Indians, Southerners, and Americans: Race, Tribe, and Nation during “Jim Crow”

After the Civil War, Southerners of all races struggled to resolve questions of citizenship, opportunity, political autonomy, and freedom in a drastically changed economic environment. The story of Southern African Americans in this period is well known, while that of Native Americans centers on conflicts over the United States’ imperial expansion in the West. But Native Americans in the South contended with an imperial force as well: the mounting wave of white supremacy. By 1910 white supremacy dictated the separation of racial groups in public facilities—schools, churches, movie theaters, streetcars, and other places.

In Robeson County, North Carolina, home of the largest Indian community east of the Mississippi, that separation was threefold in the county seat of Lumberton. There were different facilities for whites, blacks, and Indians. In the county courthouse each group had its own water fountains and restrooms, while the Lumberton movie theater boasted a balcony divided by chicken wire for the Indian and black patrons. What were the contours and boundaries of racial segregation for Native American Southerners? How did their identities function and how did the concept of race become institutionalized out of identities based on different markers, of kinship and place? Furthermore, how did Indians negotiate identities as both Indians and American citizens? Why do Indians seek recognition, when other American citizens have devoted so much energy to dispossessing them?

I want to introduce the topic of Indian citizenship and federal recognition with a personal story. I am Lumbee, from Robeson County, North Carolina, and the people you see in this photograph are all Lumbees.

Fig. 1.

Veterans’ Club, Pembroke State College for Indians, 1946. First row, left to right: James H. Dial, Danford Dial, Archie Oxendine, J. P. Swett, Brantley Blue, Vincent Lowry. Second row, left to right: J. A. Jacobs, Grady Oxendine, Castor Locklear, Harry West Locklear, Lock B. Locklear, William Earl Oxendine, Josephus Jacobs, Simeon Cummings, Reese Bullard. Third row, left to right: Henry Ford Lowry, Peter Dial, Theodore Maynor, Andrew Ransom, Warford Maynor. Courtesy Lumbee River Fund Collection, Mary Livermore Library, University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My great-uncle Theodore Maynor is pictured here in 1946 as a veteran—he’s the bald head at the very top of the group, in the center. My father remembers Uncle Theodore as the most politically active of his father’s brothers, a “maverick who drank whiskey,” Woodmen of the World member, and Boy Scout booster. Uncle Theodore spent the 1930s teaching school, after having earned a teaching certificate in 1928. The navy drafted him early in World War II, and after the war he returned to college to earn a baccalaureate degree at Pembroke State College for Indians, which is now the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

While back at college after the war, Uncle Theodore joined the Veterans’ Club; he is nearly forty years old here, a senior member of this group of dapper gentlemen—they might have inspired the casting and costuming for Guys and Dolls; their expressions and outfits announce them as good-natured men, shy adventurers, and soft-hearted rogues. Their poses are reminiscent of 1940s American culture and prosperity. But their surnames also connect them to an older, ancient, perhaps sacred culture. Every one of them has a name that is instantly recognizable as part of the kinship community of Robeson County Indians. Uncle Theodore and the rest of these men gave their loyalty to two communities, American and Indian, but they wondered whether that loyalty was returned.

I use this photograph of the Veterans’ Club to illustrate why understanding identity formation is important to history. These men appear to articulate one identity—as assimilated Americans—but their names and their stories manifest an identity as Indians who belong to Robeson County. Our interpretation of their history changes when we understand the full complexity of their identities. Much of the historical literature on Indian ethnicity has implicitly defined an Indian as an individual who is racially different from American immigrant groups, who has a historical, continuous attachment...