Defining the "African-American"

[IllmaticDelta]

The Black Yankees

The newly formed Black Yankee ethnicity of the early 1800s differed from today’s African-American ethnicity. Modern African-American ethnic traits come from a post-bellum blending of three cultural streams: the Black Yankee ethnicity of 1830, the slave traditions of the antebellum South, and the free Creole or Mulatto elite traditions of the lower South. Each of the three sources provided elements of the religious, linguistic, and folkloric traditions found in today’s African-American ethnicity.30

Black Yankee ethnicity was also not the same thing as membership in America’s Black endogamous group. The difference between Black Yankee ethnicity and Black endogamous group membership is that ethnicity is to some extent voluntary whereas which side of the color line you are on is usually involuntary. Mainstream America assigns to the Black side of the endogamous color line people of many different ethnicities whose only common trait is a dark-brown skin tone. These include West Indians, some East Indians (sometimes), recent African immigrants, and (until recently) African-looking Muslims and Hispanics. Finally, the endogamous color line was imposed in 1691 but the earliest evidence of Black Yankee ethnicity dates from the mid 1700s.

Although less wealthy than the Louisiana Creoles, the Black Yankees had developed a strong supportive culture that could withstand the buffeting of social upheaval. They were usually ostracized from mainstream society due to the endogamous color line. According to contemporary accounts, they responded with grace and dignity, making a virtue of their separation. It was not uncommon to see lines of quiet, well-behaved children following their parents to Sunday service with the gravitas and pietas of Roman elders. Their preachers taught that they were put on earth to be tested.31 Their lot was to serve as example to the white folks of how civilized Christians behave.

Most Black Yankees distinguished themselves from slaves—indeed many families had no history of slavery but descended from indentured servants. Nevertheless, many were active contributors to and activists in the abolition movement. This is in strong contrast to the biracial elite of the Gulf coast and Latin America, who owned slaves and defended slavery as a noble institution.32 The contrast was due to the lack of an independent Black ethnicity among Hispanic planters of part-African ancestry, and this lack was due, in turn, to the absence of an endogamous color line.

In some ways, Black Yankee culture (religion, language, music, dance, food, costume) was indistinguishable from that of White Yankees. For example, the boisterous interactive style of many African-American church services today would have been alien to them, since it originated in the slaveholding South. Daniel A. Payne was a Black Yankee, a career AME minister in Philadelphia. He was a sympathizer of the Underground Railroad, so its organizers asked him to preach to a group of newly escaped slaves. His diary reports:

After the sermon, they formed a ring, and with coats off sung, clapped their hands and stamped their feet in a most ridiculous and heathenish way. I requested that the pastor go and stop their dancing. At his request they stopped their dancing and clapping of hands, but remained singing and rocking their bodies to and fro.33

Although the endogamous color line was stricter in the antebellum North than in the antebellum South, it was less strict in 1850 and 1860 than in 1970 and 1980.34 The children of interracial marriages in the Northeast were usually census-reported as “Negroes” rather than as “Mulattoes.” This resembles today’s customs and contrasts with the more permeable color lines of the lower South. According to Joel Williamson, “In 1850 in the five states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, mulattoes actually outnumbered blacks by 24,000 to 22,000, while in the older-settled New England and Middle Atlantic states blacks outnumbered mulattoes by about three to one.”35


The Black Yankees set many of the patterns of modern African-American life. They developed the supportive church-centered social structure found in African-American communities today. Long before the South was segregated, they faced isolation and cyclical rejection by mainstream society. They were also the first to articulate the dilemma that continues to occupy Black thinkers to this day: integration versus separatism.

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[IllmaticDelta]

@IllmaticDelta Do you own those books? And where do you get some of your articles from?

I have some of them but get the articles from various net sources with one being google books.

 

[J-Nice]

I have some of them but get the articles from various net sources with one being google books.

I'm a huge reader with a crazy book collection and I just copped two of the books you posted in this thread on an impulse buy. It's a habit I gotta break

 

[Poitier]

@IllmaticDelta do you teach?

I'm a huge reader with a crazy book collection and I just copped two of the books you posted in this thread on an impulse buy. It's a habit I gotta break

good habit to have

 

[IllmaticDelta]

the free Creole or Mulatto elite traditions of the lower South

 

[IllmaticDelta]

@IllmaticDelta do you teach?

nah

 

[Bawon Samedi]

nah

Did you study a lot in this area because your knowledge seems limitless...

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Did you study a lot in this area because your knowledge seems limitless...

I did some reading

 

[IllmaticDelta]

@ 1:00



The info below gives some info on the dynamics of the line of demarcation between the "old issue negroes" and the newly freed slaves in Carolinas and Virginia



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[IllmaticDelta]

Brown Fellowship Society (1790--1945)

Founded in 1790, the Brown Fellowship Society is the oldest all-male Funeral Society in Charleston, South Carolina. It also provides a major historical example of how racism affected the African American community itself, in that lighter skinned African Americans in the Society considered themselves superior to darker skinned African Americans. Although still considered inferior by the white population, South Carolina's mulattos, octoroons (a person with one-eighth black ancestry), and quadroons (a person with one-quarter black ancestry), were often given their freedom while darker-skinned individuals remained in slavery.

