Melungeon

The term Melungeon likely comes from the French word mélange ultimately derived from the Latin verb miscēre ("to mix, mingle, intermingle").[5][4][6] It is a derogatory term. 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."[6]

The term Melungeon was historically considered an insult, a label applied to Appalachians who were by appearance or reputation of mixed-race ancestry. That term has never shed its pejorative character.[7] The spelling of the term varied widely, as was common for words and names at the time.

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."[6]

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."[6]

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.[8]

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 labor in civilization, have become in some degree distinct from their neighbors, perpetrating their qualities and absorbing into their number those of like minded disposition, without preserving any clear racial lines. Such are the remnants called Indians in some states where pure-blooded Indian can hardly longer be found. In Tennessee there is such a group, popularly known as the Melungeans, in addition to those still known as Cherokees. The name seems to have been given to them by early French settlers, who recognized their mixed origin and applied to them the name of Malangeans or Malungeans, a corruption of the French word "melange" which means mixed. (See letter of Hamilton McMillan of North Carolina)"[5][4]

Porch of the restored Mahala Mullins Cabin, now located in Vardy, Blackwater Creek

Mrs. Mahala (Collins) Mullins a.k.a "Big Haley"'s cabin was originally located atop Newman Ridge. Mrs. Mahala "Big Haley" Mullins (1824-1898) was a famous moonshiner who was wanted by the law and was famous for being "catchable but not fetchable". She lived on the Newman Ridge overlooking the town of present-day Sneedville, Tennessee.[9]

On November 10, 1935, The Nevada State Journal wrote: "Melungeons are a distinct race of people living in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. They are about the color of mulattoes but have straight hair."[10]

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".[11] 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.[11][12][13]

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]

Definitions of who is Melungeon differ. Historians and genealogists have tried to identify surnames of different Melungeon families.[11][14]

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)".[11]

In 1992, Virginia DeMarce explored and reported the Goins genealogy as a Melungeon surname.[15]

"Beginning in the early 1800s, or possibly before, the term Melungeon (meh-LUN'-jun) 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]

The 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. ..."[16]

In 1999, the 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.[17] 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.[18]

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.[19]

On May 25, 2012, The Associated Press wrote in an article titled "DNA Study Seeks Origins of Melungeons" to promote Estes et al.'s 2011 paper titled "Melungeons, A Multi-Ethnic Population" and explains that: "For years, varied and wild claims have been made about the origins of a group of dark skinned Appalachian residents once known derisively as the Melungeons. Some speculated they were descended from Portuguese explorers, or perhaps Turkish Slaves or Gypsies.(Tampa Bay Times, pp.1)[1]

On June 24, 2015, the USA Today published an article by Dale Neal titled "Melungeons Explore Mysterious Mixed Race Origins", reports: "Melungeons, the mysterious dark-skinned mountaineers of eastern Tennessee and southwest Virginia and into Kentucky, have sparked myths and theories over the past century. They were whispered to be descendants of shipwrecked Portuguese sailors, or gypsies now known as Roma. Some have speculated on connections with the Lumbee Indians in Robeson County or the Lost Colonists of the Outer Banks."[2]

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",[14] which shows that ancestry of the sample is primarily European and African, and 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.[14] "Estes and her fellow researchers "theroize 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][14]

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," but almost never as "Indian". One family described as "Indian" was the Ridley (Riddle) family, as was noted on a 1767 Pittsylvania County, Virginia, tax list.

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.[20]

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.[21]

Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States were not declared unconstitutional until the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case.[22]

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. The Melungeon Heritage Association represents the interests of Melungeon people today and holds annual conferences.[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.[23]

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.[24]

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.

• Croatan
• List of topics related to the African diaspora
• Vardy Community School
• Mulatto
• Pardo
• Dominickers in the Florida Panhandle
• Redbone (ethnicity)
• Turks of South Carolina
• Chestnut Ridge people of West Virginia

• 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/s11013-005-7423-2 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 Archived 2014-04-19 at the Wayback Machine From Louis Gates Jr's "Finding your Roots."