Defining the "African-American"

[IllmaticDelta]

A geneological breakdown example of the Lumbee and other triracial/indian groups in the Carolinas and the Aframs in the same region

Reuben Mainor/Maynor


Reuben Mainor appears to have spent most of his life in Sampson County NC. Frank Mainor, one of his descendants, believes that Reuben and his wife Elizabeth were "Indians" originally from Robeson County; that they had to leave Robeson because they killed a White man over some land dispute. He also stated that Elizabeth was a Manuel (maiden name).

The Sketch of Classified Indians of Sampson County pamphlet originally published in 1921 by the tribe holds the genealogy of Reuben Mainor and Elizabeth Manuel. Reuben was the son of John Mainor. Reuben had at least three siblings: Jack, Bob, and Sampson. Brothers Bob, Sampson, and Reuben Mainor married sisters America, Loney, and Elizabeth/Lizzie Manuel.

Elizabeth Manuel and her sisters were daughters of Shade and Zilpha Manuel. Shade had married Zilpha Hardin – as well as Zilpha’s sister, Dicy Hardin. Zilpha and Dicy were the children of Si Hardin. Shade Manuel was the son of Nicholas Manuel and Millie Hale, grandson of Ephriam Manuel and great-grandson of Nicholas Manuel the first.

It is true that both Mainor and Manuel are surnames in what is today recognized as the Lumbee Indian tribe based in Robeson County, NC. The two particular surnnmmes and others, such as Hardin and Brewington, were more prevalent in the free colored population of Sampson County in the time frame in which Reuben Mainor lived. Today's Lumbee Indians, the Sampson County Coharie Indians, and the Colored/Negro/Black Sampson/New Hanover NC County families named Mainor, West, Jacobs, Brewington, Williams, Manuel are descended from the same mixed race group of people that have lived in the area since at least the 1700's. The Lumbee/Coharie/Mainor/West/Jacobs/Brewington/Williams/Manuel ancestors have always been visibly Native American, yet varying in color, features, and hair texture enough that African and European influence could not be denied.

There are many books on the struggle of the Lumbee people to gain tribal recognition from Whites and from other, more organized, recognized Indian peoples. This struggle culiminated in the tribe gaining official recognition and a name in the late 1880's. At that time persons exhibiting the physical characteristics and surnames of the loose-knit clans could declare their Indian-ness and join the tribe. These people were thereafter reclassified from "mulatto" to "Indian" on censuses and other records.

The Sampson County people followed the same pattern; there are just fewer published documents attesting to the fact. In the 1880’s through the 1920’s, the people began to claim their Indian heritage and subsequently restricted their affiliation with kindred who did not do likewise. Even the spellings of Manuel/Emmanuel and Mainor/Maynor are believed to have arisen in this time period as a way to distinguish tribesmen from non-tribesmen.

For the people who chose not to join the tribe, they carried the "mulatto" designation on censuses until the early 1920's, at which time they began to be counted with other Blacks. So there are sets of third cousins in Sampson County and between Sampson and New Hanover Counties who are “Black” on one side of the family and “Indian” on the other. Some of the older relatives remember the kinship. Many of the younger do not.

The family of Reuben and Elizabeth Mainor reflect this phenomena perfectly. Five of their children married into one free colored family in the 1860’s and 1870’s. These children and their descendants seemed not to have joined the tribe at its incorporation. They consider themselves African American today. At least two more of Reuben and Elizabeth’s children married their Mainor cousins. It appears that these descendants are affiliated as Coharie Indians today.

An R. Mainer appears in the 1840 Sampson County census. The household consisted of two free colored males from aged 10-25, one free colored male from 55-99, and one free colored female from 55-99. A John Mainer and an S. Mayner are also listed. This was probably Reuben, his father John, and brother Sampson.

Reuben Mainor

 

[IllmaticDelta]

All of the "Indian or Triracial" surnames are found amongst Aframs because of this relation

Chavis

The CHAVIS surname in America | Ethnic Distribution | American Surnames


Locklear

The LOCKLEAR surname in America | Ethnic Distribution | American Surnames

Cumbo

The CUMBO surname in America | Ethnic Distribution | American Surnames

Brayboy

The BRAYBOY surname in America | Ethnic Distribution | American Surnames

....plus many more

 

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

On the term "Afro American or African American". Many people think it's a recent creation (1980's) but it's not.

We never accepted African American as a people. That term was imposed on us your talking about a term that was created in the late eighties lol.

