Richmond, a famous Southern United States city. It is remembered as the former capital of the Confederacy, which is true, but many people like to conflate Old Richmond with places like Natchez or Mobile. People’s idea of Richmond varies depending on what they know about the city, everything from a Southern Gothic ideal, the Capital of Southern Identity, to the Capital of White Supremacy and the Confederacy; most people have a flat view of the River City.

After living here for about a year and volunteering as a tour guide at a local museum, I felt it was time to talk about my new home. Not a flat categorization, but the complicated fabric that makes Richmond what it is today.

Native Richmond: Powhatan

For 12,000 years, Native Americans in Virginia lived and governed the lands we would come to know as Richmond. In the late 1500s, Wahunsenacawh, Chief Powhatan, led the Powhatans and inherited control over the Powhatan, the Youghtanunds, the Mattaponis, and the Pamunkey tribes. As a successful leader, he expanded his power from 28 tribes to 32, establishing the Powhatan Chiefdom. This chiefdom covered land from the south of the James River to the Potomac River, and parts of the eastern shore called Tsenacommacah, covering an area of 100 miles by 100 miles. Before the English arrived, some sources estimate that at least 25,000 people lived in the tribe.

The Powhatan seat of power was Werowocomoco, located along the York River’s Purtan Bay in modern-day Gloucester County, Virginia. Archaeological evidence indicates human occupation dating to around 6,000-8,000 years ago. This place has long been associated with Native power in the region, as its name, translated from Algonquian, means “Place of Leadership.” Chief Powhatan was a leader among chiefs; each tribe had a chief, but Chief Powhatan ruled them and required them to pay tribute.

First European Contact.

In 1570, the Spanish sought to expand their territories in the Americas to include the modern-day Chesapeake Bay. Part of the reason they wished to expand was to bring Catholicism to the Native Americans in the region. Juan Baptista de Segura was a Spanish-born priest andvice-provincial of the Jesuits in the Spanish province of La Florida. He, along with Pacquiquineo, a converted Native American, and several Jesuit priests, established Ajacan Mission. Its exact location remains unclear, as archaeologists have yet to recover it. Pacquiquineo had been guiding the Jesuit priests, but sometime in late 1570 or early 1571, he rejoined his people and helped attack the mission. Everyone was killed save for the 13-year-old altar boy, who was eventually recaptured by Spanish Forces, who decided to abandon the hope of establishing the region for the Spanish.

The British are Coming!

In 1606, the Virginia Company of London was granted its first charter, formal permission from King James I, to colonize North America. This was a private company settlement with goals for colonizing the “New World”: to find riches like gold and silver, establish new territory for England, create trade routes to reduce England’s dependence on foreign resources, and bring Christianity to the Natives. 105 men and boys sailed for Virginia in 1606 and landed in Powhatan-occupied territory. This did not stop the English from claiming the land for their own use and beginning a settlement of Jamestown.

However, this did not mean that the English settlers were doing well. Relations with the Powhatan were tenuous, and the settlers were not prepared for the vastly different environment. Most settlers were upper-class merchants and lacked the skills to produce their own food or build the settlement. They were constantly on the edge of starvation and ruin.

In the winter of 1607, Captain Smith was captured by the Powhatan and taken to Werowocomoco to be brought before Chief Powhatan. By the spring of 1608, Captain Smith and Chief Powhatan had established a peaceful relationship, and trade began between the Chiefdom and Jamestown. Captain John Smith, acting as a de facto leader, instituted a “no work, no food” policy, forcing everyone in the settlement to pull their weight because these upper-class men were unwilling to work for their survival.

In 1609, King James I granted a second charter to the Virginia Company, finally giving Jamestown governance under a strong Governorship, though the office wouldn’t be filled until Sir Thomas Gates and Lord De La Warr arrived the following year. Unfortunately for the Powhatan, this allowed the English presence to grow stronger in America and raised tensions among colonists and Natives. Later that year, Chief Powhatan left Werowocomoco and moved his people to Orapax, near present-day Richmond. He did this to stop further English encroachment into his domain.

In May of 1611, the Virginia Company instructed Sir Thomas Dale to establish a secure and healthy area for a new town and principal seat for the settlement. Dale moved up the James River to what is now modern-day Chester, VA, now a suburb of the greater Richmond area.

This would be the first English settlement in the Richmond area. The town and fort were called Henricus, named for Henry Frederick, the Prince of Wales. This further incursion into Powhatan territory was unwelcome, and in 1622, Opechancanough led a coordinated attack that devastated the colony’s outlying settlements, killing hundreds and sparing Jamestown only because of a last-minute warning

After the Indian Massacre of 1622, a tiny village would emerge from a nearby tobacco plantation owned by John Rolfe, who was married to Pocahontas. Varina is now located in modern-day Henrico County, VA, north of the James River, and is part of the Greater Richmond area.

In 1624, King James I revoked the Virginia Company’s charter and declared Virginia a royal colony. This distinction shaped Virginia’s development. Before then, it was a privately owned and operated business settlement subject to English Law. But settlements in the New World were not technically under direct English government and thus fell into a legal gray zone. Once Virginia was declared a Royal Colony, it received military protection and a political and governmental structure, and the colonists became English subjects.

In 1634, the crown divided up the colony into eight shires: James City, Henrico, Charles City, Elizabeth City, Warwick River, Warrosquyoake (later called Isle of Wight), Charles River, and Accawmack.

