People and Place: Croatan Indians in Jim Crow Georgia, 1890–1920

In 1890 a group of Croatan Indians, now called Lumbees, migrated from their home in Robeson County, North Carolina, to Bulloch County, Georgia. These families left voluntarily, walking the railroad lines, following the turpentine industry from North Carolina to southeast Georgia, where this community of approximately one hundred established a new home and built a school and church to solidify their place. In this period Georgia, and the South as a whole, legally encoded racial segregation and threatened to force Bulloch County Croatans into a black or white identity. But rather than assimilate into the larger black or white communities of Bulloch County, Croatans maintained an identity as Indians and eventually returned home to Robeson County in 1920. The story of their sojourn in Georgia raises questions about how Croatans perpetuated a sense of themselves as a distinct “Indian” people. That distinctiveness depended on markers we ordinarily do not associate with Indian communities. How did they maintain a distinctive identity, away from their homeland, in a region that countenanced only two racial categories, “white” and “colored”? Rather than claiming that an unbroken connection to a place sustained their Indian identity, Croatans used the segregation of the Jim Crow South to build social institutions—a school and a church—to distinguish themselves from non-Indians and reinforce their community ties. SOUTHERN INDIAN IDENTITY AFTER REMOVAL After Indian Removal relocated the large southern tribes west of the Mississippi, remaining Indian populations received little attention from white southerners. Most simply believed that Indians were gone or that traces of Indian blood existed in the free “mulatto” communities sprinkled throughout the South. But the remaining Indians suffered a different kind of removal, one that sought to obliterate their identity and curtail their legal rights