Aframs are the ones who created the term "AfroAmerican". It wasn't imposed on us at all.


The meaning straight from the AfroAmerican that coined the term



Timothy Thomas Fortune

"In Chicago on January 25, 1890 Fortune co-founded the militant National Afro-American League to right wrongs against African Americans authorized by law and sanctioned or tolerated by public opinion. The league fell apart after four years. When it was revived in Rochester, New York on September 15, 1898, it had the new name of the "National Afro-American Council", with Fortune as President. • The National Afro-American Council - the first nationwide civil rights organization in the United States. • Provided a training ground for some of the nation’s most famous civil rights leaders in the 1910s, 1920s, and beyond. • The Council lobbied actively for the passage of a federal anti-lynching law and raised funds to finance a court test against the “grandfather clause” in Louisiana. Fortune was also the leading advocate of using Afro-American to identify his people. Since they are "African in origin and American in birth", it was his argument that it most accurately defined them."

Timothy Thomas Fortune - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

why didn't we just rock with that. Way back than

..because we went by many things from negro, colored, people of color and when those became old/outdated we stuck to "Black" and "AfroAmerican".


Other documented usages

Gertrude Emily Hicks Bustill Mossell (July 3, 1855 – January 21, 1948)

was an African-American author, journalist and teacher.[1]

Her great-grandfather, Cyrus Bustill, served in George Washington's troops as a baker and after the War of Independence, he started a successful bakery in Philadelphia. The elder Bustill also co-founded the first black mutual-aid society in America, the Free African Society. Among the many other Bustills of distinction are Gertrude's great-aunt, abolitionist and educator Grace Bustill Douglass and her daughter Sarah Mapps Douglass, who followed in her mother's footsteps.

After an early career contributing articles to Philadelphia newspapers, she became women's editor of the New York Age from 1885 to 1889, and of the Indianapolis World from 1891 to 1892. She strongly supported the development of black newspapers, and encouraged more women to enter journalism.

Gertrude Bustill was managing a career and a family life: in 1893 she married a leading Philadelphia physician, Nathan Francis Mossell, with whom she had two daughters. Around the time of her wedding, Mossell was working on an important little book: The Work of the Afro-American Woman (1894), which is a collection of essays and poems that recognized the achievements of black women in a range of fields. As scholar Joanne Braxton has pointed out, this book was for the black woman of the 1890s what Paula Giddings's When and Where I Enter was for the black woman of the 1980s.

As a woman with such strong feminist views, people found it odd that Gertrude published the book under her husband's initials. Braxton offers the following explanation: "By this strategy of public modesty, the author signaled her intention to defend and celebrate black womanhood without disrupting the delicate balance of black male-female relations or challenging masculine authority."

The year after The Work of the Afro-American Woman came out, Gertrude Bustill Mossell was busy helping her husband with the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School, which opened in 1895: she headed up the fundraising drive, raising $30,000, and went on to serve as president of its Social Service Auxiliary. Her other civic activities included organizing the Philadelphia branch of the National Afro-American Council. The only other book Gertrude Bustill Mossell wrote was a children's book, Little Dansie's One Day at Sabbath School (1902).

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(far right)

Julia Ringwood Coston (1863 - 1931)

Ringwood’s Afro-American Journal of Fashion (1891)

The first fashion magazine for Black women was Ringwood's Afro-American Journal of Fashion in 1891. It is remarkable not only as evidence that the black middle class had advanced sufficiently by the early 1890s to support a fashion magazine, but also for the first appearance in print of the term Afro-American.

The owner of Ringwood's Journal, is not well remembered. There are no books written about who she was and why she did or did not become great. While having begun and edited the first magazine aimed at and written by African American women is an achievement worthy of praise.

Julia Ringwood Coston (1863 - 1931), was born on Ringwood's Farm in Warrenton, Virginia. Her family migrated from their southern plantation home to Washington, D.C., following the Civil War. In Washington, she spent much of her postbellum childhood in school, excelling and enjoying it. Her later childhood was spent as the family breadwinner; she was forced to drop out of school at the age of 13 and work as a governess in the home of a Union general and was eventually able to continue her studies.

In the spring of 1886, she married William Hilary Coston, (1859 - 1942), a noted author and graduate of Wilberforce and Yale Divinity School. He had published, 'A Freeman and Yet a Slave' (1884), a pamphlet of eighty-four pages, and may have broadened her formal education. A longer version of the same book was published in 1888 in Chatham, Ontario, Canada, which may suggest they lived there at one time.

