Beale: 6/18/04
by Calvin L. Beale I first heard the term “Melungeon” in the late 1940s when I went to work at the Census Bureau as a demographer, a population analyst. One or more officials at the bureau had become aware that there were a number of groups of peole aroiund the eastern and sohern U.S. with distinctive names applied to them (such as Melungeon) who had not been consistently identified with respect to their race in past censuses. Public knowledge of such groups had increased rather recently at that tie by the publication of two pieces by William H. Gilbert, first an article in Social Forces in 1946 on “mixed blood racial islands,” as he termed them, and a report for the Smithsonian Institution in 1949 called “Surviving Indian Groups of the Eastern United States.” I learned at this time about Gilbert’s work. I was fascinated by it and became acquainted with him. He was an anthropologist who worked on Indian affairs for what is now called the Congressional Research Services, at the Library of Congress. He was a very nice guy, a rather shy-mannered person who had written his Ph.D. dissertation on “marginal” populations in various countries. In his Smithsonian report, Gilbert described briefly each group of people that he knew of in the East and South who had or might have any degree of Indian descent. He listed the counties where they lied and their principal surnames, along with a bibliography of such printed material on them as he had found. The groups ranged from those possessing Indian reservations with Federal recognition, such as the Cherokee in North Carolina, to groups of more indeterminate origin, such as the Melungeons. Some of the latter groups were closer to White society in status, appearance, and outlook; some were closer to Black society, and others regarded themselves as Indian in origin and in some cases had state recognition. |
| Some of the people in charge of planning for the 1950 Census decided it would be desirable to identify counties in which such groups were known to live and to reclassify as “other race” all persons who were reported in these counties either as Indian or by any nonstandard racial term, such as “Moor” or “Wesort” or “Turk.” When the census was taken, all of the portfolios containing the schedules from these counties were stamped “Mixed stock,” and the clerks processing those schedules were to record as “other” any racial entries of Indian or of any colloquial term that the census takers had used. Keep in mind that at that time, there was no mail-out, mail-back census. Census takers went door to door and decided for themselves what race to list for each person, although they were free to ask if they wanted to.
In the processing of the 1950 Census, I happened to be assigned to a job in which all Census schedules went through the unit where I worked. So with permission, I asked to go through the schedules for the “Mixed stock” counties after hours and on weekends to see just how the groups that Gilbert had identified were listed racially by the census takers before any recoding. I did this for over a year and also looked through many of the original 19th century census schedules at the National Archives to get a better picture of how the groups had been counted in earlier times. I had enough material to give a paper on the topic in 1953. In retrospect, the Census Bureau’s procedure in 1950 wound up serving no useful purpose, either statistical or social. I found that its major impact was to transfer to an “all other” racial category about 30,000 persons who were reported as Indian i the Mixed Stock counties, and no tabulations of social and economic data for these populations were ever made. Yet, the great majority of these Indians were the Lumbee and similar groups of North Carolina who were recognized by the State as Indian and had their own Indian schools in the segregated society of that time, including one college. It would have been one thing to treat as “other” the relatively minor number of people for who colloquial terms were used. In fact, that might have happened anyway without the “mixed stock” rule. But, without any of the notorious racism that had earlier motivated the Virginia Director of Vital Statistics, Walter Plecker, in his campaign to see that no Melungeons and other groups were allowed to register themselves as Indian or White in Virginia, the 1950 Census effort wound up seeming implicitly like an attempt to prevent people in many eastern areas from being recorded as Indian even thought they were locally so recognized. I don’t recall any public commotion or repercussions from this, but the procedure was never used again. Out of 77,000 persons in 17 states whom I estimated were in groups of either real or perceived triracial status, only 1,000 were listed by the census takers with colloquial terms, or “other,” or had their race entry left blank. The colloquial terms that had any usage were Cajan[sic] and Creole (in Alabama), Moor (Delaware), Portuguese (North Carolina), and Turk (South Carolina). |
In the processing of the 1950 Census, I happened to be assigned to a job in which all Census schedules went through the unit where I worked. So with permission, I asked to go through the schedules for the “Mixed stock” counties after hours and on weekends to see just how the groups that Gilbert had identified were listed racially by the census takers before any recoding. I did this for over a year and also looked through many of the original 19th century census schedules at the National Archives to get a better picture of how the groups had been counted in earlier times. I had enough material to give a paper on the topic in 1953. In retrospect, the Census Bureau’s procedure in 1950 wound up serving no useful purpose, either statistical or social. I found that its major impact was to transfer to an “all other” racial category about 30,000 persons who were reported as Indian i the Mixed Stock counties, and no tabulations of social and economic data for these populations were ever made. Yet, the great majority of these Indians were the Lumbee and similar groups of North Carolina who were recognized by the State as Indian and had their own Indian schools in the segregated society of that time, including one college. It would have been one thing to treat as “other” the relatively minor number of people for who colloquial