James Mitchell, George Bampfield, William Cattel, George Bedon, and Samuel Saltus, all mulatto members of Charleston’s St. Phillips Episcopal Church, founded the Brown Fellowship Society. Although the church was interracial, the attached cemetery was restricted to whites. The Fellowship Society aimed to establish their own cemetery for “brown” African American individuals, believing it would foster a sense of social unity among them. Officially the stated purpose was to provide respectable funerals for Society members, support widows, and educate surviving children.

Determined not to upset the white community, the Society did nothing to help slaves (indeed, some lighter-skinned members were slave-owners themselves) and were careful about whom they admitted to their ranks, which consisted of no more than fifty men at a time. In fact, prospective members were voted on at three meetings before they were allowed to join, and had to pay a hefty, for the time, $50 initiation fee (plus regular dues). The group purchased burial grounds as well as a meeting house.

Typically only free lighter skinned African Americans were allowed to join, but sometimes darker-skinned individuals who had naturally straight hair were permitted as well. All who joined were considered prosperous and a few were wealthy. Most held relatively affluent jobs such as shoemakers and tailors, but were still subject to prejudice from the white community.

Darker-skinned black men, led by Thomas Smalls, formed their own group, The Society for Free Blacks of Dark Complexion, in 1843, and purchased their own burial land. After the Civil War, the Brown Fellowship Society expanded to include more African Americans, including women and those of darker skin, and changed its name to the Century Fellowship Society. The graveyard property was sold in 1945 by descendants of the Century Fellowship Society. In the late 1950s the graveyard was paved over so that a parking lot could be built for Catholic Bishop England High School. In 1990, the graveyard descendants organized to erect a small memorial to their ancestors, who are buried beneath the asphalt.

Brown Fellowship Society (1790--1945) | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Differences in identification or "Blackness" of Black Yankees vs their Southern counterparts

Douglass considered himself to be neither White nor Black, but both. His multiracial self-identity showed in his first autobiography. Introducing his father in Narrative, Douglass wrote, “My father was a white man.” In this text, his mother was a stranger whom he had never seen in daylight, he could not picture her face, and he was unmoved by news of her death.4 Not only did Douglass adopt a fictional Scottish hero’s name, he emphasized his (perhaps imagined) Scots descent through his father. When visiting Great Britain in 1845-47, Douglass extended his stay in Scotland. He immersed himself in Scottish music and ballads, which he played on the violin for the rest of his life. Having plunged into a Scottish ethnic identity, Douglass wrote to his (then) friend, William Lloyd Garrison, “If I should meet you now, amid the free hills of old Scotland, where the ancient ‘black Douglass’ [sic] once met his foes… you would see a great change in me!”5 Upon arriving in Nantucket, Douglass hoped to represent a blending of both endogamous groups, a man who was half-White and half-Black:

Young, ardent, and hopeful, I entered upon this new life in the full gush of unsuspecting enthusiasm. The cause was good, the men engaged in it were good, the means to attain its triumph, good…. For a time, I was made to forget that my skin was dark and my hair crisped.6

But acceptance by White society was out of reach for Douglass. He discovered that, in the North, there was no such thing as a man who was half-Black. White ships’ caulkers in New Bedford denied him a chance to work at his craft because in their eyes he was all Black.7 When he joined the Garrisonians on a boat to an abolitionist convention in Nantucket, and a squabble broke out because the White abolitionists demanded that the Black abolitionists take lesser accommodations, Douglass found himself classified as Black by his friends. Later in Nantucket, Douglass so impressed the Garrisonians with his public speaking that abolitionist Edmund Quincy exchanged reports with others that Douglass was an articulate public speaker, “for a ******.”8 Repeatedly, Douglass tried to present himself as an intermediary between America’s two endogamous groups. But the Garrisonians made it clear that he was expected to present himself as nothing more than an intelligent “Negro.” He was told to talk only about the evils of slavery and ordered to stop talking about the endogamous color line. “Give us the facts [about being a slave]. We will take care of the [racial] philosophy.” They also ordered him to “leave a little plantation speech” in his accent.9 In their own words, they wanted to display a smart “******,” but not too smart.

Douglass’s cruelest discovery came after he broke with the Garrisonians and went out on his own. Abolitionist friends of both endogamous groups had warned him that there was nothing personal in how Garrison had used him. The public did not want an intermediary; they wanted an articulate Black. Douglass soon discovered that his friends were right. His newspaper, The North Star,failed to sell because it had no market; White Yankees wanted to read White publications and Black Yankees wanted to read Black ones. Indeed, Black political leaders resented Douglass’s distancing himself from Black ethno-political society. There was no room in Massachusetts for a man who straddled the color line.

Douglass dutifully reinvented himself. He applied himself to learning Black Yankee culture. “He began to build a closer relationship with… Negro leaders and with the Negro people themselves, to examine the whole range of Negro problems, and to pry into every facet of discrimination.”10 Eight months later, The North Star’s circulation was soaring and Black leader James McCune Smith wrote to Black activist Gerrit Smith:

You will be surprised to hear me say that only since his Editorial career has he seen to become a colored man! I have read his paper very carefully and find phrase after phrase develop itself as in one newly born among us.11

From that day on, Douglass never looked back. The public wanted him to be hyper-Black and so hyper-Black he became. His later autobiographies reveal the change.12 Narrative (1845) says that his “father was a white man,” My Bondage and My Freedom (1854) says that his father “was shrouded in mystery” and “nearly white,” and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882-1892) says flatly, “of my father I know nothing.”13 Narrative says that his mother was a stranger whose death did not affect him, and Bondage and Freedom reports that he was “deeply attached to her,” Life and Times says that “her image is ineffably stamped upon my memory,” and describes her death with “great poignancy and sorrow.”14

