"I Told Him I'd Never Been to His Back Door for Nothing": Lumbee Indian_x000D_ Access to Higher Education in the Jim Crow South (2011)

Undergraduates: Walker Elliott, none none none

Faculty Advisor: Theda Perdue
Department: History

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The Lumbee Indians are a Native American community centered in Robeson County, North Carolina. In the early twentieth century, Lumbees and other non-African American minority groups regularly gained access to theoretically all-white universities in in the Southeast. To explain this phenomenon, I argue that blackness, rather than whiteness, defined segregation policy in the region. Because of the ambiguity and mutability of their status under North Carolina’s Jim Crow laws, Lumbees illustrate the complicated, constantly shifting, and frequently illogical system of racially segregated education in the American South. Between 1885 and 1952, Lumbees gradually lost their status as members of a nonblack minority group and the associated educational advantages. I attribute this shift to developments in the interpretation of Indian segregation law prompted by the Civil Rights Movement, social scientific research on Lumbee ancestral origins, and changes in the demographics of higher education after the adoption of the G.I. Bill.