terms were used. In fact, that might have happened anyway without the “mixed stock” rule. But, without any of the notorious racism that had earlier motivated the Virginia Director of Vital Statistics, Walter Plecker, in his campaign to see that no Melungeons and other groups were allowed to register themselves as Indian or White in Virginia, the 1950 Census effort wound up seeming implicitly like an attempt to prevent people in many eastern areas from being recorded as Indian even thought they were locally so recognized. I don’t recall any public commotion or repercussions from this, but the procedure was never used again. Out of 77,000 persons in 17 states whom I estimated were in groups of either real or perceived triracial status, only 1,000 were listed by the census takers with colloquial terms, or “other,” or had their race entry left blank. The colloquial terms that had any usage were Cajan[sic] and Creole (in Alabama), Moor (Delaware), Portuguese (North Carolina), and Turk (South Carolina). |
The Wesorts and the National Institute of Dental Heath
| Literally the next day after I read my 1953 paper at a meeting of demographers, I learned that I was losing my job at the Census Bureau in a big layoff. Fortunately, I landed at the Department of Agriculture and am still there. Not long after I arrived, a medical researcher from the National Institute of Dental Health (NIDH) , Dr. Cark Witkop, called the Census Bureau wanting to know if anyone there was familiar with the Maryland “Wesorts” and similar groups. In effect the Census folks had to say, “Well, we did have someone but we just let him go.” They referred Witkop to me. It turned out that a Washington dentist had reported to the dental institute that he was repeatedly seeing patients from Southern Maryland, with a small common set of surnames, who had a serious hereditary dental problem known at dentinogenisis imprefecta. Those affected has short unsightly teeth and often lost all of them to decay when still in their 30s. The Institute decided to do a major research project on the “Wesorts,” as this triracial group was called. I had no special knowledge about them, although Gilbert did, but I was asked to consult with the project to place the Wesorts within the context of the larger existence of other such groups and to provide any leads on possible hereditary health problems in the other groups.
The interest of NIDH stimulated me to continue my research, and since the groups were largely rural people I could justify spending some of my time on the topic at the Department of Agriculture, especially now that there was a practical health aspect to it and another agency asking for assistance. I was able to publish an article in 1957 focused to some extent on hereditary conditions that had arisen in some groups because, over several generations, many marriage partners were related to one another. But the article also gave me an opportunity to publish the results of my work on the 1950 Census, giving my estimates of the number of people in each group and county, and how they were reported on the original census schedules. Please note that I use the word “estimates,” because in many groups, such as the Melungeons, people were nearly all listed as White rather than as Melungeon or Indian, or in the case of the Wesorts, listed as Black. Since no one in these groups was reported as Melungeon or Wesort, and only a handful as Indian, I made my judgment about numbers on my knowledge of surnames, including how people of certain surnames had been classed in the 19th century censuses, and the extent to which people of core surnames live near of with one another in 1950. I am sure I included some families that would not have been regarded locally as part of this group and excluded others who had, say, Melungeon or Wesort backgrounds, but whose surnames I was unfamiliar with. For example, I had no knowledge at that time of the significance of the Kennedy name in Wise County, or Winkler in Tennessee. For Melungeons, I had the least confidence in the numbers I came up with in southeast Kentucky and southwest Virginia. Deciding to err on the side of caution, I omitted people there who had core surnames but were not near other persons of Melungeon names. Yet I recall receiving a letter later from someone at the university of Kentucky who felt that I had substantially overstated the size of the Melungeon-background population in that State. But given the large number of people who have come forward in recent years to proclaim their Melungeon antecedents, I’m not so sure I exaggerated. |
| There was one major emergence in the 1950 Census of people newly asserting a racial status at odds with what White and Black society has assigned to it previously. That was the group that has become known as the Haliwa Saponi Indians in North Carolina. Up popped over 800 Indians in the Warren County census in 1950, where there had been none in 1940. Gilbert had not known of them. I don’t think Price knew of them. From the 1950 schedules, I learned the surnames, which were not particularly marker names, although a couple appeared in the Gointown group in Rockingham County and a couple among the Lumbee and Brass Ankles. I checked the pre-Civil war censuses at the National Archives, and there they were, free farming people, consistently listed as “M” for mixed or mulatto. I drove down to the area in 1954 and made cotact. The whites called them “Issues,” a term that historically only connoted White and Black ancestry, but they lived separately from the local Black population, and asserted they had always had a tradition of being Indian. In just the previous few years they had begun to insist that their driver’s licenses and vital records show them as Indian. Unlike the Lumbee or the Person County Indians, they had never been given separate schools and were in the Black school system, although their neighborhood concentration essentially gave them their own schools. They had a sympathetic State legislator whom I met while making my first inquiries and whom they had hired to do research in Raleigh for them. He gave me the name of one of the group’s leaders to contact and said there would be mutual benefit in my doing so. His name would guarantee me access and at the same time the group would think that he was still busy on his work of determining their history.