And yet, although he donned a public persona of extreme Blackness, he continued to see himself as half White Scottish in his private life. When he eventually married Helen Pitts, a woman of the White endogamous group, even close friends were bothered by the mismatch between the public and private Douglasses.15 In a speech in 1886 Jacksonville, Florida, Douglass justified his intermarriage on the grounds of his own multiracial self-identity. According to James Weldon Johnson:

Douglass spoke, and moved a large audience of white and colored people by his supreme eloquence. … Douglass was speaking in the far South, but he spoke without fear or reservation. One statement in particular that he made, I now wonder if any Negro speaker today, under the same circumstances, would dare to make, and, if he did, what the public reaction would be; Douglass, in reply to the current criticisms regarding his second marriage, said, “In my first marriage I paid my compliments to my mother’s race; in my second marriage I paid my compliments to the race of my father.”16

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The clash between how Douglass saw himself in 1838 and the public persona that he was forced to portray, was due to the presence of African-American ethnicity in the North.17 Free citizens of part-African ancestry in the South, especially in the lower South, lacked the sense of common tradition associated with ethnic self-identity. This essay traces the emergence of African-American ethnicity and the subsequent evolution of the color line in five topics: Origins of African-American Ethnicity explains how the imposition of a unique endogamous color line eventually led to the synthesis of a unique ethno-cultural community in the Jacksonian Northeast. African-American Ethnic Traits outlines the customs of the Black Yankee ethnic group to show that they gave birth to many of today’s Black traditions. The Integration versus Separatism Pendulum introduces a debate that has occupied Black political leaders since colonial times. The Color Line in the North contrasts the harsh enforcement of the intermarriage barrier in the free states with the more permeable systems of the lower South (as presented in the preceding three essays). The National Color Line’s Rise and Fall concludes this section on the endogamous color line by presenting two graphs. The first shows that which side of the endogamous color line you were on was most hotly contested in U.S. courts between 1840 and 1869. The second shows that the color line grew abruptly stronger during Reconstruction, was at its harshest during Jim Crow, and began to recover only around 1980.

Origins of African-American Ethnicity
Early in the nineteenth-century, the American North saw the emergence of invented ethnic self-identities that became political power groups: Germans, Irish, Jews, Hispanics (from Louisiana and Florida), and, of course, Black Yankees. Each ethnicity was synthetic in the sense that, while adopting symbols (traditions, language, rituals) associated with some land of origin, it absorbed diversity under a single label. Residents of what would become western Germany (Bavaria or Hesse-Kassel), for example, did not think of themselves as kin to Prussians until after they became a U.S. ethnicity.18

An incident in early nineteenth-century Buffalo, New York, exemplifies immigrants’ initial perception of separate identity, before the formation of a shared sense of common ethnicity. Some fifty families of German Jews came to Buffalo. They soon felt compelled to build their own synagogue, to avoid attending services with prior American Jews who had already been accepted as Americans. Before long, they had to split again into two congregations because of doctrinal differences between those from western and eastern Germany. Finally, the eastern congregation split in half due to liturgical disagreements between Prussians and Poles.19 Similarly, residents of county Cavan in Ireland looked down on Corkers as profligates, and those from Cork or County Claire used the term “meanCavanb*stard” as a single word (rather like “damnYankee” in the U.S. South).

Despite such initial divisions, immigrants quickly learned that power in America comes to those who command bloc votes. Each ethnic label became an umbrella designation covering all who joined. Voting was not the only manifestation of group power. Parades, public rituals, even riots and gang wars pitted group against group. Ultimately however, the aggressive, in-your-face umbrella ethnicities of the period arose as a consequence of democracy and surged with the widening Jacksonian franchise. Ethnic groups were voting blocs.20

One would think that Black Yankees would have been initially more diverse than Europeans because Africa is larger and more populous than Europe. The geographic triangle bounded by Cape Town, Casablanca, and Cairo is a vast kaleidoscope of thousands of cultures, religions, and mutually unintelligible languages. Nevertheless, Northerners of the Black endogamous group were not exempt from the need to define themselves as an ethnic group. Like other ethnicities, Black Yankees in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati also conducted parades, processions, and festivals to, “strengthen and solidify the boundaries of class and ethnicity that buttressed and circumscribed American politics of self-interest.”21

Amid much pomp and parade, with carriaged processions of Revolutionary War veterans, members of benevolent and literary societies, and the committee on arrangements, entire communities made a public show of their “industry, integrity, [and] temperance.” Women and children joined the parades, waving flags from the windows of omnibuses. Along waterways like the Hudson and Susquehanna rivers, chartered steamboats brought ‘large delegations from different localities’ to common points of celebration like Geneva, New York, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In a resonant declaration of Pan-African unity, African-American communities made clear [their solidarity].22

In Cincinnati, a three-way fight for jobs, among Black Yankees, Irish, and Germans, led to an attempt to exile Black Yankees from the state.23 The struggle among Irish, German, and Black laborers for lucrative work on Cincinnati’s docks led to demonstrations, then parades, then riots. Previously, Cincinnati’s Black caste had provided the bulk of construction laborers, porters, vendors, shoeblacks, messengers, and domestic workers—steady work in an expanding economy. The growing political power of Irish and German immigrants struggling to distinguish themselves as White men too, manifested itself in the enforcement of the repressive Ohio Black Codes, laws that had long been on the books but ignored.24 The city expelled Black Yankee children from public schools and forbade the construction of Black private schools.

