racial characteristics.

Genetic swamping, where one population receives so much input from another that its original characteristics are replaced by those of the new members, can happen without being accompanied by much cultural change. The dark hair and eyes of most Afrikaners belies their assertion of pure Dutch ancestry. The swamping of so many American Indian groups may be partly a result of the Indians' lack of natural immunity to many of the diseases brought by the whites and blacks. Mixed children would have a much better chance of surviving to adulthood than pure Indian children.

LUMBEE INDIANS

The Lumbee of Robeson County in North Carolina are the largest and most cohesive of the Mestee groups. They are descended from the Hatteras tribe of Algonquin Indians from the coast, who absorbed the "Lost Colony" of English at Roanoke Island. This is disputed by many, who say this colony perished, but the survival of the family names from this colony plus their own tradition plus the difficulty in explaining a group of English speaking Indians living in wooden houses in North Carolina before the arrival of other English colonists, with most of their men having beards, makes evidence which I find convincing [AD]. There were a couple of other English colonies from the sixteenth century which were lost, and the most common names of the group, Oxendine, Locklear and Chavis, are local names, Oxendine and Locklear being of Lumbee origin and Chavis from South Carolina Mestees, probably the Brass Ankles. They presumably absorbed the remnants of the Cheraw tribe and other Siouan Indians indigenous to the area plus free mulattos, runaway slaves, and renegade whites [AD]. Some of them claim to have some southern Iroquoian (Cherokee and Tuscarora) ancestry, but this is not confirmed by history or names, unless the ubiquitous Goins is accepted. They founded Pembroke State College, which was for many years an all-Lumbee institution. The Museum of the American Indian there contains much on their history and culture.

They take the name Lumbee from the Lumbee or Lumber river (Lumberton, where many of them live, also takes its name from this river). They were called Croatan for many years after the location of the Hatteras group under chief Manteo which the Roanoke colony is thought to have joined. When this name was abandoned because of the contempt with which it was used by whites, they first called themselves Cherokees of Robeson County and then switched to Lumbee, perhaps as a result of Cherokee anger over the usurpation of their name by an unrelated group.

They are the most Indian of all the Mestee groups and the only one to be accepted as Indian by recognized Indian groups. Some of them are recognized as Indian by the Bureau of Indian Affairs but not as descended from any historical Indian tribe and are therefore denied all benefits. They also have the only truly heroic leader in their history, Henry Berry Lowrie (Lowry in some sources). In a conflict during the Civil War growing out of the use of Lumbee men as slave labor in Confederate camps and the harboring of escaped Union prisoners of war, the Confederate Home Guard attacked the Lowrie family and a leader killed three of Henry Lowrie's brothers. Henry Lowrie, then a teenager,

killed this man and organized the Lowrie Band which hid in the swamps of Robeson county and raided Confederate camps and stole many supplies [AD]. With his full black beard and cloudy grey eyes, Henry Lowrie was clearly a Mestee and not pure Indian. After the war, his band protected the Lumbees from the Ku Klux Klan, who left the Lumbees alone until 1958, when some 700 armed Klansmen held a rally outside Pembroke because a Lumbee boy had been dating a white girl. 3000 Lumbees attacked the rally, seizing the Klan banner and many rifles and white robes, and the Klansmen fled in terror and have not bothered the Lumbee since [BB].

RAMAPO MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

The Ramapo Mountain People, formerly known as Jackson Whites, have little or no Indian in them. From their mostly Dutch names, their location above the Dutch farms of the Hudson Valley, and their obvious high level of African ancestry, it is easy to surmize that they descend from escaped slaves and free mulattos from those farms. They sued the New York Department of Education for admission to white schools. Their case was supported by the NAACP and presented by Thurgood Marshall two years before the famous Topeka vs. Brown case, it was a forerunner preparing the way for school integration in the US.

The whites have developed a nasty but intriguing legend to explain their origin, derived from the name Jackson Whites. A man named Jackson is said to have been contracted by the British army occupying New York City during the American Revolution to provide 5000 campfollowers for the soldiers, who were shunned by the local prostitutes. After recruiting 3000 from the slums of London, he finished with 2000 from Jamaica. After the war, the British didn't take these women with them and the local people drove them out of town. The women fled to the Ramapo mountains and joined

the remnants of various Indian tribes hiding there. Invented by a newspaper reporter, not one word of this legend is supported by any evidence. In claiming to be part Indian rather than part black, these people have searched for possible Indian ancestors but have come up with very little. The only serious claim is that some Tuscarora stopped off on their way north from North Carolina to upstate New York, which has been accepted (strangely, I think) by modern Tuscarora, despite the historical evidence that their ancestors followed the Susquehanna river well west of the Ramapos.

