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.’”

This reference to Melungeons in the Times prompted one member of the Melungeon Historical Society to suggest this may have been the first time the Melungeons were ever mentioned in "America’s newspaper of record.” In fact, the New York Times published an article on the Melungeons in 1971. Unfortunately, the article, entitled “Mysterious Hill Folk Vanishing,” not only perpetuated negative stereotypes about the Melungeons (and Appalachian people in general), it completely ignored several pertinent facts that might have benefited the Melungeons and Hancock County, Tennessee.

An economic study in the mid-1960s determined that tourism was a possible means for stimulating the economy of the county. Out-migration to Midwestern auto plants and to places like California and Maryland had reduced the population of the county, which had more residents in 1860 than it did in 1960. Economic opportunities were few in Hancock County, but the study recognized an asset in the beautiful scenery of the area, an attribute which might inspire tourism. To further attract tourists, the Hancock County Drama Association formed to produce an outdoor drama about the Melungeons.

Despite a couple of articles in national magazines which appeared in 1891 and in 1947, the Melungeons were unknown to the vast majority of Americans. Hancock County residents, Melungeon and non-Melungeon alike, resented these articles for their disparaging portrayals of the county and its people. And in those years of legal and social discrimination against people of color, no one in the county wanted to talk about the mixed-ethnic Melungeons.

That reticence began a surprisingly rapid reversal in the mid-1960s, beginning with the 1965 publication of Jesse Stuart’s Daughter of the Legend. Stuart’s novel presented a positive and sympathetic portrayal of the Melungeons and further romanticized the legends of their mysterious origins.

Local reluctance to even acknowledge the existence of the Melungeons was countered by the possibility of attracting tourists who would spend money to hear more about the Melungeons. The Hancock County Drama Association persuaded noted outdoor dramatist Kermit Hunter (Unto These Hills, The Trail of Tears, and many others) to write a drama based on the Melungeon story. The result, Walk Toward the Sunset, opened in July of 1969.

The play was directed by Dr. John Lee Welton of Carson-Newman College, and C-N drama students portrayed the main characters. The play was staged in an amphitheater built by volunteer labor behind the old elementary school at the foot of Newman’s Ridge in Sneedville, and local volunteers served as extras in the play and handled the business end of the production.

The first season attracted more than 10,000 visitors, including Calvin Beale, who wrote approvingly of the play and noted that Walk Toward the Sunset “has been well received by most of the Melungeon element of the population…The act of sponsoring the play and thus confronting publicly the mystery of their origin and their inferior status in the past seems to have been liberating in itself.”

The play generated dozens of articles in regional newspapers, and members of the Drama Association, including Corinne Bowlin, Dora Bowlin, and particularly Claude Collins became the primary contacts for reporters looking for information and quotes. Collins, a public school administrator, proudly proclaimed his Melungeon heritage and was frequently quoted. Being the “Melungeon spokesman” wasn’t always easy. Not everyone in the county was enthusiastic about the attention given to what had quite recently been a taboo subject in the county. When Collins took tour buses across Newman’s Ridge to view the old Presbyterian mission church and school, some residents felt that they were being viewed as exotic tourist attractions and eventually forced Collins to discontinue the tours. Still, Collins and others continued to make themselves available to reporters and thus open to criticism from some of their neighbors. “It wasn’t easy for Corinne or myself,” he recalled. “But we had to do these things to keep the play going and to keep people coming in. It was not easy.”

Dealing with reporters was often difficult when the reporter had little or no background information on the Melungeons, or worse, relied on some of the more outrageous and negative stereotypes of Melungeons and Appalachians. Reporters often came to Appalachia with preconceived notions and their stories mostly written before they arrived; they simply sought out individuals or groups who fit the story the reporters had concocted before arriving on the scene. One reporter found the college-educated and eloquent Claude Collins unsuitable for the story he sought. “They wanted to take my picture and interview me and so forth,” Collins recalled. “I said, ‘Fine, when do you want to interview me?’ So we decided on a time and I said ‘Well, now, you’ll have to meet me at my house and let me dress up in my best suit and sit on my front porch. Because I don’t want to be depicted in a little mountain cabin where I never lived. I never experienced that.’ So they didn’t interview me.”

Jon Nordheimer’s article, “Mysterious Hill Folk Vanishing,” was published in the Sunday edition of the New York Times on 10 August 1971. The article recounted many of the old theories and legends of the Melungeons’ origins and noted that “[f]or many years before the Civil War, Melungeons held an uncertain social status in Hancock County, somewhere between the whites and the 3,000 black slaves.” (Of course, there were never 3,000 slaves in Hancock County during that period; in fact, the entire population of the county was less than 3,000.) Nordheimer wrote that in the post-War years, intermarriage between Melungeons and whites became more acceptable, but while he opined that these intermarriages usually involved a white man “taking a hill girl for his bride,” he cited (without attribution) “reports of Melungeon males abducting white girls from distant farms to take into the hills with them.” Nordheimer combined racial/sexual tension with the image of Ernest T. Bass swooping out of the mountains into Mayberry to make off with an unwilling bride.