When I met and talked with one of the leaders, I recall the sense of frustration and embarrassment that showed at one point when he said to me, “The newspaper wil ltalk of events down here in Fishing Creek Township and it will mention the white people, the colored people, and the ‘other.’ Now who are the other?” I am sure this feeling of “Who are we?” was a common one at times for people in every mixed racial population whose origin was lost in time. At the same time that the 800 Indians showed up in Warren County, in 1950, about 40 did so in neighboring Halifax County. Yet 10 years later the Halifax contingent was up to 537, indicating that many people there who were regarded by census takers as Negro in 1950 were now either regarded as Indian or were actively asserting their Indianness to the census taker. The Warren County group, though, fell off from 800 to 400, perfectly showing the inconsistency of treatment from one census to another or one enumerator to another, that seemed to have led to the Census Bureau’s “mixed stock” procedure in 1950. By 2000, in the era of self-reporting with mail-out, mail-back questionnaires there were over 3,000 Indians in the two counties, with 2/3 in Halifax. |
| During the 1950s and 1960s,I gradually visited a number of the mixed-racial communities as opportunity offered. In some, I made contact with group members; in others, where the situation was touchy, I simply talked with informed people, perhaps consulted courthouse records and looked around. I think my most satisfying visits were those to the Haliwa, the Carmelites of Ohio, the Creeks of Alabama, and the Melungeons.
In the early 1960s I had another experience like the 1950s inquiry regarding hte Wesorts. This time someone from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) called the Census Bureau asking if anyone there was aware of a group of people in southwest Alabama who claimed to be Creek Indians. The Census Bureau referred him to me. Well, I knew there was such a group, because William Gilbert has listed them in an article that I had read. But now there was going to be a cash award to the Creek Tribe for the lands taken from it in the South without compensation when the tribe was forcibly moved to Oklahoma. Suddenly the BIA had people in Alabama claiming to be eligible for part of the award. I was quite surprised that the BIA anthropologists were unsure of them. But they were asking me, are these people Creek descendants? Do they have any survival of Indian culture? So with my interest piqued, I caught a plane to Mobile, went over to their area, and rather easily made contact. It didn’t matter how much I stressed that I was just there as a private individual, since I worked for the federal government it had to be a good sign. I found that the group consisted of both descendants of “friendly” Creeks from the Creek War and of “hostile” Creeks. Some of the group had quietly remained behind when the removal came. In general, it was the “friendly” descendants who were poor and felt discriminated against, whereas the “hostile” descendants had intermarried more with the Whites and had a higher social status (including the sheriff of one county). I visited a number of people, asked a lot of questions, took some photos, wrote up my notes, and briefed the BIA people when I returned. Whether this played any role in the final BIA decision or not I don’t know, but the Alabama Creeks did get to share in the award. Late they acquired Federal recognition as a tribe, and submitted part of my notes with the documentation. So it was an experience that was not only interesting but was satisfying because it may have had some practical effect. |
| In July of 1969, I read a small item in a newspaper about the Melungeons opening an outdoor drama in Sneedville. It so happened that I had some business in Oak Ridge at this time. So the day after I finished that, I drove up to Sneedville, found the amphitheatre, and got a ticket. I also asked whether there was anyone in town who might be willing to show me around some. Claude Collins was mentioned. So I contacted him and he was gracious enough to take me for a drive up on Newman’s Ridge, to the Vardy School, and up Snake hollow. I also asked about a place to stay overnight and was able to get one of the two motel rooms above the beauty parlor.
