Movement and Migration Series Lecture: Their Own Kind of Removal: Lumbee Indians in the Antebellum South

Barnard Observatory, Tupelo Room

For the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina, their long struggle has entailed working through the South’s racial binary and resisting the erasure that seemed an inevitable outcome of Indian Removal. The Lumbees persisted in an increasingly hostile environment by adapting some aspects of white culture, including apprenticeship and marriage, and by building literacy and practicing Christianity. Others participated in black market activities and met social challenges through legal channels. Their efforts provided a sense of social unity that defined their sense of belonging and defined them as a distinct community in a biracial region. Malinda Maynor Lowery is a professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill and director of the Center for the Study of the American South. She is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She is the author of The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle.