Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Africans and Indians: Only in America

"If you believe people have no history worth mentioning
it is easy to believe they have no humanity worth defending"

There in the misty dawn of the Americas two peoples of color began to meet in slave huts, on tobacco and cotton plantations, and as workers in dank mines. For two centuries Indians and Africans remained enslaved together, and Native Americans were not exempted from the system until after the Revolution. Scholar C. Vann Woodward has concluded "If the black-red inter-breeding was anywhere as extensive as suggested by the testimony of ex-slaves, then the monoracial concept of slavery in America requires revision."

To read this article by historian William Loren Katz: Click Here.

The phenomenon of Indian and black intermixing in early America is undoubtedly important to Melungeon studies. Note that the transcriber of this article made a glaring typo in the first paragraph where "geological detectives" should have read "genealogical detectives" instead.

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