By the summer of 1829, Black Cincinnatians were avoiding going out in public. They stopped going to hotels, restaurants, theaters, or riding public transportation. They found that they were no longer welcome to attend White church services.25 Former Virginian John Malvin organized a petition drive calling for a repeal of the Black codes. In angry reaction, the city council gave each Black Cincinnatian thirty days to leave the state or post $500 surety bond (roughly $25,000 apiece, in today’s money). Desperate, Malvin negotiated a sixty-day extension from the city in order for the refugees to find new homes in exile. The city’s White zealots—led by not-yet-fully-White immigrant German and Irish laborers—responded to the extension on August 19, 1829 with a riot that burned down all of Cincinnati’s Black residential areas.26

The expulsion order and subsequent arson riot shocked Americans everywhere. It was even reported overseas. Compassion for the victims sparked collection drives for money, food, and clothing even among Southern slave-owners, and brought about the first meeting of the National Convention movement. Zephaniah Kingsley, one of Florida’s wealthiest slaveowners, a man who, seven years earlier had been appointed by President Monroe to Florida’s Legislative Council wrote that, “[racial tolerance] may be considered as a standard measure by which the comparative state of civilization… may be fairly estimated.” He opined that Ohio had stepped outside the limits of civilized society, “in its acts of oppression against its free colored inhabitants, by which their existence seems so far to have been threatened….”27

Looked at rationally, immigrant Irish and German resentment of Cincinnati‘s Black workers made little sense. From the viewpoint of strict self-interest, the most severe competition that each unskilled Irish worker faced in selling his labor was not from already-employed Black workers, but from the dozens of identically unskilled Irish laborers who had just stepped off the same boat.28 Returning to the experience of Frederick Douglass, the former slave had no more success at portraying himself as biracial in such an environment than an agnostic resident of Belfast would have in adopting a dual Catholic/Protestant persona today. Membership in an ethnicity in many ways resembled membership in a gang

Essays on the U.S. Color Line » Blog Archive » The Color Line Created African-American Ethnicity in the North


The Color Line in the North

The endogamous color line was enforced more strictly in the North than in the antebellum lower South (South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida).

Essays on the U.S. Color Line » Blog Archive » The Color Line Created African-American Ethnicity in the North





On the interactions between the Black Yankees and Southern Plantation Blacks:

The aftermath of the Civil War dramatically accelerated the process of cultural osmosis. In the same way that Northern entrepreneurs (carpetbaggers) flooded the Reconstruction South seeking business opportunities, tens of thousands of Black Yankees left homes and careers and also migrated to the defeated South. They built the schools, printed the newspapers, and opened the businesses that taught the newly freed to flourish as Americans.68 Joel Williamson particularly distinguishes between Northern Black Yankees and Southern former slaves, especially among former Union soldiers:

The channels though which mulatto leadership moved from the North to the lower South are clearly visible. Many of the migrants, women as well as men, came as teachers sponsored by a dozen or so benevolent societies, arriving in the still turbulent wake of Union armies. Others came to organize relief for the refugees…. Still others… came south as religious missionaries… Some came south as business or professional people seeking opportunity on this… special black frontier. Finally, thousands came as soldiers [Black Yankees in regiments that served in the South], and when the war was over, many of [their] young men remained there or returned after a stay of some months in the North to complete their education.69

Culture clash made for bumpy times for some of the volunteers. Slave religious services were characterized by the ring-shout ceremony. In a ring-shout, as Daniel Payne had noticed,70 the outdoor congregation shuffles, dances, claps, and sings as they circle the preacher, loudly responding to his or her every utterance. Although the ring-shout is ostensibly Christian, the old Yoruba orixas Exu, Ogun, Xango, Oxossi often make an appearance by taking possession of a dancer, especially in the Sea Islands and in Louisiana bayous.71 Black Yankees, in contrast, were staid Methodist Episcopalians. Slave music had exceedingly simple melodies and harmony was unknown, but the music gloried in dazzling rhythmic syncopation. Black Yankee music was characterized by the subtle and changing harmonies of Anglican hymns and a steady British beat.72

Many AME ministers sent south insisted on an educated ministry, undercutting the authority of self-taught slave-born preachers, and demanded more sedate services than new freedmen were used to. “The old people were not anxious to see innovations introduced in religious worship,” one wrote home, telling how a Black Yankee preacher was mocked as a “Presbyterian” by his new flock.73 Nevertheless, the overall attitude of the Black Yankees reflected solidarity with their charges. New England Black Yankee teacher Virginia C. Greene wrote home, “I class myself with the freedmen. Though I have never known servitude they are in fact my people.”74 Some of the southbound migrants even married white southern Republicans during Congressional Reconstruction. Carrie Highgate, a Black Yankee schoolteacher from New York married White Mississippi state senator Albert T. Morgan.75

Essays on the U.S. Color Line » Blog Archive » The Color Line Created African-American Ethnicity in the North

