Melungeons in the New York Times

By MHS President Wayne Winkler

Calvin Beale died on September 2, 2008, at the age of 85. A demographer with the U. S. Department of Agriculture, Beale was best known for his discovery that decades of rural-to-urban migration patterns were being reversed in the 1960s. However, for many of us, his most significant work was with the Melungeons and other mixed-race groups. As his obituary in the New York Times said, “He wrote, for example, of a mixed-race people called Melungeons, reputedly of white, black and Indian descent. They are found from the Tidewater areas to the Piedmont and the Allegheny-Cumberland Plateaus. ‘Some are landless, some landed,’ he wrote. ‘But they are all marginal men — wary until recently of being black, aspiring where possible to be white and subject to rejection and scorn on either hand.’”

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