Melungeons

Melungeon ( ) (sometimes also spelled Malungean, Melangean, Melungean, Melungin) was a slur historically applied to individuals and families of mixed-race ancestry with roots in colonial Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina who were primarily descended from free people of color and white settlers. In the late 20th century, the term was reclaimed by descendants of these families, especially in southern Appalachia. Despite this mixed heritage, many modern Melungeons pass as white, as did many of their ancestors.

Many groups have historically been referred to as Melungeon, including the Melungeons of Newman's Ridge, the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the Chestnut Ridge people, and the Carmel Indians. 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. Some modern researchers believe that early Atlantic Creole slaves, descended from or acculturated by Iberian lançados and Sephardi Jews fleeing the Inquisition, were one of the pre-cursor populations to these groups. Many creoles, once in British America, were able to obtain their freedom and many married into local white families.

Despite often being able to pass as white people, Melungeons were affected by the one-drop rule. The one-drop rule either caused, or had the potential to cause, many Melungeons to be labeled as non-white. Some Melungeons who were labeled as non-white were sterilized by state governments, most notably in Virginia.

Etymology

The term ''Melungeon'' likely comes from the French word ''mélange'' ultimately derived from the Latin verb ''miscēre'' ("to mix, mingle, intermingle"). It was once a derogatory term, but later became used by the Melungeon people 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."

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,Sovine, Melanie L. "The Mysterious Melungeons: a Critique of the Mythical Image." University of Kentucky Ph.D. dissertation, 1982 this word has been reclaimed by members of the community."Frequently Asked Questions." Melungeon Heritage Association. Retrieved December 2023 The spelling of the term varied widely, as was common for words and names at the time.

Early uses

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." 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." 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.

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.)

Origins of the Melungeon people

Claims and hypotheses

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).

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. ..."

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.

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. 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.

Myths

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.

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

Genetic testing

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", 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. "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.">

History

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, though others resisted the Confederate government, such as Henry Berry Lowry.

In the 1894 US census, Melungeon people were enumerated as of the races to which they most resembled.

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. Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States were not declared unconstitutional until the 1967 '' Loving v. Virginia'' case.

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". 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.

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.

"King of the Melungeons"

During the American Revolution, there was purportedly a Melungeon "king" or "chief" named Micajah Bunch (1723–1804). Local folklore claims he intermarried with the Cherokee, making the Melungeons a branch of the tribe, though no documentation of this event exists.
The last male in Micajah's bloodline, Michael Joseph Bullard, died in a swimming accident at the age of 15 in 1991.

Modern identity

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. 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.

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. 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.

Culture

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.

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.

Melungeon families

Definitions of who is Melungeon differ. Historians and genealogists have tried to identify surnames of different Melungeon families. 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)".

In 1992, Virginia DeMarce explored and reported the Goins genealogy as a Melungeon surname. 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. 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. These have included Van Guilders and Clappers of New York and Lumbees in North Carolina to Creoles in Louisiana.

Literature

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.

A character of Melungeon descent, Pearl Grimes, is pivotal in Adriana Trigiani's novel (and the romantic comedy film derived from that novel) “ Big Stone Gap,” which is set in Trigiani's hometown Big Stone Gap, Virginia.

See also

* Chestnut Ridge people of West Virginia
* Melungeon Jews
* Croatan
* Dominickers in the Florida Panhandle
* List of topics related to the African diaspora
* Mulatto
* Pardo
* Ramapough Mountain Indians ("Jackson Whites")
* Redbone (ethnicity)
* Turks of South Carolina
* Vardy Community School
* South Asians in Colonial America

References

Further reading

* 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.
*
* 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.
* 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

External links

Melungeon Heritage Association

Mixed Race Studies
* Paul Brodwin
""Bioethics in action" and human population genetics researMacon, GA: Mercer University Press.ch"
''Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry'', Volume 29, Number 2 (2005), 145–178, DOI: 10.1007/s11013-005-7423-
PDF
addresses issue of 2002 Melungeon DNA study by Kevin Jones, which is unpublished

Paul Heinegg, ''Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware''
1999–2005

"Melungeons"
Digital Library of Appalachia. Contains numerous photographs and documents related to Melungeons, mostly from 1900 to 1950.

A Mystery People: The Melungeons
From Louis Gates Jr.'s "Finding your Roots."

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Ethnic groups in Appalachia
Free people of color
History of North Carolina
History of Tennessee
History of Virginia
Multiracial affairs in the United States
Multiracial ethnic groups in the United States
Pre-emancipation African-American history
Society of Appalachia
Self-identification as Native American in the United States