THE SOUTHERN RANGE

The Brass Ankles of South Carolina are a large and well-known group. Nothing is known of their origin, except they are in an area where the Indians were all enslaved and kept with African slaves and Irish indentured servants. They are considered by local legend to be the descendants of white slaves (supposedly forced to wear leg chains, hence the name) with only small amounts of Indian and African ancestry, but their status is very low, perhaps even lower than the local black population. Their type names, such as Chavis and Goins, tie them to the Lumbees and many other Mestee groups of the Carolinas. Note that the new president of the NAACP is named Chavis, which is a name thought to have originated among the South Carolina Mestees as a modification of Shavers, with Shavis and Chavers as other forms. The Cajans of Alabama were founded by a Jamaican man married to an American mulatto woman, but have been joined by many Mestees from South Carolina, and can be considered part of this group. Although the Cajans and Creoles of Alabama have rarely claimed not to have black ancestry, during segregation southwestern Alabama had separate school systems for whites, blacks, Indians and Mestees (Creoles and Cajans). There has been some mixing between these two groups and between the Redbones and 'colored' Creoles of Louisiana, so French names are

now found in the Cajans and the Redbones. The Dead Lake People of Florida came from South Carolina, as did most of the founders of the Louisiana Redbones. The Smilings of South Carolina recently moved to Robeson County, North Carolina and tried to join the Lumbees. They have not been welcomed, as the Lumbees fear adding a less Indian group would erode their efforts to be accepted as Indian.

The Turks of Sumter County, South Carolina, have been accepted as entitled to the rights of white people longer than any other Mestee group. This does not stem from their physical appearance, as they are less white than Brass Ankles or Melungeons, but from the connivance of one influential white man. General Sumter hired some of the Turks who had served under him in the Revolutionary War to work on his plantation and apparently found them more productive than slaves. Fearful of losing them as they were unhappy with their treatment by neighboring whites, he took action to have their status as whites recognized. He presented an affidavit to the authorities that they were indeed Turks which he had personally imported from the Ottoman Empire as contract labor. Never mind that Turks were the ruling people of that Empire and not likely to contract out as hired hands, or that the Turks of South Carolina knew no Turkish and were not Muslim.

One of the founders of the Turks was a Lumbee named Oxendine. This and Benenhaley, a specifically Turk name, are the two most common names.

The Florida Melungeons or Dead Lake People are attested by several authors, but apparently no longer exist as an identifiable group. Checking the telephone book for Bay and Calhoun Counties (Telephone Directory: St. Joseph Telephone and Telegragh Company) seems to confirm Brewton Berry's assertion that they were connected to the South Carolina groups such as the Brass Ankles and not to the Melungeons of Tennessee. The original form of the main type name for the Brass Ankles, Shavers, is found in Wewahitchka on the west side of Dead Lake. No Shavers are found in the other towns around the area, though the more common modern form Chavis is found in Panama City and Tallahassee. Checking Wewahitchka and Blountstown, the other town in the Dead Lake area, against the neighboring cities shows little evidence of any Melungeon, Lumbee or Alabama Creole and Cajan presence, so the Brass Ankle connection would appear to be the only one demonstrated (Melungeon names have nearly twice the expected frequency in Wewahitchka, but in a sample this small, that is far from significant). The Mr Shavers I spoke with in Wewahitchka confirmed having relatives in the Carolinas, though he thought the name came to Florida from Alabama.

Name Frequency in Four Towns in Northwest Florida
Melungeon names:

Names Wewahitchka Blountstown Panama City Tallahassee

Goins 0 0 4 6

Mullins 2 3 7 22

Collins 3 1 37 158

Sexton 2 3 16 12

Gipson 0 0 4 1

Gibson 1 1 18 61

Total 8 8 86 260

Brass Ankle names:

Names Wewahitchka Blountstown Panama City Tallahassee

Shavers 2 0 0 0

Shavis 0 0 0 0

Chavers 0 0 6 2

Chavis 0 0 1 7

Total 2 0 7 9

Lumbee names:

Names Wewahitchka Blountstown Panama City Tallahassee

Locklear 0 0 2 1

Oxendine 0 0 0 8

Alabama Creole and Cajan name:

Names Wewahitchka Blountstown Panama City Tallahassee

Chastang 0 0 0 0

Common names (control):

Names Wewahitchka Blountstown Panama City Tallahassee

Smith 13 34 338 1172

Williams 18 29 262 1112

Total 31 63 600 2284

OTHER MESTEE GROUPS

There is a book on the Issues of Virginia, Mongrel Virginians, it is very racist and contributes little information. Its topic is hereditary criminality, mental retardation and other defects, blaming these on racial crossing. As a population geneticist whose research topic has been crossbreeding cattle to increase productivity and adaptability, I find this sort of racist drivel from the 1920's offensive in more than one way. The Nanticokes of Delaware use the name of a historical Indian tribe, but this usage is bitterly resented by the surviving Nanticokes who now live in Canada. The Nanticokes of Delaware are the blackest of all the Mestee groups; some members of the group appear to be pure African. The Wesorts of Maryland have the distinction of being nearly accepted as whites by their neighbors, they are thought to be inferior more because of hereditary defects brought on by inbreeding than because of a very small amount of non-white contamination. Some distinction. Some Mestee families have achieved fame, such as the Jukes, who with the Kallikaks, a white family, were the subject of several studies on hereditary criminality and feeble-mindedness in upstate New York in the 1930's, and the Hatfields for their long and bloody feud with their white neighbors, the McCoys.

CLASSIFICATION

As long as the United States government persists in not recognizing mixed race people, but insists on putting everyone into one race or the other, the Mestees and many other people such as children of mixed marriages are forced into an unpleasant choice. "Other" is not a category for mixed people, it means other races such as Australoid or Khoisan. My personal choice is black, since the laws of Arkansas and Tennessee say that any person known to have any black African ancestry is black. I have lost jobs for admitting that I was not pure white, but I have never been made unwelcome in a black church or an NAACP meeting. In consideration for those Mestees who would not be comfortable being called black and in view of the growing number of other mixed race people in America, I believe there is a need to accept mixed or Mestee as a racial classification. Therefore I suggest the following new entries on Social Security registration forms, census forms, affirmative action forms, drivers license applications, voter's registration forms, etc.:

MESTEE. Check this classification if you are member of any of the long established mixed race communities such as Melungeons, Ramapo Mountain People, Brass Ankles, Freedmen, Colored Creoles, Redbones, Guineas, etc.

MIXED. Check this classification if you are of mixed ancestry and identify with more than one ethnic or racial group.

I would not name the Lumbees, as they would prefer to be Indian, and I would not name the Cajans for fear of confusion with the Cajuns. The Cajans will readily identify with the Colored Creoles with whom they share so much history anyway. The fact that Guinea has been used in the past as an insult word for Italians makes it questionable for inclusion, but they are a large and distinct group with no other name.

AFTERWORD

This paper is dedicated to those who have taken an interest in Melungeons and other Mestees, especially Jean Patterson Bible and Edward Price. It is intended to provoke interest and cause those interested to consult the more complete studies. Jean Patterson Bible's Melungeons Yesterday and Today is the main source for Melungeons, along with Edward Price's dissertation and Henry Price's booklet. Brewton Berry's Almost White is the main source on Mestee communities in general but William Gilbert's papers give more detail on the groups individually. Adolph Dial has just written a new book entitled The Lumbees as one in a series of studies on the American Indians for young people. Henry Berry Lowry: Rebel with a Cause, by Richard Cooper, is also written for young people.

There has been some fiction written about some of the Mestee groups. Redbone Woman and Po Buckra were recommended by Brewton Berry and The Hawk Done Gone was recommended by Jean Patterson Bible. Many newspaper and magazine articles have been written about the Melungeons, see the bibliography in Melungeons Yesterday and Today.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Initials before an entry, such as [JB], show that this item has been cited in the text by these initials. Initials after an item show that the item was cited by Brewton Berry {BB} in Almost White or by Jean Patterson Bible {JB} in Melungeons Yesterday and Today.