In 1899 her husband published, 'The Spanish-American War Volunteer; Ninth United States Volunteer Infantry Roster, Biographies, Cuban Sketches.' He also wrote a pamphlet, 'The Betrayal of the American Negroes as Citizens, as Soldiers and Sailors by the Republican Party in Deference to the People of the Philippine Islands.'

The Costons settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where her husband became the pastor of Saint Andrew's Church and Julia Coston began publishing Ringwood's Afro-American Journal of Fashion, also known as Ringwood's Home Magazine using her maiden name.

The Lynchburg Counselor says, "It is a beautiful 12-page journal, and the only publication of its kind on the market. Every colored woman in America should read it." The Philadelphia Recorder observed, "It is especially designed to be an Afro-American magazine, and is edited by colored women, but the pleasing fashion articles, instructive talks with girls and mothers, make Ringwood's Magazine a welcome addition to any home, whether its occupants be black or white."

The Richmond Planet emphasized that the 12-page journal, which sold for $1.25 a year, was a "typographical beauty." Edited by women's and civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell.

Julia and her husband had two children, a son and daughter.

Julia Coston died on June 1, 1931, in Washington, D.C., of an apparent heart attack at the age of 68. She is buried in Warrenton, Virginia. Her husband, W.H. Coston died on June 27, 1942 at the age of 82. He is buried in Arlington, Virginia.

In the spring of 1886, Ringwood married William Hilary Coston, a student at Yale University who eventually became a minister and writer. They had two children, a daughter, Julia R. in 1888, and a son, W.H. in 1890. The family settled in Cleveland, Ohio where William Coston was pastor of Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church. William Coston was especially encouraging of Julia’s writing interests and gave her advice based on his experience as a writer.

In 1891, Julia Coston, realizing that white journals ignored black interests and themes, decided to create her own journal: Ringwood’s Afro-American Journal of Fashion. Concerned with the suffering and hopelessness of black women in the South, she believed that press editorials could be affective in protesting their inhumane treatment. The twelve page journal, which had a yearly subscription fee of $1.25, provided advice on homemaking, etiquette, and fashion.

Ringwood’s Afro-American Journal of Fashion carried illustrations of the latest Paris fashions along with articles, biographical compositions of outstanding black women and promising young ladies, instructive articles for women and their daughters, as well as love stories. At the time, it was the only fashion magazine for blacks in the world.

The journal received tremendous praise from its readers and other noted publications. In 1892, Rev. Theodore Holly, then living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, wrote that Ringwood’s Afro-American Journal of Fashion was already the leading magazine in that nation while the Philadelphia Recorder declared the magazine a welcome addition to any home, white or black. Victoria Earle (later Matthews), a black New York society leader, wrote that the magazine was a major source for instruction and guidance in home organization.

 

[K.O.N.Y]

On the term "Afro American or African American". Many people think it's a recent creation (1980's) but it's not.



Aframs are the ones who created the term "AfroAmerican". It wasn't imposed on us at all.


The meaning straight from the AfroAmerican that coined the term



Timothy Thomas Fortune




Timothy Thomas Fortune - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia




..because we went by many things from negro, colored, people of color and when those became old/outdated we stuck to "Black" and "AfroAmerican".


Other documented usages

Gertrude Emily Hicks Bustill Mossell (July 3, 1855 – January 21, 1948)





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(far right)

Julia Ringwood Coston (1863 - 1931)

Ringwood’s Afro-American Journal of Fashion (1891)

Interesting.

I was mainly referring to the forced, politically correct fashion in which "African American" was imposed on us with jesse jacksons movements. Many blacks don't even agree with the term nor is it properly defined in our census

But anyway,I like and prefer Afro-American to African-american

 

[Samori Toure]

Lately on here I've seen a lot of controversy on who is AA or what it means to be AA, blah...blah...blah...

Of course in this thread I will be referring to AA's as an ethnic entity and not a racial one. IMO its simple to define what it is to be AA and that is having ancestral family roots in the American South pre-jim crow... Simple.

Think of the Great Migration like the Bantu migration from Africa. Think of the American south of the African-American ethnic/cultural homeland, but then they expanded out and soon developing their own unique culture and "styles" and they also mingled with different groups they came in contact with from their perspective new region(northeast blacks and Puerto Ricans, Southwest blacks and Mexicans, Northwest Blacks and Asians, you get the picture) this is the same with the Bantu Migration. But all those African-Americans ALL trace their family roots back to the American South whether you're from New York, California, Illinois, Michigan, etc. Just like all Bantu's "supposedly" trace their origins back to Cameroon; whether they be from Central, South or East Africa.

