Black Cherokee

by Sharlotte Neely

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As an anthropologist with an interest in Cherokee history, I have often been drawn to one of the treasure troves of the Cherokee past, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Southeast Region Facility, in metropolitan Atlanta. Doing archival research there has often been more like going on a treasure hunt since most of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ documents on the North Carolina Cherokee have never been indexed. Under the supervision of the helpful NARA personnel, one wanders down warehouse-size rows of boxes and randomly chooses two or three of the containers to explore. I have always found something unique and important among these documents, none more so than papers revealing a tantalizing glimpse into the lives of “Black Cherokee.”

There are more Native Americans in North Carolina than in the “Indian country” state of South Dakota. Most Americans do not realize this, in part because of the South’s unique notions of racial categories. Especially in the first decades of the twentieth century, southerners tended to view the world as black and white, literally, with nothing in-between. What happens to a third “race” in such a society? In 1920s North Carolina, there were several Native American groups who did not easily fit into the two recognized categories.

Typically, white southerners labeled those with even a small amount of black ancestry as “Negro.” The Cherokee of southwestern North Carolina were officially recognized by both federal and state governments as “Indians.” Those southeastern North Carolinians, who today are known as the Lumbee Indians, were not. In the 1920s, the Lumbee had no federal and only quasi-state recognition. In fact, whites argued that the Lumbee were a mixture of whites, Indians, African Americans, and “others” and not simply “Indians.” The Lumbee resisted being lumped with African Americans into a generally non-white category, with even fewer rights than they had as Indians. Such efforts by whites placed all Native Americans, even the Cherokee, in a precarious position. Indians might not have had the same freedoms as whites, but they clearly had more than African Americans.

It is clear that the Cherokee were aware that North Carolina groups, like the Lumbee, had struggled throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to secure a positive Indian identity for themselves. During the first half of the twentieth century, the Lumbee mostly called themselves the “Croatan,” after one of the historic tribes from whom they may be descended. For a brief time, however, in an effort to secure their Indian identity, the group called itself the eastern North Carolina “Cherokee,” much to the consternation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who did not want to associate themselves with the group.

The Cherokee were clearly aware of the existence of the Lumbee and their precarious racial classification. According to non-indexed source materials housed at the NARA, on January 20, 1921, Cherokee Indian Affairs Superintendent James E. Henderson wrote to D. W. Simms of the North Carolina Sunday School Association in Raleigh:

You are dubtless [sic] aware that there are a large number in Robinson [Robeson] and adjoining counties who call themselves Indians. There are in the neighborhood of 5000 of these people. There is also a small colony in Person County of the same blood as those in Robinson [italics mine].

On February 15, 1922, Henderson wrote to Bertha M. Eckert of the Dallas, Texas Y. W. C. A. about the Lumbee:

In the strictest sense of the word I would not class the Croatan [Lumbee] as Indians. They do not have a reservation. Unlike real Indians they acquire all the land possible and sell very little. They work well and have fairly good homes; as good as I might say as the whites of like station in life. They are neither whites nor Indians. The whites will not associate with them as equals. The state of North Carolina provides schools for them separate from the whites. At the last session of the N. C. Legislature $15,000 was appropriated for their normal and industrial school at Pembroke. It is thought that the Lost Colony [of Sir Walter Raleigh] of Roanoke went to these Indians as they have a great many characteristics that are purely English. Living at or on the rivers near the coast escaped pirates, many of whom were Portuguese, joined the colony and no doubt many runnaway [sic] negroes. You will see, therefore, that they are evidently an amalgamation of a number of races. These people will have nothing to do with the Southern negroes. They call themselves Cherokee but in reality have no Cherokee blood.

Perhaps such doubts contributed to “Black Cherokee” being squeezed off the official tribal rolls, despite the fact that they had the required legal blood quantum for membership in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

One such family was the Coleman’s, whose children, like many Cherokee, were boarding students at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia. Unlike Indian boarding schools, such as Carlisle in Pennsylvania, Chilocco in Oklahoma, or Haskell in Kansas, however, the historically-Black Hampton educated both black and Indian students, but in a segregated environment. Calvin and Nancy Coleman were one-quarter blood degree Cherokee, who had been enrolled as Cherokee by their father; they had lived for a time on reservation land and they had attended Birdtown Day School, which was run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. While their paternal grandfather was said to be a full-blood Cherokee, the rest of the Coleman siblings’ ancestry was probably African American.

Therefore, on September 6, 1917, at the beginning of the new school year, Caroline Andrus, of the Hampton Institute, wrote the following to Superintendent Henderson in Cherokee, North Carolina:

I am in receipt of an application for admission to Hampton from Calvin Coleman of Bryson City, who says that he is one quarter Cherokee. His sister, Nancy, has been a student here for some years, and is an exceptionally nice girl, but seems more Negro than Indian, and I have been very much puzzled over their status in the tribe. I should be very grateful if you would write me concerning them, as to whether or not they are enrolled at Cherokee, and if they are considered Indians by the other members of the tribe. In a case of this sort it is difficult to know what to do with a student, whether to have them room, eat, etc. with the Indians or Negroes. . . .