Ball, Bonnie Sage. 1969. Melungeons: Their Origin and Kin. Bonnie Ball. {BB},{JB} (Contains interesting anecdotes of her personal contact with Melungeons, gives more information on the communities in Virginia.)

Ball, Donald B. 1976. A Bibliography of Tennessee Anthropology including Cherokee, Chickasaw and Melungeon Studies. Tennessee Anthropological Association. (Almost nothing on Melungeons not cited by [JB].)

Barr, Phyllis. 1965. The Melungeons of Newman's Ridge. East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN. {BB},{JB} (Gives condensed versions of 'folklore' from a Melungeon family named Sexton. All excitement and interest lost.)

[CB] Beale, Calvin Lunsford. 1990. A Taste of the Country: A Collection of Calvin Beale's Writings. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA. (Reprints articles on Melungeons, Haliwa Indians, Eastern Creeks and other Mestee groups. With [JB], [BB], [EP], [WG] and [HP], one of the main sources on Mestee groups.)

Beale, Calvin. 1957. "American Triracial Isolates, Their Status and Pertinence to Genetic Research." Eugenics Quarterly 4(4):187-196. {BB},{JB}

Beale, Calvin. 1972. "An Overview of the Phenomenon of Mixed Race Isolates in the United States." American Anthropologist 74:704-710.

[BB] Berry, Brewton. 1963. Almost White. Macmillan, New York. (The classic, comprehensive book on the Mestee groups. Does not identify which group is being described in many instances, tends to generalize from one or a few groups to all Mestees. Extensive bibliography is prime guide to the literature to this date.) {JB}

Berry, Brewton. 1960. "The Mestizos of South Carolina." American Journal of Sociology 51(1):34-41. {BB}

Berry, Brewton. 1972. "America's Mestizos." In Blending of Races: Marginality and Identity in World Perspective edited by Noel Gist and Anthony Dworkin. Wiley, New York. (Mainly repeats material in Almost White.)

[JB] Bible, Jean Patterson. 1975. Melungeons Yesterday and Today. East Tennessee Printing Company, Rogersville, Tennessee. (The most comprehensive study of the Melungeons, this book is still in print. See note at end of the bibliography.)

[KB] Blu, Karen. 1980. The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an Indian People. Cambridge University Press, New York. (Interesting study of the Lumbee and the development of their group identity.)

Burt, Jesse, and Robert Ferguson. 1973. Indians of the Southeast: Then and Now. Abingdon Press, Nashville. (Contains much material and several pictures on the Lumbee.)

[NC] Callahan, North. 1952. "The Melungeons" in Smoky Mountain Country by North Callahan (edited by Erskine Caldwell). Little, Brown & Co. Boston. (Biased, racist and unpleasant but informative.)

[DC] Cohen, David S. 1974. The Ramapo Mountain People. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey. (Very comprehensive treatment of this group).

Daniel, G. Reginald. 1992. "Passers and pluralists: subverting the racial divide." In Racially Mixed People in America, edited by Maria Root. Sage Publications, Newbury Park, California. (Interesting current view of the identity question facing Mestees, from a mainly black perspective.)

[FD] Davis, Floyd J. 1991. Who Is Black? Pennsylvania University Press, Newbury Park, Pennsylvania. (Outstanding book on the problem of racial identification in America, only treats Mestees in passing.)

Davis, Louise. 1976. "The mystery of the Melungeons." In Frontier Tales of Tennessee. Pelican, Gretna, LA. (Contains some interesting anecdotes of personal contact with Melungeons.)

[AD] Dial, Adolph, and David Eliades. 1975. The Only Land I Know: A History of the Lumbee Indians. Indian Historical Press, San Francisco. (The basic book describing the Lumbees and their history.)

Dial, Adolph L. 1993. The Lumbee. Chelsea House, New York. (Update of previous book, intended for young people.)

Dominguez, Virginia. 1986. White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ. (A lot of information on both the 'white' and the 'colored' Creoles of Louisiana.)

Evans, W. McKee. 1971. To Die Game: The Story of the Lowry Band, Indian Guerrillas of Reconstruction. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. (History of Henry Berry Lowry and the Lowry [Lowrie] family, the Lumbee people and their insurrection. Also includes an account of the Lumbee rout of the Klan in 1958.)