I'm part AA due to my family having ancestral roots in North Carolina pre-Jim Crow. So they are actually "indigenous" American Blacks who traces their roots back to slavery in America and not being descendants of new black immigrants.

I hope this thread solves this controversy.

Good stuff, but you missed an earlier large migration that African Americans took. They also had a massive migration from East to West in the USA both involuntarily before the Civil War; and voluntarily after the Civil War. The movement came about after the USA completed the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 from France; as a result of the French taking a beat down in Haiti from the Haitians during the revolution.

As you might recall from your history classes as a kid the USA acquired West Tennessee; Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Louisiana, and Northern Texas and New Mexico and portions of Colorado. Initially African Americans were taken as slaves into some of those territories and later on after the Civil War many African Americans emigrated into those territories as freemen.

 

[Indiglow Meta (R$G)]

It's cool, I can see the path my grandmother's family took from slavery on the map
Camilla, GA > Knoxville, TN>>> Columbus, Ohio> Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania > New York, NY

One of the greatest tricks ever played on black people was the advertisement of Columbus as a city where black folks could make it. Shout outs to "Flytown"...The "Canada" of racist ass Ohio cities.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Some other terms we once went by and the rejection of the term "Negro"

 

[wheywhey]

They blended in with Southern descent Aframs and/or became the basis for North "Black Indian" groups.


These areas are historically known for "Black Indians"

I am interested in how people learn foreign languages and I saw a documentary on the people of the Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts who are trying to reclaim their language. I was surprised to see that they are black people of various shades.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I am interested in how people learn foreign languages and I saw a documentary on the people of the Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts who are trying to reclaim their language. I was surprised to see that they are black people of various shades.

We Still Live Here: Black Indians of Wampanoag and African Heritage.

Brought to you by Anne Makepeace and Makepeace productions, “We Still Live Here” is a documentary that gives insight into the complexities of defining identity when you are both of African and American Indian descent. The documentary features Black Indians of Wampanoag and African heritage sharing their experiences and perspective on issues like retaining their rich cultural heritage and encountering colorism.

 

[wheywhey]

We Still Live Here: Black Indians of Wampanoag and African Heritage.

Thanks. I watched the video a couple years ago when I had a free 30-day trial of Amazon Prime. Either there are two versions of this documentary or my memory is very bad because I don't remember them mentioning their African heritage at all. It was all about their language. One of the members got a master's in linguistics (I believe) even though she didn't have a bachelor's degree. Amazon has taken down the video but the comments are still there and no one is talking about them being black.

I didn't know Crispus Attucks was Wampanoag. I enjoyed the clip.

 

[Yagirlcheatinonus]

A geneological breakdown example of the Lumbee and other triracial/indian groups in the Carolinas and the Aframs in the same region



Reuben Mainor

Lumberton NC

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I didn't know Crispus Attucks was Wampanoag. I enjoyed the clip.

I don't know if you ever heard of him but Paul Cuffee was another influential/historic Afram/Wampanoag. He was one of the earlier pioneers of the "Back To Africa" movement.

The person who spearheaded “the first, black initiated ‘back to Africa’ effort in U.S. history,” according to the historian Donald R. Wright, was also the first free African American to visit the White House and have an audience with a sitting president. He was Paul Cuffee, a sea captain and an entrepreneur who was perhaps the wealthiest black American of his time.

Cuffee was born on Cuttyhunk Island, off Southern Massachusetts, on Jan. 17, 1759, and died on Sept. 7, 1817. He was one of 10 children of a freed slave, a farmer named Kofi Slocum. (“Kofi” is a Twi word for a boy born on Friday, so we know that he was an Ashanti from Ghana.) Kofi Anglicized his name to “Cuffee.”

Paul’s mother was Ruth Moses, a Wampanoag Native American. He ended up marrying a member of the Pequot tribe from Martha’s Vineyard, Alice Pequit.

In 1766, Kofi purchased a 116-acre farm in Dartmouth, Mass., on Buzzard’s Bay, which he left upon his death in 1772 to Paul and his brother, John. When his father died, Paul changed his surname from Slocum to Cuffee, and began what would prove to be an extraordinarily successful life at sea.

