Cradled between Blackwater Creek and the Clinch River, on the northeastern edge of Tennessee where the trek to Virginia's Powell Mountain is just across the state-line, is the ancestral home of a mysterious American people, the Melungeons. The dark-skinned mountaineers were whispered to be gypsies, others believed them to be descendants of Indians or of ship-wrecked Portuguese sailors. Though the history and settlement of the Melungeons in the Appalachian region is still unclear, much of their racial make-up has been solved.
The name Melungeon may come from the Greek word melas, meaning dark or black, or early French settlers use of the word mélange to describe them, but the name soon became a racial slur. Melungeons were no strangers to prejudice or segregation, and their ill treatment is a plausible reason as to how they settled in and around isolated Hancock County, Tennessee, 200 or more years ago. The county was, for the most part, outside the grip of Jim Crow laws.
Kathy Lyday, a professor at Elon University in North Carolina, has researched Melungeons appearances in periodicals and literature for the past century. She spoke with Dale Neal from the Citizen-Times in Asheville about seeing Melungeons in newspapers as a child. "Melungeons are clearly not like the mountaineers I knew," Lyday told Neal. "They look different. They have darker skin, darker hair and blue eyes. In older photos, their physical appearance looks almost Mediterranean or Middle Eastern."
Researchers have re-defined Melungeon as tri-racial, theorizing that they are descendants of Europeans, Africans and Native Americans. In 2012, however, the Journal of Genetic Genealogy released a DNA study that reported families historically called Melungeons "are the off-spring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin." Today, Melungeons stretch across East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia and into areas of Eastern Kentucky.
At a time when mixed ethnic backgrounds are becoming a more comfortable topic of conversation, emerges a peculiar people that can declare they are not the racial identity of half or one third of an ethnicity. Melungeons can identify, rather, as wholly sub-Saharan African and European. The "invention" of the Melungeon race and the unravelling mystery of their origins is refreshing optimism in a muddy and infamous past of race relations in America.
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Kathy Lyday, a professor at Elon University in North Carolina, has researched Melungeons appearances in periodicals and literature for the past century. She spoke with Dale Neal from the Citizen-Times in Asheville about seeing Melungeons in newspapers as a child. "Melungeons are clearly not like the mountaineers I knew," Lyday told Neal. "They look different. They have darker skin, darker hair and blue eyes. In older photos, their physical appearance looks almost Mediterranean or Middle Eastern."
Researchers have re-defined Melungeon as tri-racial, theorizing that they are descendants of Europeans, Africans and Native Americans. In 2012, however, the Journal of Genetic Genealogy released a DNA study that reported families historically called Melungeons "are the off-spring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin." Today, Melungeons stretch across East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia and into areas of Eastern Kentucky.
At a time when mixed ethnic backgrounds are becoming a more comfortable topic of conversation, emerges a peculiar people that can declare they are not the racial identity of half or one third of an ethnicity. Melungeons can identify, rather, as wholly sub-Saharan African and European. The "invention" of the Melungeon race and the unravelling mystery of their origins is refreshing optimism in a muddy and infamous past of race relations in America.
from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/2bKwGum Mystery of a mountain people may be solved, at an interesting time for America - Entrepreneur Generations
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