Calvin Beale Passes Away

Obituary by MHS President Wayne Winkler

Calvin Beale, who was one of first researchers to scientifically examine the phenomenon of Melungeons and other mixed ethnic populations, died on September 2 after a bout with colon cancer. He was 85 years old.

Calvin Lunsford Beale was born June 6, 1923, in Washington and was a graduate of the city's Wilson Teachers College. Fascinated by geography from childhood, he found a job in the map department of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, during World War II.

While working at the Census Bureau in the late 1940s, he did graduate work in the new field of demography at the University of Maryland and the University of Wisconsin. He received a master's degree from Wisconsin for his life's work in 1981.

The "Los Angeles Times" reports, "His most renowned discovery came in the late 1960s, when he noticed that people were beginning to trickle back to the countryside after 150 years of steady migration to cities. When he published evidence of what became known as the "population turnaround," academics scoffed. "No one believed him when he first started talking about it," said USDA colleague John Cromartie, "but later surveys bore him out."

For more than five decades, he continued to travel to distant outposts in all 50 states to take the measure of the people who live there. Of the nation's 3,141 counties, he visited almost 2,500. In each one, he took a picture of the county courthouse, interviewed local residents and recorded meticulous notes. Many of his photographs can be found on a USDA website.

To view them: Click Here.

Beale worked for the U. S. Census Bureau in the late 1940s in preparation for the 1950 census. Beale and at least one other colleague had noticed that many of the families identified in William Gilbert's work on remnant Indian tribes had been classified inconsistently from census to census. After the census was taken, Beale had access to every portfolio of census returns and, using the family names noted by Gilbert, began examining how these families were classified ethnically.

After the 1950 census, Beale went to work for the U. S. Department of Agriculture but continued to study Melungeons and mixed-ethnic populations on his own. In 1957 he published an article entitled "American Triracial Isolates: Their Status and Pertinence to Genetic Research." The magazine was "Eugenics Quarterly," and in 2003 Beale told me, "I wish that I didn't have to say it was in 'Eugenics Quarterly' - not because 'Eugenics Quarterly' was a bad journal. It was as very reputable journal...But 'eugenics' had become a bad word, particularly after World War Two, and it wasn't more than a couple more years before the journal took a different name."

I met Calvin Beale at a Melungeon gathering in 2003. My prepared talk was on the work of William Gilbert, Edward Price, and Calvin Beale, whom I considered the pioneers in research on multi-ethnic populations. A couple of hours before my presentation, someone told me Calvin Beale was in the audience. I went to meet him and his first words to me were, "I'll bet you thought I was dead by now." Needless to say, I was very pleased that I had written complimentary things about his work and we stayed in touch over the years.

To see Calvin Beale with Wayne Winkler in 2004: Click Here.

Beale coined the term "triracial isolates" as a synoptic of all the multi-ethnic groups. "And I limited myself only to those who had, either by self-identity or local ascription, three races - whether or not any individuals in [those groups] were necessarily of tri-racial descent." Beale believed that these groups "seem to have formed through miscegenation between Indians, whites, and Negroes - slave or free - in the Colonial and early Federal periods."

In 2004, Beale told a Melungeon gathering, "In July of 1969, I read a small item in a newspaper about the Melungeons opening an outdoor drama in Sneedville. It so happened that I had some business in Oak Ridge at this time. So the day after I finished that, I drove up to Sneedville, found the amphitheatre, and got a ticket. I also asked whether there was anyone in town who might be willing to show me around some. Claude Collins was mentioned. So I contacted him and he was gracious enough to take me for a drive up on Newman's Ridge, to the Vardy School, and up Snake hollow. I also asked about a place to stay overnight and was able to get one of the two motel rooms above the beauty parlor.

"That night, before the play, there was a lobby at the amphitheatre with craft items on sale. I wanted to take home some small souvenirs and gifts and stood contemplating some homemade soaps. I must have done so for more than just a moment. Presently, I heard a voice from somewhere in back and I think somewhat above me say, "Mr. Beale, are you planning on taking a bath?" It was Claude Collins.

"There was a big audience for the play. I remember having a rather so-so reaction to the first act that pictured the Melungeons' rather prosperous early period in the area, although they were regarded as people whose origin was unknown. But the second act, set much later and with its star-crossed love story between a Melungeon girl and the son of a prominent businessman who covets Melungeon land, was very skilfully done, and by the end there were hardly any dry eyes in the house, my own included.

"That trip was nearly the last research excursion that I took relating to the triracial populations, as my interests seemed to turn to other things. Life was rapidly changing for the groups, as it was for the country in general. The Civil Rights era had ended the separate school systems many groups had that had both limited and sustained their status. It was the time of television and much better roads, and a greatly diminished role for farm work. By '69, there were large numbers of people from every group who had dispersed to the cities to work. The Melungeons, in effect, had a big coming-out party and said, 'Yes, we're Melungeons. So what?'"

From the Los Angeles Times: What may be even more remarkable is that Beale never charged his trips to a government expense account. He paid for everything -- airline tickets, car rentals and hotels -- out of his own pocket. "The taxpayers got their money's worth from Calvin, and then some," said David L. Brown, a former colleague who now teaches at Cornell University. Beale, who never married, lived in Washington his entire life -- and had no desire to live anywhere else. He followed baseball closely and was his office's resident movie expert, but mostly he devoted his life to his work, studying maps, the ever-changing numbers on census reports and the lives those numbers represented. In the words of his nephew, Richard Beale, "He's the only person I've ever known who, on his deathbed, said he should have spent more time at the office.'"

To read the New York Times' obituary in its entirety: Click Here.