Starting as a whaler, then moving into maritime trading, Paul Cuffee eventually “bought and built ships, developing his own maritime enterprise that involved trading the length of the U.S. Atlantic coast, with trips to the Caribbean and Europe,” according to Wright. But he was also politically engaged: In 1780, he, his brother and five black men filed a petition protesting their “having No vote on Influence in the Election with those that tax us,” because they were “Chiefly of the African Extraction,” as his biographer, Lamont Thomas, reports. He was jailed, but got his taxes reduced.

Cuffee’s dream was that free African Americans and freed slaves “could establish a prosperous colony in Africa,” one based on emigration and trade. Cuffee’s visit to the White House happened like this: The U.S. had established an embargo on British goods in 1807, and relations were worsening with Great Britain. On April 19, 1812, U.S. Customs in Westport, Mass., seized Cuffee’s ship and its cargo upon its return from Sierra Leone and Great Britain as being in violation of the embargo. When customs refused to release his property, Cuffee sought redress directly from President James Madison.

On May 2, 1812, he went to the White House, where he met with Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin and with Madison himself, who greeted him warmly and ordered that his goods be returned. Madison queried Cuffee about his recent visits to Sierra Leone, and his ideas about African-American colonization of the new British colony.

The British had founded a settlement there for London’s Committee of the Black Poor; it was called the Province of Freedom in 1787. Then Freetown was founded as a settlement for freed slaves in 1792, the year when the black Loyalists (including George Washington’s former slave, Harry Washington) arrived from Nova Scotia. In 1808, Sierra Leone became a colony.

Cuffee’s dream was that free African Americans and freed slaves “could establish a prosperous colony in Africa,” one based on emigration and trade. As Wright put it, “Cuffee hoped to send at least one vessel each year to Sierra Leone, transporting African-American settlers and goods to the colony and returning with marketable African products.”


Engraving of Paul Cuffee by Mason & Maas, from a drawing by John Pole, M.D. (Library of Congress)

Sierra Leone was already populated in part by former American slaves who had received their freedom by running away from their masters and joining the British as black Loyalists in the Revolutionary War. When the British lost to the Americans, many of these black Loyalists were settled in Nova Scotia. And when conditions there proved too harsh, they had petitioned to be relocated in Sierra Leone.

To distinguish his plan from British and American efforts essentially to use colonization as a way of removing the threat that free African Americans posed to the continuation of slavery, in 1811 Cuffee founded the Friendly Society of Sierra Leone, a cooperative black group intended to encourage “the Black Settlers of Sierra Leone, and the Natives of Africa generally, in the Cultivation of their Soil, by the Sale of their Produce.” He made two trips to the colony that year.

In 1812, after returning from Sierra Leone, Cuffee traveled to Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York to form an African-American version of the British “black poor” organization. Named the “African Institution,” it had self-contained branches in each city, and was charged with mounting a coordinated, black-directed emigration movement.

Cuffee’s close friend, the wealthy sailmaker and inventor James Forten, became the secretary of the Philadelphia African Institution, while Prince Saunders, a well-known teacher and secretary of the African Masonic Lodge in Boston, became the secretary of the Boston African Institution. Cuffee’s movement seemed to be gaining steam among some of the most powerful and wealthy leaders of the free black community throughout the North.

On Dec. 10, 1815, Cuffee made history by transporting 38 African Americans (including 20 children) ranging in age from 6 months to 60 years from the United States to Sierra Leone on his brig, the Traveller, at a cost of $5,000. When they arrived on Feb. 3, 1816, Cuffee’s passengers became the first African Americans who willingly returned to Africa through an African-American initiative.

Cuffee’s dream of a wholesale African-American return to the continent, however, soon lost support from the free African-American community, many of whom had initially expressed support for it. As James Forten sadly reported in a letter to Cuffee dated Jan. 25, 1817, a meeting of several thousand black men had occurred at Richard Allen’s Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, to discuss the merits of Cuffee’s colonization program and the work of the African Institution. The news was devastating: “Three thousand at least attended, and there was not one soul that was in favor of going to Africa. They think that the slaveholders want to get rid of them so as to make their property more secure.” And then in August, Forten co-authored a statement that declared that “The plan of colonizing is not asked for by us. We renounce and disclaim any connection with it.”

When Paul Cuffee died just a month later, on Sept. 7, 1817, “the dream of a black-led emigration movement,” Dorothy Sterling concludes, “ended with him.” However, the cause of black emigration would be taken up by a succession of black leaders, including Henry Highland Garnet, Bishop James T. Holly, Martin R. Delany, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and, of course, Marcus Mosiah Garvey.

Some of his descendants

 

[IllmaticDelta]

also