Despite often being able to pass as white people, Melungeons were affected by theone-drop rule. The one-drop rule either caused, or had the potential to cause, many Melungeons to be labeled asnon-white. Some Melungeons who were labeled as non-white were sterilized bystate governments, most notably inVirginia.[38][39][40]
The termMelungeon likely comes from the French wordmélange ultimately derived from the Latin verbmiscēre ("to mix, mingle, intermingle").[3][10] It was once a derogatory term, but later became used by the Melungeon people as a primary identifier. TheTennessee 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."[10]
The termMelungeon was historically considered an insult, a label applied to Appalachians who were by appearance or reputation ofmixed-race ancestry. Although initially pejorative in character,[41] this word has been reclaimed by members of the community.[42] The spelling of the term varied widely, as was common for words and names at the time.
The earliest historical record of the termMelungeon dates to 1813. In the minutes of the Stoney Creek Baptist Church inScott County, Virginia, a woman stated another parishioner made the accusation that "she harbored them Melungins."[10] 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."[10] In the 1890s, during the age ofyellow journalism, the term "Melungeon" started to circulate and be reproduced in U.S. newspapers, when the journalistWill Allen Dromgoole wrote several articles on the Melungeons.[citation needed]
In 1894, theUS 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.)[3]
According to the 1894Department 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. ..."[43]
Jack D. Forbes speculated that the Melungeons may have beenSaponi/Powhatan descendants, although he acknowledges an account from circa 1890 described them as being "free colored" and mulatto people.[44]
In 1999, historian C. S. Everett hypothesized that John Collins (recorded as a Saponi Indian who was expelled fromOrange 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.[45] 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.[46][promotional source?]
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",[52] which shows that ancestry of the sample is primarily European and African, with one person having a Native American paternalhaplotype.
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 havingNative American origins, but their DNA is European. Among the participants, only the Sizemore family is documented as having Native American DNA.[52] "Estes and her fellow researchers "theorize that the various Melungeon lines may have sprung from the unions of black and whiteindentured 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 fromVirginia through theCarolinas before settling primarily in the mountains ofEast Tennessee."[1][52]
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 theRacial Integrity Act of 1924. He identified these as being "chiefly Tennessee Melungeons".[58] 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.[39][58][59]
During theAmerican Revolution, there was purportedly a Melungeon "king" or "chief" named Micajah Bunch (1723–1804). Local folklore claims he intermarried with theCherokee, 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.[60]
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 writerBill Bryson devoted the better part of a chapter to them in hisThe Lost Continent (1989). People are increasingly self-identifying as having Melungeon ancestry.[61][page needed][better source needed] Internet sites promote the anecdotal claim that Melungeons are more prone to certain diseases, such assarcoidosis orfamilial Mediterranean fever. Academic medical centers have noted that neither of those diseases is confined to a single population.[62]
There is no uniquely Melungeon culture, though specific groups have formed into their owntribal entities on the basis of ancestral connections to historicalNative American communities.[63][64]
Definitions of who is Melungeon differ. Historians and genealogists have tried to identify surnames of different Melungeon families.[58][52] 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)".[58]
In 1992,Virginia DeMarce explored and reported theGoins genealogy as a Melungeon surname.[66] 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 andLumbees in North Carolina toCreoles in Louisiana.[1]
^Mark, Peter; Horta, José da Silva (2013).The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World. Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-1-107-66746-4.[page needed]
^Schorsch, Jonathan (2019). "Revisiting Blackness, Slavery, and Jewishness in the Early Modern Sephardic Atlantic".A Letter's Importance: The Spelling of Daka(h) (Deut. 23:2) and the Broadening of Western Sephardic Rabbinic Culture.doi:10.1163/9789004392489_022.ISBN978-90-04-39248-9.
^Kananoja, Kalle (2013). Mariana Pequena, a black Angolan jew in early eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro (Report).hdl:1814/27607.
^Mozingo, Joe (2012).The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family. Simon and Schuster.ISBN978-1-4516-2761-9.[page needed]
^Berlin, Ira (1996). "From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America".The William and Mary Quarterly.53 (2):251–288.doi:10.2307/2947401.JSTOR2947401.
^Berlin, Ira (2017). "From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America".Critical Readings on Global Slavery (4 vols.). pp. 1216–1262.doi:10.1163/9789004346611_039.ISBN978-90-04-34661-1.
^abcdEstes, Roberta A.; Goins, Jack H.; Ferguson, Penny; Crain, Janet Lewis (Fall 2011)."Melungeons, A Multi-Ethnic Population"(PDF).Journal of Genetic Genealogy.7 (1). RetrievedJuly 3, 2023.
^Smith, J. Douglas. “The Campaign for Racial Purity and the Erosion of Paternalism in Virginia, 1922-1930: ‘Nominally White, Biologically Mixed, and Legally Negro.’” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 68, no. 1, 2002, pp. 65–106. JSTOR,https://doi.org/10.2307/3069691. Accessed September 3, 2023.
^DeMarce, Virginia Easley. “‘Verry Slitly Mixt’: Tri-Racial Isolate Families of the Upper South–A Genealogical Study.” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 80.1 (March 1992): [5]-35.aZ
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", inOut 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.