Nordheimer did interview some real people. Taylor Collins and his wife were preparing to move to Indiana, and Monroe Collins told Nordheimer, “All the Ridge people have gone up from here and left, or else they’re sleeping in their graves, and the ones that leave don’t ever find their way back home no more.” These quotes fit the point of Nordheimer’s story – that the Melungeons were disappearing, moving away to be assimilated into industrial Northern cities and towns. No one could dispute the truth of that view.

However, the Times article completely ignored a very important aspect of the Melungeon story – the fact that local Melungeons were celebrating their heritage and making a concerted effort as a community to stimulate the county’s economy and provide more opportunities for its young people. Claude Collins is not quoted; in fact, there is no indication anywhere in the article that some Melungeons were college-educated, reasonably prosperous, and held prominent positions within the county. There was no photograph of Claude Collins in front of his attractive ranch house, or of bank president Martha Collins in her office. Instead the article featured a photograph of a man and a child in the shadows of the front of a weathered mountain home. The photograph is similar to the hundreds of images portraying Appalachian poverty in those years of the War on Poverty, VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America), and other programs meant to alleviate that poverty. These images are not false; rates of poverty were and still are above the national average. They simply emphasize the negative aspects of Appalachia and ignore the positive.

Nordheimer’s article also completely ignored a very important and relevant aspect of the his story – the fact that night before the article appeared, an audience of people from all over the southeastern United States and even farther away had filled an amphitheater to watch a two-act drama about the Melungeons, as audiences had done on summer weekends for the past two years. It is inconceivable that Nordheimer was unaware of the outdoor drama. No one could have been in Hancock County that summer, or any of the previous three summers, without hearing about the “Melungeon drama,” which was the talk of the county a year before the play opened.

In fairness to Nordheimer, he may well have written about the play, and about some of the Melungeons who were not moving away but were staying to improve their community. But reporters are subject to the dictates of editors and page space, and it is possible that any such material was cut in the interest of space or because it didn’t fit the central theme of the story. That theme, of course was that the Melungeons were disappearing. The very existence of the outdoor drama at the very least provided a contrast to this theme; at most it contradicted the whole concept. One could say that instead of disappearing, Melungeons were coming out in droves. The common joke in Hancock County, seemingly repeated by everyone, was “It used to be no one even said the word ‘Melungeon,’ now everyone wants to be one.” At the same time Melungeons like Taylor Collins were moving away from their homes and heritage, others in the community staying and were proudly celebrating that heritage.

Whether the one-sided portrayal in the New York Times was caused by poor reporting or poor editing, the omission of any mention of the outdoor drama was very unfortunate. The Hancock County Drama Association struggled to keep the production going despite constant shortages of money. At that time, there were no four lane roads in the county. The only lodging available was at the Town Motel, two rooms above the beauty shop on Main Street. Sneedville had a couple of diners that saw a boost in profits, but the nearest lodging was in Rogersville or Morristown. Coming to Sneedville from either place involved a harrowing drive over narrow roads across Clinch Mountain. For a time, tour buses brought audiences into Sneedville for the drama, but attendance had been dropping since the opening season.

Had the play been discussed in the Sunday New York Times, attendance during the final few weeks of the play’s 1971 season would almost certainly have been impressive. The mere mention that there was a play might have made the season profitable. But it was an opportunity missed, and Walk Toward the Sunset needed all the help it could get. The 1971 season was unprofitable and the play was not staged at all in 1972. The Drama Association revived the play for the 1973 season, but as the summer of 1974 approached, America was experiencing its first shortage of gasoline since World War Two. Sneedville, with its infrequently open two-room hotel, was not a place anyone wanted to be stranded without gas that summer. The drama was suspended for 1974, revived again in 1975, and staged for one final season in 1976.

Anthony Cavender, writing later in the Tennessee Anthropologist, cited “bickering between members of the elite” as one cause for the play’s demise. Claude Collins emphasized that, although the Carson-Newman students and staff were paid a stipend for their work, the locals were all volunteers. “That’s really why we had to quit,” he recalled. “Our people decided they wanted to be paid or they wouldn’t be in it.” Unfortunately, attendance had dropped to the point that it was becoming difficult to pay anyone.

A plug for Walk Toward the Sunset in the Sunday edition of the New York Times might have provided a badly-needed shot in the arm for the Drama Association. But it was certainly not the duty of Nordheimer or the Times to serve as publicity agents for the drama, and events probably would have doomed the play eventually even with a Times mention. However, the outdoor drama, and its effect on the attitudes of local people, Melungeon and non-Melungeon alike, was an important part of the story the Times sent Nordheimer to cover, yet it was completely ignored. America’s newspaper of record simply missed the story this time.


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