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, "Black Gotham" is Carla Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbours, and business associates, she illuminates the greater history of African-American elites in New York City. "Black Gotham" challenges many of the accepted "truths" about African-American history, including the assumption that the phrase "nineteenth-century black Americans" means enslaved people, that "New York state before the Civil War" refers to a place of freedom, and that a black elite did not exist until the twentieth century. Beginning her story in the 1820s, Peterson focuses on the pupils of the Mulberry Street School, the graduates of which went on to become eminent African-American leaders. She traces their political activities as well as their many achievements in trade, business, and the professions against the backdrop of the expansion of scientific racism, the trauma of the Civil War draft riots, and the rise of Jim Crow. Told in a vivid, fast-paced style, "Black Gotham" is an important account of the rarely acknowledged achievements of nineteenth-century African Americans and brings to the forefront a vital yet forgotten part of American history and culture

Another influential "Black Yankee"

James McCune Smith (April 18, 1813 – November 17, 1865)

was an American physician, apothecary, abolitionist, and author. He is the first African American to hold a medical degree and graduated at the top in his class at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He was the first African American to run a pharmacy in the United States.

In addition to practicing as a doctor for nearly 20 years at the Colored Orphan Asylum in Manhattan, Smith was a public intellectual: he contributed articles to medical journals, participated in learned societies, and wrote numerous essays and articles drawing from his medical and statistical training. He used his training in medicine and statistics to refute common misconceptions about race, intelligence, medicine, and society in general. Invited as a founding member of the New York Statistics Society in 1852, which promoted a new science, he was elected as a member in 1854 of the recently founded American Geographic Society. But, he was never admitted to the American Medical Association or local medical associations.

He has been most well known for his leadership as an abolitionist; a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, with Frederick Douglass he helped start the National Council of Colored People in 1853, the first permanent national organization for blacks. Douglass said that Smith was "the single most important influence on his life."[1] Smith was one of the Committee of Thirteen, who organized in 1850 in New York City to resist the newly passed Fugitive Slave Law by aiding fugitive slaves through the Underground Railroad. Other leading abolitionist activists were among his friends and colleagues. From the 1840s, he lectured on race and abolitionism and wrote numerous articles to refute racist ideas about black capacities.

The first African American to receive a medical degree, this invaluable collection brings together the writings of James McCune Smith, one of the foremost intellectuals in antebellum America. The Works of James McCune Smith is one of the first anthologies featuring the works of this illustrious scholar. Perhaps best known for his introduction to Fredrick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, his influence is still found in a number of aspects of modern society and social interactions. And he was considered by many to be a prophet of the twenty-first century. One of the earliest advocates of the use of "black" instead of "colored," McCune Smith treated racial identities as social constructions, arguing that American literature, music, and dance would be shaped and defined by blacks.

The absence of James McCune Smith in the historiographic and critical literature is even more striking. He was a brilliant scholar, writer, and critic, as well as a first rate physician. In 1882 the black leader Alexander Crummell called him "the most learned Negro of his day," and Frederick Douglass considered him the most important black influence in his life (much as he considered Gerrit Smith the most important white one). Douglass was probably correct when, in 1859, he publicly stated: "No man in this country more thoroughly understands the whole struggle between freedom and slavery, than does Dr. Smith, and his heart is as broad as his understanding."

As a prose stylist and original thinker, McCune Smith ranks, at his best, alongside such canonical figures as Emerson and Thoreau. His essays are sophisticated and elegant, his interpretations of American culture are way ahead of his time, and his experimental style and use of dialect anticipates some of the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1920s. Yet McCune Smith has been completely ignored by literary critics; and aside from one article on him, he has remained absent from the historical record.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

As I said before, the "Afram" ethnicity and culture is very multi layered and more complex than many people realize. Afram splinter or subgroups are very regional for example (this also gives more context into the mullato or creole traditions of the lower south)

Basically the Lumbee became an offshoot of Aframs because they didn't want to adhere to the basic 2 tier USA colorline. The ancestors of the Lumbees were called "old issue negroes" which meant they were free(d) before the Civil War.


Free People of Color in the USA

Many free people of color were born free. By the 19th century, there were flourishing families of free coloreds who had been free for generations. In the United States many of the "old issue" free people of color (those free before the Civil War) were descended from African Americans born free during the colonial period in Virginia. Most of those were descendants of white servant women who entered into relationships with African men, indentured servant, slave or free. Their relationships demonstrated the fluid nature of the early working class, before institutionalized slavery hardened lines between ethnic groups. Many of their descendants later migrated to the frontiers of North and South Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee, and west, as well as further south

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The people who are known as Lumbees today refused to go to schools with newly freed slaves. This is how they got their own school and helped further their identity as "Indians" rather than "Coloreds-Mulattos-Negroes-Blacks"

Education and recognition

In 1868 the legislature elected during Reconstruction created a new constitution, which established a public education system for the first time in North Carolina. In an effort to re-establish white supremacy, the following year the state legislature required segregated schools to be established for whites and blacks (in the whites view of the binary society, free people of color, or African descended, were essentially included in the latter category because of slavery history). The ancestors of the Lumbee, long free, objected to having to send their children to school with the children of newly emancipated slaves.

