October marks the debut of a new website for MHA which offers many more functions than the previous site.  I am administrator of the Ning and now Vice President of MHA.

Melungeon Conference Focuses on Mixed-Ethnic Populations

Daniel Sharfstein, author of The Invisible Line, will be the keynote speaker at the Melungeon Heritage Association’s annual meeting to be held in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Sharfstein will join other scholars and speakers to discuss the Melungeons and other mixed-ethnic groups and families at Warren Wilson College July 14-16.

In The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, legal scholar Sharfstein chronicles the lives of three families who made the transition from black to white during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His study of the Gibson, Spencer, and Wall families also includes new information about Melungeons.

For more than 200 years, the mysterious multi-ethnic people known as Melungeons have been the subject of folklore, speculation, and occasional scientific inquiry in the southern Appalachian region.  In some places, Melungeons faced stigma, both legal and social, because they did not fit into America’s accepted racial categories.  The Melungeon Heritage Association hosts a yearly gathering to celebrate Melungeon heritage and to support other mixed ancestry groups. Fifteenth Union (MHA’s 15^th annual gathering) is entitled “Carolina Connections: Roots and Branches of Mixed Ancestry Communities.”

Scholarly presentations will be featured on Friday and Saturday, beginning with Stacy Webb, president of the Redbone Heritage Foundation, with a preview of her forthcoming book Gone to Texas and her recently published chapter in Carolina Genesis tracing the migrations of mixed ancestry peoples from the Carolinas.  Phyllis Starnes, project administrator of the recently completed Melungeon DNA study, will follow with a report on the details and implications of its findings.

On Friday afternoon Dr. Elizabeth Hirschman will discuss early colonial settlers with Jewish, Muslim, and Gypsy ancestry. Dr. Terry Mullins, author of four books on southwest Virginia history, will share Mullins family research, and discuss his new children’s book, Melungeons Out of the Dungeon. Dr. Kathy Lyday-Lee will share a report on her investigation of Will Allen Dromgoole’s 1890 visit to Newman’s Ridge.  Musicologist Jeanne Bornefeld will conclude Friday afternoon by performing and explaining “Music of Our Ancestors” with traditional instruments.  The keynote address by Daniel Sharfstein will be presented on Friday evening.

Saturday will open with Wayne Winkler, author of the groundbreaking study Walking Toward the Sunset, with a multimedia introduction to Melungeon history.  Dr. Arwin Smallwood will present “The Ties that Bind: Colonial Virginia and North Carolina and the Possible Origin of Melungeons.”  Bestselling novelist Lisa Alther will discuss and read from her forthcoming novel Washed in the Blood.

 Marvin T. Jones, founder of the Chowan Discovery Group, will open the Saturday afternoon session describing the Civil War experience of the mixed ancestry community of the Winton Triangle in Hertford County.  Dr. Anita Puckett will explore the interaction of language, speech and ethnicity as applied to Melungeon studies.  Manuel Mira, born in Portugal and longtime North Carolinian, will discuss his researches in the southeastern US.  Johnnie Gibson Rhea, beloved elder of the Newman’s Ridge Melungeon community, will share her wisdom and creativity.  The MHA annual meeting, chaired by president S.J. Arthur, will conclude the afternoon session.

Aside from scholarly presentations on Friday and Saturday, informal events will take place on Thursday evening and Saturday evening. Fifteenth Union offers the opportunity to share family histories, both oral and written, that have been kept secret for far too many generations.  MHA encourages folks to bring musical instruments, family Bibles, pictures, and stories to this event.  The event has a casual picnic/family reunion atmosphere combined with academic presentations.  A wide selection of books related to Melungeon and Appalachian history will be available for purchase.  The DVD Melungeon Voices will also be available.

 The site of 15^th Union, Warren Wilson College, is located in Swannanoa, few miles east of Asheville, surrounded by beautiful mountain scenery.  The public is invited to join in this celebration; registration for nonmembers is $21 per day.  MHA will have available inexpensive, although somewhat limited, on-campus housing and dining for attendees.  Preregistration is available until July 1 for housing and/or dining, but not required. (Meal tickets are available with or without lodging on campus). For more information, visit the official website of the Melungeon Heritage Association:  www.melungeon.org.

This review appeared in the 85th volume of the venerable journal, January 2009:

K. Paul Johnson in his family history Pell Mellers: Race and Memory in a Carolina Pocosin uses the “process of exploring family mysteries” to gain a “deeper understanding of the region and times they [his family] inhabited” (p. 13) while respecting the limitations that extant records might place on such an endeavor.  Centered on his own research experience, Johnson takes the reader on a contemporary journey of practical genealogy—visiting archives, local government repositories, long-known and newly-met relatives, geographical areas (houses, neighborhoods, and areas such as pocosins), engaging new technology such as the Internet and DNA testing—while exploring the time line between generations.  Johnson uses all the resources at his command to learn more about his people, their place, and their time—the central focus of genealogy.