Feest, Christian F. 1989. The Powhattan Tribes. Chelsea House, New York. (Notes the absorption of black and white by these groups and the mixed nature of their descendants at present. Also the treatment and legal problems of these groups resulting from their mixed nature.)

Fetterman, John. 1970. "The Mystery of Newman's Ridge." Life Magazine, June 26. [Not in all editions.]

[JF] Forbes, Jack. 1988. Black Africans and Native Americans. Backwell, New York. (Outstanding book detailing the relationship between blacks and Indians, particularly during the time when both groups were enslaved in Virginia and the Carolinas. A must for understanding the origin of the Mestees. Little actually said about the Mestees, but the Saponi and Powhattan are identified as the Indians in the ancestry of the Melungeons in two places.)

Foster, John. 1985. "Some questions and perspectives on the problem of metis roots." In The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Metis in North America. University of Manitoba Press. (Gives much information on the origin of the Metis of Canada and neighboring areas of the United States where French Canadian and Metis traders and trappers penetrated before the Anglo-American arrival.)

Gilbert, William Harlen, Jr. 1946. "Memorandum concerning the characteristics of the larger mixed-blood racial islands of the eastern United States." Social Forces 21(4):438-447. (Contains much of the information found in his next publication, cited below.)

[WG]Gilbert, William Harlen. 1947. Synoptic Survey of Data on the Survival of Indian and Part-Indian Blood in the Eastern United States. Library of Congress. Also printed as "Surviving Indian Groups of the Eastern United States," pages 407-438 in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of The Smithsonian Institution, 1948. (Gives numbers, locations and common family names for the principal Mestee groups. This major source is copied as an appendix to this document.) Now online at: www.geocities.com/mikenassau/gilbert.htm.

Hall, Christine C. Iijima. 1992. "Please choose one: ethnic identity choices for biracial individuals." In Racially Mixed People in America, edited by Maria Root. Sage Publications, Newbury Park, California. (Not about Mestees, but very pertinent in stating the identity problems of mixed people.)

Kahn, Kathy. 1973. Hillbilly Women. Doubleday, Garden City, New York.

[FL] Livingstone, Frank. Polygenic models for the evolution of human skin color differences. Human Biology 41:480-493.

Mangum, Charles. 1940. The Legal Status of the Negro. University of North Carolina Press. (Overview of discriminatory laws. Gives information on the laws defining who could be white in different states.)

Matthews, Denise, and Vinny Jones. 1991. The Black Warriors of the Seminole. Video program shown on PBS TV stations. WUFT, Gainesville, FL.

Merrell, James. 1989. The Catawbas. Chelsea House, New York. (Includes information on the absorption of remnants of other tribes by the Catawba.)

[P&B] Pollitzer, William S., and William H. Brown. 1969. Survey of demography, anthropology, and genetics in Melungeons of Tennessee: an isolate of hybrid origin in process of dissolution. Human Biology 41:388-400.

[WP] Pollitzer, William S. 1972. The physical anthropology and genetics of marginal people of the southeastern United States. American Anthropolgist 74:719-734.
76

[EP] Price, Edward Thomas, Jr. 1950. Mixed Blood Racial Islands of Eastern United States as to Origin, Localizations and Persistence. University of California, Berkeley. (The definitive study of the Melungeons and some other Mestee groups. The following three articles are based on this dissertation.)

Price, Edward. 1950. "The Mixed-Blood Racial Strain of Carmel, Ohio, and Magoffin County, Kentucky." Ohio Journal of Science 50(6):281-290. (Photocopy included as an appendix to this document.)

Price, Edward. 1951. "The Melungeons: A Mixed-Blood Strain of the Southern Appalachians." Geographical Review 41(2):256-271. (Photocopy included as an appendix to this document.)

Price, Edward. 1953. "A geographical analysis of White-Negro-Indian racial mixtures in eastern United States." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 43(2):138-155. (Photocopy included as an appendix to this document.)

[HP] Price, Henry R. 1966. Melungeons: The Vanishing Colony of Newman's Ridge. Hancock County Drama Association, Sneedville, TN. (Much detail on the early history of the Melungeons. Includes the records of land ownership by early Melungeons. Was used as the information brochure for the outdoor drama Walk Toward the Sunset.)

Reuter, Edward. 1918. The Mulatto in the United States. Gorham Press, Boston. (Gives a wealth of information on part-white blacks up to this time, and the great contribution which they made to the black community.)