Following Reconstruction, in 1885, through the effort of the Democratic representative Hamilton MacMillan, the North Carolina legislature formally recognized the people in Robeson County as "Croatan Indians." It authorized them to establish separate schools for their children. By the end of the 19th century, the "Indians of Robeson County" (as they then were named) established schools in eleven of their principal settlements.[31]

In 1887, the Indians of Robeson County petitioned the state legislature to establish a normal school to train Indian teachers for the county's tribal schools. With state permission, they raised the requisite funds, along with some state assistance, which proved inadequate. Several tribal leaders donated money and privately held land for schools. Robeson County's Indian Normal School has evolved into Pembroke State University and later still, the University of North Carolina at Pembroke

Lumbee | World Public Library - eBooks | Read eBooks online

 

[IllmaticDelta]

They (that old issue negro stock of Virginians) didn't all try to become "Indians" though, so today you have people that are related where some identify as "Lumbee Indian", "Afram and Lumbee or Black Indian" and others only as "Afram". For example

(Afram identified but of the same stock as Lumbee identified people)

What is 'PenderROCK'?

In the beginning was the Walker Family Reunion. Then came the Wheelers. Then came the Williams. So it became the Walker+ Family Reunion.

There used to be the Jacobs Family Reunion. There was also the Merritt Family Reunion. They beget the Jacobs-Merritt Family Reunion.

The Walker+ people and the Jacobs-Merritt people are kin. They started having reunions together -- the Jacobs-Merritt/Walker+ Family Reunion.

The name became rather long and cumbersome.

Who are these people and why are they all in the same family group? They are descendants of people who have lived in Pender County since at least 1765 (Esther Jacobs was on the tax roll that year). They were colored people. They were colored beige. They were colored yellow. They were colored red. They were colored brown.

North Carolina had many clans of free colored people. Each clan was heavily interrelated and was also related to neighboring clans. So the Pender colored people are kin to the Robeson colored people and the Sampson colored people and the Brunswick & Bladen & Columbus colored people.

Some of the other people no longer identify themselves as “colored”. They have become Indian or white. The Pender people continued to be called colored or mulatto. Today, they self-identify as black and/or African American. But they’re still colored beige and colored yellow and colored red and colored brown. And they’re still trying to be free.

Half of the surnames [Jacobs, Messick, Walker, Wheeler] have lived in Pender County since the 1700s. Thus, the combined reunion was renamed the Pender Reunion Of Colored Kindred (PenderROCK).

Half of the families [West, Merritt, Williams] came to Pender from nearby Sampson County in the 1880s. PenderROCK has been strengthened by the increasing attendance of Sampson County cousins who share the same lineage

PenderROCK > 'PenderROCK'?


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[IllmaticDelta]

Divergent Paths --“Your Freedom Cost Me”

“Choosing Sides, Creating Your Own Ground, or Accepting a New Yoke”

Your Freedom cost Me

‘Reconstruction’ is the period after the Civil War in which the Southern states were re-integrated into the United States. Initially during this era, laws were crafted at national and state level to define the rights available to freed slaves. As the Southern states regained control of their affairs from the federal government, increasingly laws were passed to restrict the rights available to freed slaves – ‘Jim Crow laws’.

The free persons of color in Southeastern North Carolina had their own reconstructing to do.

Some Coharie in Sampson County had been slaveholders and rebel fighters. They had to rebuild their livelihoods and reaffirm their loyalty to the federal government just as the other vanquished confederates.
By the start of the war in 1861, the free persons of color had lived isolated in the margins of society for at least one-hundred years. They were afforded a status higher than slaves, but lower than White persons. Many had never been under Indian or African slavery. For others, their servitude was so distant, neither they nor their neighbors could recollect it. Still others had joined the free colored community as manumitted or escaped mulattos, and probably still had familial linkages to slave kin.

As the war approached, Southern Whites had closed ranks to defend their status from encroachment. Instead of the familiar tiers of White, Free non-White, and Slave, they began to view the world as simply White (us) or not (them).

The free persons of color also had familial relationships with some local White families, and in some cases their White relatives protected them from the worst treatment. However, as a rule, the term ‘free person of color’ lost its meaning. Now, ex-slaves were free and non-White. The isolate people were free and non-White.

In the Reconstruction era, the people began to suffer under the Jim Crow laws designed to re-constrain the ex-slaves.

Freedom of their slave kin had resulted in bondage for the free people of color.


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Creating Their Own Ground

Thus, a four-county community of colored cousins – some tied to slave relatives, others fighting to maintain their own slave-holding way of life -- faced the daunting task of single-handedly establishing for themselves a new place in the changed society. There would be no assistance. The White community had largely closed to them. The ex-slave community did not yet have the acumen to navigate its own way.

In most of the counties, these constraints led isolate leaders to lobby their neighbors and local government to recognize them as Indian. Although this did not gain them entry into the ruling class, it removed them from the wrath directed at freed slaves. In Robeson County and Sampson County, strong, influential spokespersons arose. (Columbus County followed suit several decades later) The people were denied entry to the White public school system, but refused to attend the schools established for freed slaves. They established their own school systems, paying for them out of their own pockets as they simultaneously (and – ultimately – successfully) petitioned the government to pay for the three-way segregation.

The ‘Indian schools’ were paramount in keeping the isolate culture alive. Students learned the three R’s of Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rrithmetic, and also learned the oral history of their people. They learned that they were not freed slaves and they learned why keeping that distinction was crucial to not becoming Jim Crowed. They began to call their leaders ‘chief’. They began to re-discover Native American traditions that were not a part of their own oral legacy – borrowing dances and reverence for objects such as the eagle feather from west-of-the-Mississippi tribes. They chose names for themselves based on the old Indian-named waterways in their counties.