That night, before the play, there was a lobby at the amphitheatre with craft items on sale. I wanted to take home some small souvenirs and gifts and stood contemplating some homemade soaps. I must have done so for more than just a moment. Presently, I heard a voice from somewhere in back and I think somewhat above me say, “Mr. Beale, are you planning on taking a bath?” It was Claude Collins. There was a big audience for the play. I remember having a rather so-so reaction tothe first act that pictured the Melungeons’ rather prosperous early period in the area, although they were regarded as people whose origin was unknown. But the second act, set much later and with its star-crossed love story between a Melungeon girl and the son of a prominent businessman who covets Melungeon land, was very skillfully done, and by the end there were hardly any dry eyes in the house, my own included. |
| That trip was nearly the last research excursion that I took relating to the triracial populations, as my interests seemed to turn to other things. Life was rapidly changing for the groups, as it was for the country in general. The Civil Rights era had ended the separate school systems many groups had that had both limited and sustained their status. It was the time of television and much better roads, and a greatly diminished role for farm work. By ’69, there were large numbers of people from eery group who had dispersed to the cities to work. The Melungeons, in effect, had a big coming-out party and said, “Yes, we’re Melungeons. So what?” The Reds Bones of Louisiana seem essentially to have done the same thing more recently. Some small groups were dissolving, such as the Portuguese of Northampton County, N.C., or the Coe Ridge clan in Kentucky. Others were reasserting their Indianness.
The so-called “Jackson Whites” of New Jersey and New York have sough Federal recognition as Ramapough Indians. The “Cajans” of southwest Alabama also filed for Federal recognition as Choctaw Indians. Their application was denied, but I admit it was rather convincing tome. A core of the Wesorts are organized as Piscataway Indians, although with much factionalism. The so-called Amherst County, Virginia “Issues” now have state recognition as Monacan Indians. Several of the “Brass Ankle” groups of South Carolina have also organized as survivors of historic Indian tribes. Recent censuses have also seen the emergence of new groups claiming predominant India descent. A prominent example is in northern Alabama where 2,100 persons reported themselves as Indian in Lawrence County in 1990 where there had been just 40 in 1980. I made one last field trip there and found that the population is organized and claims mostly Cherokee ancestry, a status, their leader said, that would only have been detrimental to them in the past. Although they do not have BIA recognition, they had acquired funds for educational assistance to Indians from the US Department of Education that were very beneficial in that children of the group could receive some individual tutoring in school. I don’t for a minute doubt the authenticity of the group’s claim. The East and South are full of small populations of mixed ancestry who saw no merit in advertising their racial history in the past if they could pass as white. But as a demographer, it was very interesting to me to see the apparent effect of the availability of a Federal program for Indians on the age composition of the persons who now reported themselves as indian. Those reporting themselves as Indian consisted very disproportionately of families with children of school age. Eighty-one percent of all Indian families had children 6 – 17 years old, whereas only 35 percent of all other families in the county had children of this age. Fifteen percent of all children 6 – 17 years old in the county were identified as Indian, but just seven percent of those under six years old or of persons 20 –24 years old, who were generally too young to have children of school age. For this mixed racial population, meaningful status as a separate group has emerged, whereas for the Melungeons, or others such as the Redbones or the Pools, the imposed separateness of the past has dissipated. Altogether, it has been rather remarkable over the course of 50-some years — and the last 35 in particular – to see the evolution of the status of the various groups and to witness the explosion of research and literature on their origins and culture. Calvin Beale was one of the first researchers to take a scientific look at the Melungeons and other tri-racial communities. Following in the wake of two other postwar scientists studying the tri-racial phenomenon, William Gilbert and Edward Price, Beale began researching these communities in the late 1940’s. While working as a demographer for the Agricultural Marketing Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he published “American Triracial Isolates in the December 1957 issue ofEugenics Quarterly. He has published numerous articles since then on a wide variety of topics; a collection of his writings can be found at: Beale, the Senior Demographer at Economic Research Service of the US Department of Agriculture, has visited the majority of counties in the United States. A collection of his courthouse photographs can be found at: More on Calvin L. Beale can be found at: |