Wilkins. 1992. Triracial Isolates. Unpublished paper cited by Terry Wilson and Reginald Daniel. Not seen by author.

Williamson, Joel. 1980. New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States. Free Press, New York.

Wilson, Terry P. 1992. "Blood quantum: Native American mixed bloods." In Racially Mixed People in America, edited by Maria Root. Sage Publications, Newbury Park, California. (Interesting current view of the identity question facing Mestees, from a mainly Indian perspective.)

Worden, W.L. 1947. "Sons of the Legend." Saturday Evening Post, October 18.

The most thorough treatment of the Melungeons is still in print:
Melungeons Yesterday and Today
byJean Bible is available from the author
for $10.00 plus $1.48 postage:
Mrs. Jean Patterson Bible
PO Box 886, Dandridge TN 37725
telephone: (615) 397-3479

SUGGESTIONS FOR LIBRARY COMPUTER SEARCHING

AUTHOR: Bible, Jean Price, Edward

Price, Henry Gilbert, William

Berry, Brewton Beale, Calvin

Dial, Adolph Forbes, Jack

SUBJECT: Indians--Mixed Descent

Indians of North America--Mixed Descent

Distilling, Illicit

KEYWORD: Melungeon or Melungeons

Miscegenation

Mixed and Ancestry

Mixed and Blood or Bloods

Mixed and Descent or Race

Mixed and Racial or Racially

Ramapo and People

Jackson Whites

Lumbee or Lumbees

Brass Ankle or Brass Ankles

Redbone or Redbones

Red Bone or Red Bones

Cajan or Cajans

Cajun or Cajuns

Mestee or Mestees

Mustee or Mustees

Mestizo or Mestizos

Metis or Mestis

Creole or Creoles

Minority or Minorities

Mulatto

Mulattos or Mulattoes

Marginality

Moonshine or Whiskey

Triracial or Multiracial

Carmelites

Carmel and Ohio or Indians

Sneedville or Vardy

Hancock County

Newman's Ridge

Guineas and West Virginia

Hillbilly or Hillbillies

Appalachia or Appalachian

ARTICLES BY EDWARD T. PRICE

The foremost scholar in the study of the Melungeons is Edward Thomas Price, Jr., who did original geographical and historical research on them and similar groups in the 1940s and 50s. He was born in Nashville in 1915, but did his doctoral research for the Geography Department of the University of California at Berkely. He now lives in Eugene, Oregon, where he retired from the Geography Department of the University of Oregon.

His dissertation, Mixed Blood Racial Islands of Eastern United States as to Origin, Localizations and Persistence, is mostly on the Melungeons and similar groups of eastern Kentucky and southern Ohio. The following three articles are reprinted by permission of the journals which originally published them. Dr. Prices doctoral research is used in the literature review for these articles, so they present much of the information in his dissertation.

Pages 84-93:
"The Mixed-Blood Racial Strain of Carmel, Ohio, and Magoffin County, Kentucky." 1950. Ohio Journal of Science 50(6):281-290.

Pages 94-109:
"The Melungeons: A Mixed-Blood Strain of the Southern Appalachians." 1951. Geographical Review 41(2):256-271.

Pages 110-127:
"A geographical analysis of White-Negro-Indian racial mixtures in eastern United States." 1953. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 43(2):138-155.

ARTICLE BY WILLIAM H. GILBERT

William Harlen Gilbert studied many of the Mestee and Indian groups of the eastern United States. His work was published twice as government documents.
Pages 128-159:
"Surviving Indian Groups of the Eastern United States," pages 407-438 in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of The Smithsonian Institution, 1948. Also printed as Synoptic Survey of Data on the Survival of Indian and Part-Indian Blood in the Eastern United States. Library of Congress. 1947
Now online at: www.geocities.com/mikenassau/gilbert.htm.

Copied articles are not in this online version, but two of them are available on-line, as indicated above. After reading them, arrow back here to continue with the bibliography and endnotes, including updates.

Names	Wewahitchka	Blountstown	Panama City	Tallahassee
Goins	0	0	4	6
Mullins	2	3	7	22
Collins	3	1	37	158
Sexton	2	3	16	12
Gipson	0	0	4	1
Gibson	1	1	18	61
Total	8	8	86	260