Over time, the status of the Sampson, Robeson, and Columbus county people as Native American has solidified. They have become known as the Coharie, Lumbee, and Waccamaw Indians respectively. They have gained state recognition, many other uninterrupted tribes affiliate with them, and they are well on their way to federal recognition

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Choosing Sides

The people in Pender County did not lobby to maintain themselves separate from freed slaves. This is an interesting phenomenon – as the Pender people and Sampson people were probably the closest linked in terms of bloodlines and day-to-day association. From the late 1700’s onward, the people consistently chose mates from each others’ community. Families regularly moved back and forth between the counties as they inherited land from elders, or simply found better opportunities. They belonged to the same churches. Their churches belonged to the same convention – Kenansville Eastern Missionary Baptist Association. They were essentially the same people. Yet the Sampson cousins were the forerunners of the Southeastern NC movement to establish a separate place in society for ex-free-colored people, while the Pender cousins made no moves towards that direction.

As this drama unfolds, the ‘one drop’ rule was in full effect in the United States. The Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896 Louisiana ruled that Mr. Plessy – seven-eights White and one-eight Black– could be segregated to the colored rail car under the now famous ‘separate but equal’ opinion. Although the isolate people were so thoroughly and historically mixed as to make exact percentages unattainable, Plessy v. Ferguson shows that if there was a shadow of doubt, or a far-distant African ancestor, one was subject to Jim Crow laws.

Therefore, as the Sampson cousins began to solidify their new status, the linkage between the counties began to atrophy and each person had to choose a side. Census records show isolate families disappearing from Pender County in the 1870’s and 1880’s. Most of these families reappear in Sampson County, and are counted as Coharie when the Coharie published their history.[2] Somewhat later – around 1902 – the Coharie churches are no longer reflected in the minutes from the Kenansville Eastern Missionary Baptist Association. They had pulled away to establish their own


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Accepting a New Yoke

By the early 1900’s the Pender people – although still genetically the same as their Indian cousins – began to be called Negro. By the 1920’s and 30’s as “Negro” people began to migrate to the North to avoid the still-present Jim Crow, PenderROCK people were in the crowd. Now, the people began to marry other Negroes and were no longer a racial isolate. They merged effectively into the Negro/Black community.

Why did PenderROCK people lose their status as historically free people and submit to Jim Crow laws that were not originally intended for them?

One might argue that they had more African ancestors.

That is unlikely in the late 1800’s. Sampson and Pender County were essentially the same gene pool. As late as 1917, a dispute over inherited Jacobs land in Pender County necessarily included Coharie as plaintiffs.

PenderROCK people did have a greater genetic debt to the family of Benjamin Williams. Williams was a free person of color originally from Sampson County circa 1840. Oral history and the physiology of his descendants attest that the Williams’ looked no different from others in the clan. Yet oddly, the Williams family was not recognized as Coharie in their lineage books, which could lead one to the conclusion that they were more European and African than tri-racial.

Two facts cause one to discount that theory. First, several Coharie families appear to have started out as bi-racial. Secondly, certain of the Williams descendants were included in the Coharie rolls. Some families split, with one set of siblings identifying as Coharie and the other set becoming ‘colored’.

It appears that actively making the choice to stake a new claim and name for oneself – and sticking with the decision – was the deciding factor.

As a PenderROCK icon, New Hope Missionary Baptist Church’s role in the people’s decision cannot be overestimated. Southeastern Carolinians were poor, pragmatic, Spartan people. Church was the only outlet they allowed themselves other than work. The church was their sole venue to meet and greet and court and write and read and lead – and save their souls.

From Kenansville Eastern Missionary Baptist Association minutes it appears that New Hope Missionary Baptist Church was probably formed 1902-1912. Until the 1970’s or so, practically every family in the church had PenderROCK lineage. From the earliest minutes, the Walkers, Messicks, Merritts were the deacons of the church. Jacobs began to assume leadership roles in the late 1920’s. Love Grove Church may have been the predecessor to New Hope; research is still open in this area. If not Love Grove, one may be certain that the people worshipped somewhere in the Cypress Creek/Piney Wood Road neighborhood prior to 1902.

The fact that New Hope Missionary Baptist Church -- a PenderROCK congregation -- has never had a PenderROCK pastor is striking.

PenderROCK produced more than its fair share of ordained ministers, but they all pastored other churches (including Coharie churches). True, the day-to-day authority in rural churches rested with the Deacon Board, but pastors had a higher level of visibility, respect, the ability to move across communities and negotiate between groups, and the propensity to interact with regional government.

Thus, in their only formal structure – the church – the PenderROCK people never had a PenderROCK leader speaking for them.[3]

After Reconstruction disenfranchised and Jim Crowed the ex-slaves, colored churches played a critical role of benevolence in the community. Especially in Southeastern NC, the people were struggling. In urban areas, fraternal organizations were partners in helping people to find jobs, encouraging them to save money, and assisting in burial and food expenses when necessary. In the rural areas, the church was alone. One may assume that Kenansville Eastern Missionary Baptist Association and New Hope Baptist Church played that role in Pender County. Minutes reflect monies paid to recent widows by the Association (including Coharie widows). Therefore, the PenderROCK people would have been included by the Association and by their pastor in the problems and issues of slave descendants. Poor and uneducated themselves, small wonder that it did not feel foreign to them and they began to identify with the freedmen.

