page_title: Melungeon
section_title: Acceptance
hierarchical_section_title: Melungeon / Origins / Acceptance
caption_attribution_description: English: Close-up of the Mahala Mullins Cabin front porch in the Vardy Blackwater community of Hancock County, Tennessee, USA. The tools and furniture on display were donated by the descendants of the Newmans Ridge area's early settlers. Mahala Mullins (1824–1898) was a legendary Melungeon moonshiner.
context_page_description: Melungeons are any of numerous "tri-racial isolate" groups of people of the Southeastern United States. Historically, Melungeons were associated with the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia, which includes portions of East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and eastern Kentucky. Tri-racial describes populations thought to be of mixed European, African and Native American ancestry. Although there is no consensus on how many such groups exist, estimates range as high as 200.
  According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, in his 1950 dissertation, cultural geographer Edward Price proposed that Melungeons were families descended from free people of color and mixed-race unions between persons of African ancestry and Native Americans in colonial Virginia, whose territory included the modern-day states of Kentucky and West Virginia.
context_section_description: The families known as "Melungeons" in the 19th century were generally well integrated into the communities in which they lived, though they may still have been affected by racism. Records show that on the whole, they enjoyed the same rights as whites. For example, they held property, voted, and served in the Army; some, such as the Gibsons, owned slaves as early as the 18th century.
  Under the first Tennessee constitution of 1796, free people of color (males only) were allowed to vote. Following fears raised by the 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion in Virginia, Tennessee and other southern states passed new restrictions on free people of color. By its new constitution of 1834, Tennessee disfranchised free people of color, reducing them to second-class status.
  In this period, several Melungeon men were tried in Hawkins County in 1846 for "illegal voting", under suspicion of being black or free men of color (and thereby ineligible for voting). They were acquitted, presumably by demonstrating to the court's satisfaction that they had no appreciable black ancestry. Standards were not as strict as under the later laws of the "one drop rule" of the 20th century. As in some other cases, this was chiefly determined by people testifying as to how the men were perceived by the community and whether they had "acted white" by voting, serving in the militia, or undertaking other common citizens' obligations available to white men.
  Law was involved not only in recognizing race, but in creating it; the state itself helped make people white. In allowing men of low social status to perform whiteness by voting, serving on juries, and mustering in the militia, the state welcomed every white man into symbolic equality with the Southern planter. Thus, law helped to constitute white men as citizens, and citizens as white men.
  — Ariela Gross
  After the American Civil War and following the Reconstruction Era, southern whites struggled to regain political power and re-assert white supremacy over freedmen and traditionally free families such as the Melungeons. The white Democrat-dominated state legislatures passed Jim Crow laws. But issues of race were often brought to court as a result of arguments about money.  
  For example, in 1872, a widowed woman's Melungeon ancestry was assessed in a trial in Hamilton County, Tennessee. The case was brought by relatives of her late husband, who challenged her inheritance of money from him after his death. They questioned the legitimacy of a marriage between a white man and a woman known to be Melungeon, and argued the marriage was not legitimate because the woman was of black ancestry. Based on the testimony of people in the community, the court decided the woman in the case was not of African ancestry, or not recently enough to matter.
  Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a North Carolina statute barred "Portuguese" people—presumably Melungeons, as North Carolina does not have a large Portuguese American community—from whites-only schools. However, under this statute they were also not considered Black, and were not required to attend Black schools.
  Modern anthropological and sociological studies of Melungeon descendants in Appalachia have demonstrated that they have become culturally indistinguishable from their "non-Melungeon," white neighbors: they share a Baptist religious affiliation and other community features.  With changing attitudes and a desire for more work opportunities, numerous descendants of the early Melungeon pioneer families have migrated from Appalachia to other parts of the United States.
caption: Porch of the restored Mahala Mullins Cabin, originally located in Vardy, Blackwater Creek
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