PERSONALITY IN A WHITE-INDIAN-NEGRO COMMUNITY.

Scattered throughout the South, there are over a hundred groups of people who are classified by the U.S. Census Bureau as Indians. Some of these groups, like the Catawba and the Eastern Cherokee of North Carolina, the Seminoles of Florida, and the Choctaws of Mississippi, are of relatively pure Indian stock and are recognized as such by the government, but the majority are Indians by courtesy. They represent varying mixtures of white, African Americans, and Indian blood, but as a rule the white strain predominates, and Indian culture is either very weak or extinct. This article is based upon field work among the largest and most significant of these groups, the so-called Croatan Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina. These mixed, despised, and nameless people were classed as colored by the white people, but they cherished an intense desire to escape this stigma and be recognized as white. When the state constitution was revised in 1835, they were deprived of the suffrage, along with the free African Americans, and they were told that they could not attend the public schools for whites. Resentful, some of them built little one-room schools of their own, or kept their children out of school, rather than send them to school with African Americans.