mr childs

Chris,

This will sound strident and it’s not meant so….

please hear a soft, slow explanation of a very complicated, hot-button topic that needn’t be so among us,

“Indian” and “Native American” were not Census Categories until fairly recently (notable exception being the “Indian Territories” of Oklahoma, and a spatering of isolated Indian communities in 1880 and later) so, few people will ever be found on census records before then, ennumerated as “I”.

A person of Indian descent whose immediate ancestors in the mid-1800s South and Southeast were listed as “White” on a census record only means the trail is longer and more tangled than you imagined and racial definitions have changed over time and changed differently in different parts of the country and not at the same time.

“Mulatto” once meant any “Native/Indian” or “Mixed-Race-Person” (any mix), as well as “Free Person of Color” (any race) or “Other Free” (any race) or any “Darky”, including tens of thousands of Indian people living in the Southeast, many of whom were even listed as “White” on census records. It gets even more complicated when a person was married to a non-white and their spouse and the couple’s children were included in the “slave” or “free person of color” category on a census – or a householder hid “tithables” (persons taxable) by claiming they belonged to a non-taxable category. In this same venacular, many “Black” people in the south and southeast are also of Indian descent and can’t be dismissed just because some of their ancestors had been enslaved by Whites or Natives. Native cultures enslaved their Native captives as well as their White captives as well as their Black captives and so have Whites and so have Blacks. Slavery is a very old Human habit – it wasn’t invented here.

Indian people were also often listed on census records as “Black”, particularly, immediately after the Civil War in the South and thru the 1920s “Social Darwinism” pseudo-philosophical movement period (persisted thru the 1940s in Virginia). The perception was also different depending on the time of the year the census was taken – winter & spring white, summer & fall darkies, i.e., “Mulatto” and “Black”.

Census Takers weren’t ‘scientists’. They were political appointees – some were relatives of the persons they were ennumerating and guess who they didn’t “out”? “Race” was/is in the eye of the “beholder”. It was a “White or Not” world then and “we ain’t goin’ back” as the song goes.

Racial “assignments” by census takers are virtually worthless, i.e., there are a couple of well-known Native families who lived in NC in one census year where they were listed as “Black” and by the next census year had moved to a northern state and were then listed as “White”. Go figure.

Bill