                Bertie County is the point of origin (at least since colonial times) of various branches of Johnson’s family.  He explores the many facets of this region by focusing on his family in the Pell Mell area during a specific time (colonial era, Civil War, and the rise of Jim Crow to name three more important time frames.)  Pell Mell is one of several areas in North Carolina that are home to populations with tri-racial mixtures.  Melungeons, as these Native, Africans and European people are often called, inhabit a unique place in the history of the region.  Johnson takes care to show the reader how these “free people of color” are both constrained by and set free by their mixed heritages.  Property owners before the the Civil War, many of these free people joined North Carolina’s Union volunteers during the war.  Their story is often the exception to the rule of history writ large.

                Johnson also reveals a sense of community with the Pell Mell racial mix by describing how Pell Mellers migrated as  group.  When industrial expansion in nearby Norfolk, Virginia, offered better prospects for work, Pell Mellers moved there to exploit the opportunity, reconstituting a community in a more urban setting.

                Johnson deftly moves the story along and hints at family mysteries and scandal.  Unfortunately, this occasionally leads to a bit of confusion in the narrative.  In some case he relies too much on another genealogists’ work instead of checking the original record himself, and on other occasions he speculates a bit foo far about early generations.  But these are not fatal issues, and the fascinating story of self-discovery and local history applied to one’s family offer more than enough counterbalances to keep the work afloat.  Anyone interested in either preserving their own family story in the annals of history or reading Johnson’s successful documentation of his own famiy history should read this work.  The book (illustration; notes, 208 pages; paper, $15.95) is published by Backintyme Publishing (386) 446-4909.   Alex Christopher Meekins, Archives and Records Section, NC Office of Archives and History.

Marvin T. Jones and I will be speaking at the Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City about Carolina Genesis on Sunday, September 26th.  Here is the poster the Museum created to advertise the program.

Museum of the Albemarle

Marvin T. Jones speaking at Lincoln Memorial University, with fellow authors (l-r) Cyndie Goins Hoelscher, Scott Withrow, and KPJ.   Photo by Carol Joice Jones.

The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives by Shankar Vedantam (Spiegel and Grau, $26.95)

This new book by a reporter and columnist for the Washington Post offers a fascinating summary of recent psychological findings on the unconscious mind.  Three of the ten chapters focus on race in various ways, while others analyze how the hidden brain’s implicit biases influence our behavior in matters including gender, disaster response, and terrorism.   The first chapter about race describes the research of Canadian scholar Frances Aboud, who has worked with children of all ages exploring the way bias develops.  Multiple researchers have found that young children tend to assign positive adjectives to white people and negative adjectives to black people, regardless of the beliefs of their parents and teachers.   (Also independent of the race of the respondent.)  Aboud discovered that friendships across racial lines are common among very young children but become steadily less so into adolescence.   But the same pattern was found with linguistic communities in Canada.  Aboud studied a bilingual school in Montreal and found that children coming from anglophone and francophone homes  increasingly choose friends of the same background as the get closer to adolescence.  Vedantam relates this to the increasing emphasis of adolescents on group membership and identification.  His conclusion about Aboud’s findings is that “What is disturbing to me…is not that children are biased.  It is that pervasive bias can occur without anyone—parents, teachers, or the children themselves—wanting it to happen.”(p. 75)

Racial bias in application of the death penalty in the US has been repeatedly demonstrated in statistical analyses, but in his chapter “Shades of Justice” Vedantam explains something that I had not previously known.   Studying only African American defendants, a Stanford University research team found that “Defendants who looked more stereotypically black than average were more than twice as likely to receive the death penalty as those who looked less black.”(p. 177) This would suggest that implicit bias is not binary in black and white but rather a continuum, at least in the case of juries and defendants of color.  The last chapter focusing on race, “Disarming the Bomb,” is an account of the 2008 Obama campaign’s recognition of implicit bias, and its generally successful attempts at countering it.  Psychologist Drew Westen and pollster Celinda Lake are interviewed, and at the close of the chapter Westen is quoted as saying that Obama’s skin color “made a big difference” and “Had he looked like Kwame Kilpatrick, it is not at all clear to me that he could have made it.”(p. 229)

 This research is relevant to Melungeons and other mixed ancestry groups because it shows a pervasive unconscious bias against dark-skinned people, a bias against which darker people are themselves not immune.    This explains the tendency to genealogical dissociation, people cutting off darker branches of their family trees and denying/ignoring the mixed ancestry in their backgrounds.  At least we are now in the position where most Americans consciously reject racism, and thus can identify and analyze unconscious biases that are the legacy of centuries of oppression.  But being able to confront unconscious bias does not necessarily entail being willing to do so.

Here I am speaking about the plight of Pasquotank County Quakers in the wake of the Nat Turner insurrection, at the 14th Melungeon Union as part of a panel of Carolina Genesis authors.  Photo by Marvin T. Jones. 

speaking as part of the Carolina Genesis panel

The last weekend in June, it was my pleasure to join three fellow authors of Carolina Genesis for a symposium at the Melungeon Union held on the campus of Lincoln Memorial University.   A report on the entire event is now posted on the Melungeon Heritage Association website.  A week earlier, Marvin T. Jones and I spoke on our chapters and signed books at the Ahoskie Chamber of Commerce.  A friend used Marvin’s camera to take this picture of us with Chamber director Jerry Casteloe.  

June book signing at the Chamber of Commerce

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