On September 13, Superintendent Henderson wrote back to Ms. Andrus:

The Colemans, although they claim to have Indian Blood, are not recognized as Indians by the Cherokee, and do not associate with the Indians. So far as I know, their associates are niggers. The grandmother of Calvin Coleman, on her father’s side, was a slave.

Still, Hampton’s officials were not satisfied about the status of the Coleman children. Apparently, Hampton had a precise legal concern, and on October 15, Hampton’s William H. Scoville wrote Superintendent Henderson and asked if the children were “enrolled at Cherokee as Indians, and have the rights of the members of the tribe.”

More than three months later, on January 31, 1918, Superintendent Henderson wrote to Mr. Scoville and attempted to address the legal issues:

The father of these children said they were once enrolled as Cherokee but their rights as Indians have been contested by the tribal Council and a decision in the matter is now pending in the office of the Secretary of the Interior . . . . The Indians at Cherokee recognize them as Negroes and so do the whites.

On February 5, Scoville wrote to say he was still concerned about the legal status of Calvin and Nancy Coleman.

More than two years later, Hampton’s Caroline Andrus was still confused about which students from Cherokee were Indian and which were not. On April 12, 1920, she again wrote Superintendent Henderson and asked about the status of two boys and Nancy Coleman:

I think the latter [Nancy Coleman] is not on the Cherokee rolls, but as she claims to be a Cherokee I thought it would be best to send the same papers for her, and if she is not on the roll would ask you to so indicate.

Apparently, a definitive ruling had not yet been made in the Coleman case, although the Tribal Council was still concerned. On April 20, Henderson wrote to Andrus that “Nancy Coleman’s right as an Eastern Cherokee has been contested by the Tribal Council.” Presumably, however, neither she nor her brother had been officially removed from tribal rolls.

More than a decade late, the Eastern Band was still struggling over the legal status of the Coleman family. In 1923, the United States Congress “decided that membership in the Band should include not only those on the reservation but others with a verifiable trace of Cherokee ancestry who lived anywhere within the historical domain of the tribe” (Finger 48). On February 3, 1931, however, then Superintendent L. W. Page wrote from his office in Cherokee to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, D. C.:

Information is also desired as to what action, if any, should be taken by this office in connection with cases such as the Coleman family. This family is, at this time, living on land belonging to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians within the Qualla boundary. I am sure that the Coleman family at least will endeavor, through the courts, to prove their right to continue to occupy this land, and it is for this reason that I am asking for information as to what action, if any, should be taken by me.

While no other records on the Coleman’s were discovered, on March 24 of that same year, Superintendent Page found himself dealing with similar issues of race when he again wrote the Commissioner’s office in Washington:

I have the honor to refer to a situation which I am quite sure will come up at this agency in the not distant future, relative to hospitalization of the wives of members of this band who had married into the colored race…. I have been advised that at least one colored woman who has married an Indian is about to become a mother and expects to ask that she be taken care of in our hospital…. The Office of course, is aware of the feeling of the people in this section of the country [the South] toward the colored race and it will be a very delicate matter to handle in the event a request is made that a colored woman be admitted for confinement.

Such documentation makes it clear that Cherokee efforts to remove Black Cherokee from tribal rolls were precipitated by concerns that hard-won Cherokee rights be preserved. Spurred on by the overall racist conditions of the early twentieth-century south, Cherokee were willing to act in the same racist ways toward blacks and Indians perceived to have black ancestry as were whites toward all non-whites.

For these reasons, even as recently as the 1970s, North Carolina Cherokee were reluctant to join the Lumbee, Coharie, Haliwa-Saponi, Waccamaw-Siouan, and other North Carolina Native Americans in the state’s then-new North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs. While it is possible to understand the Cherokee’ concerns, one must reflect on the harm the Cherokee’ position caused groups like the Lumbee and those Black Cherokee who attempted, nevertheless, to maintain their Cherokee culture and identity in the face of such rejection.

I wonder about Nancy and Calvin Coleman. How did they cope with the ambiguity of their racial classification and diminishment of their freedom? Did they grow up, marry, and have children? Did their descendants identify as Cherokee? Maybe the answers lie somewhere in one of those boxes in the treasure trove of the NARA in metropolitan Atlanta.

Postscript

Years ago, in an effort to track down any Coleman family descendants, I left a message posted on a genealogy web site. On January 15, 2006, I received an email from Ms. Beverly Ansari of Salina, Kansas, who is the great-great niece of Nancy and Calvin Coleman. From our e-mails and telephone conversations, I have learned more about the Coleman’s and have even discovered a local link to their story. Ms. Ansari tells me the Coleman family took to the courts their fight to remain on Cherokee Tribal Rolls. Ultimately this effort failed, despite the fact that Nancy and Calvin’s father, Harrison Coleman, was at least one-half blood degree Cherokee. On a final note, Calvin Coleman worked as an engineer for the Kroger Company and lived in Cincinnati until his death in 1960.

Note

All archival materials quoted throughout the article are housed at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Southeast Region Facility in East Point, Georgia. They have not been indexed.

Bibliography

Finger, John R. 1991. Cherokee Americans: The Eastern Band of Cherokees in the Twentieth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

National Archives and Records Administration Center, Southeast Facility, East Point, Georgia. Non-indexed.

 

Sharlotte Neely is a faculty member of the Sociology,
Anthropology and Philosophy Department at Northern Kentucky University.