Conversely, the Coharie churches had Coharie pastors. There was probably little economic difference between the people at this time. They both had land – inherited from their joint-ancestors; they both were subject to the depressed economy and the repression of being hired after White people. So the Coharie churches had benevolence work to do as well. However, the Coharie pastors would have been in the position to understand their options and keep the people from being classified as ‘Negro’ – even if that meant pulling away from their kin.[4]

Another key difference between the PenderROCK people and their cousins in Sampson, Robeson, and Columbus counties is that the other cousins coalesced around two institutions: church and school.

As noted earlier, more widespread literacy and strong cousin/teacher/leaders enabled the Sampson and Robeson people to see a way around the crippling Jim Crow laws that were applied to freed slaves and historically free people of color. Their self segregation began in their schoolhouses – refusing to attend ‘Black’ schools and unable to attend ‘White’ schools, they established their own and fought relentlessly to have the schools and pupils recognized by North Carolina as distinct and separate.

PenderROCK people did not establish their own schools. The Jacobs land lies across the unruly Cypress Creek. Around 1915 or so, the Jacobs paid their Sampson cousin, Geneva Brewington, to live with them and teach their children so they would not have to navigate the creek. But for the most part, PenderROCK people were educated by the state-run school system for non-Whites. Love Grove School (its connection to the early Love Grove Church still under investigation) was the elementary school. PenderROCK people lived on contiguous land and were the bulk of the non-White neighborhood around Cypress Creek and Piney Wood Road. As late as the 1930’s only one family of children in Love Grove School was not PenderROCK. Still, this was considered a ‘Negro’ school by state and local educators. One may be sure that PenderROCK history was not in the curriculum. High school education did not become the norm for PenderROCK people until the middle of the twentieth century. By then, they were firmly a part of the Negro community and the colored C.F. Pope High School was their destination.

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Conclusion:

The conclusion is that the Southeastern NC free people of color diverged into five major groups in the decades of Reconstruction and thereafter.

In three counties, the people were resistant to being re-marginalized to the very bottom of the social and economic ladder. They leveraged their cohesiveness, budding literacy, and relationships with the ruling class to forge a new stratum higher than freed slaves and somewhat shielded from the harsh treatment accorded the freedmen.

In Pender County, cohesive but almost wholly uneducated, and without a leader that could negotiate terms with society at-large, the people were acquiescent to the label society gave them.

Less studied is the fifth group. They were aspirants – seeking to make their living unencumbered by societal doubts and judgment. They struck out solo, or in small family groups – pushing their way West and leaving tradition, clan cohesiveness, and the argument as to how ‘colored’ they were, behind in NC.

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Footnotes
[01] Some of the people made a fifth choice: not Coharie, Lumbee, Waccamaw, or colored=Negro; but becoming White over time. The West had opened up. People were stage-coaching to the other side of the Mississippi to homestead and ‘settle’ the West. Even as the U.S. government was driving their (distant) Indian cousins like cattle from western NC, GA, SC, to west of the Mississippi in the ‘Trail of Tears’, some of the isolate people were taking the same route as homesteaders. Identifying as Indian obviously was not the best choice for these settlers. Over time, they married other settlers and identify as White.
[02] In a brilliant move, the Sampson County cousins published at least three documents of their lineage. These pamphlets essentially spell out ‘who’s in and who’s out’, and successfully buttressed the case for a separate school system and protection from Jim Crow. One sees that the barriers between Pender and Sampson were still fluid in the early decades. Pender people are included in the documents and listed as Coharie if they had moved to Sampson and proclaimed themselves ‘Indian’.
[03] Taylor Jacobs (abt. 1845-1925) is conceded by the PenderROCK elders who knew him, as the leader of PenderROCK people. After the side-choosing was complete, most of the Jacobs-surnamed people in PenderROCK were descendants of Taylor or of James Owen Jacobs. Taylor Jacobs was called ‘the big man’ ‘leader’ ‘head’ in several interviews with different elders. He probably occupied the same position as the men who came to be known as ‘chief’ in the Coharie and Lumbee communities. However, there is no oral history of Taylor being active in the church, and he was illiterate. Thus his access to information and his platform for affecting change were both severely limited.
[04] All of the ex-free persons of color could legally vote. The Grandfather Clause allowed one to vote if his grandfather was eligible. This effectively ruled out the freed slaves, but enabled the isolate people to stay on the rolls. Voter registration records in Pender, Sampson, Robeson, and Columbus Counties show that the people did vote. However, one might imagine that in the Indian churches, voting was encouraged and discussed. At New Hope, one must wonder how much attention a non-PenderROCK pastor – himself ineligible – would pay to encouraging his flock to vote

http://www.penderrock.org/PenderROCK...gent_Paths.htm

A key difference between the PenderROCK people and their cousins in Sampson, Robeson, and Columbus counties [who became known as the Coharie, Lumbee, and Waccamaw Indians respectively] is that the other cousins coalesced around two institutions: church and school. More widespread literacy and strong cousin/teacher/leaders enabled the people to see a way around the crippling Jim Crow laws that were applied to freed slaves and historically free people of color. Their self segregation began in their schoolhouses – refusing to attend ‘Black’ schools and unable to attend ‘White’ schools, they established their own and fought relentlessly to have the schools and pupils recognized by North Carolina as distinct and separate

Church History Project