As the English expanded, the Powhatan tribe continued to try to push them back. A major offensive on April 18, 1644, was launched against the English settlements, resulting in the deaths of several hundred colonists. The James River Fall Line was settled in 1644 with the creation of Fort Charles, along with several other forts in the region, in response to Native attacks. The conflict ended with the Treaty of 1646, which forced the Powhatan Confederacy to recognize English sovereignty and pay tribute to the King.

William Byrd I inherited land in Virginia from a family member around the Falls of the James. Byrd intended to create an international trading center in the region. Byrd wanted to add water mills and a trading house, and he partnered with his neighbor Nathaniel Bacon.

Bacon and Byrd’s relationship worked well until tensions rose between colonists seeking to expand their land and Natives resisting that expansion. The English crown had a series of governmental shake-ups and wars with European forces. They did not want to create another conflict with the Powhatan.

Things came to a head in 1675, when Doeg Indians took pigs from an English Virginian farm. The man and the Natives were in the midst of a trade dispute. The Virginian asked the local militia for help to deal with the Native and get his property back. The militia mistakenly killed 14 Susquehannock Indians, a tribe located in Maryland that had been on good terms with the Virginia government up until then. However, upon hearing about the death of their people, the Susquehannock immediately retaliated, killing several Virginians.

Colonists who wanted war to expand English control of the land took this as an opportunity to push for war. Virginia Governor William Berkeley did not want to fight another colonial conflict and tried to pursue diplomacy, sticking with the Treaty of 1646, in which the tribal entities were subjects to the Crown.

In Nathaniel Bacon, those who wished to pursue a war with the Natives had found a champion. Bacon was well connected and even served Berkeley on the governor’s council. However, Berkeley’s intention to stick with the Treaty brought the men to an impasse. Bacon began recruiting supporters among the colony’s lower classes, who were unhappy about falling tobacco prices and local taxation. These men wanted lower taxes, elections held for the House of Burgesses, an extension of voting to all free men (not just landed gentry), and the ability to wage war with all of the Native peoples in the area. Bacon also promised enslaved and indentured individuals freedom if they joined his cause.

While Bacon was in charge, these ragtag colonists gave the English a good fight. Both sides had victories and defeats. However, once Bacon passed away from likely dysentery, Bacon’s men began to falter without a leader. This left the colony more unstable and worsened English relations with local Native groups.

Byrd stayed loyal to Governor Berkeley, which helped him gain more political opportunities. In 1679, the General Assembly met to expand Byrd’s holdings and help him stabilize the region.

Byrd I died in 1704, leaving the land to his son, William Byrd II. He expanded the land and established the town of Richmond on the north side of the James River in 1733, and the General Assembly formally recognized the town in 1742.

End of Part 1

From the settlement of Jamestown to the founding of Richmond as a town would take about 126 years. In that time, there was a mission built and destroyed, starvation, wars between the Powhatan and Virginians, governments created, and open rebellion. And that is all before Richmond was founded, became a state capital, and eventually the capital of rebellion. Join me next time as we discuss Richmond’s early days, starting with the history of Shockoe Bottom.

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Sources:

450th Commemoration of Ajacán – the Spanish Mission of 1570 | Blog | Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, VA. https://www.jyfmuseums.org/Home/Components/News/News/55/148. Accessed 18 Aug. 2026.

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Bacon’s Rebellion | Historic Jamestowne. https://historicjamestowne.org/history/bacons-rebellion/. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

Bacon’s Rebellion » Henrico County, Virginia. https://henrico.gov/history/colonial-era/bacons-rebellion/. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

Colonial Era » Henrico County, Virginia. https://henrico.gov/history/colonial-era/. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

Frontier Forts in Virginia. https://www.virginiaplaces.org/military/frontierforts.html. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

Gallivan, Martin D. The Powhatan Landscape: An Archaeological History of the Algonquian Chesapeake. University Press of Florida, 2018. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.5744/9780813062860.

Gottlieb, Matthew S. “Richmond during the Colonial Period.” Encyclopedia Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/richmond-during-the-colonial-period/. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

Henricus History | Chesterfield County, VA. https://www.chesterfield.gov/5969/Henricus-History. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

“Historic Richmond, Virginia | History | Research Starters | EBSCO Research.” EBSCO, https://www.ebsco.com/. Accessed 18 Aug. 2026.

History of Jamestown | Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, VA. https://www.jyfmuseums.org/visit/jamestown-settlement/history-of-jamestown. Accessed 18 Aug. 2026.

Huber, Margaret Williamson. “Powhatan (d. 1618).” Encyclopedia Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/powhatan-d-1618/. Accessed 18 Aug. 2026.

Hughes, Amanda. “Royal, Self-Governing, and Proprietary Colonies: Advancing From British Rule Toward American Independence.” Constituting America, 7 June 2022, https://constitutingamerica.org/90day-aer-royal-self-governing-and-proprietary-colonies-advancing-from-british-rule-toward-american-independence-guest-essayist-tom-hand/.

Long, Thomas L. “William Byrd (1674–1744).” Encyclopedia Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/byrd-william-1674-1744/. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

Nation, The Powhatan. “The Powhatan Nation.” The Powhatan Nation, https://powhatannation.us/history. Accessed 18 Aug. 2026.

Quitt, Martin H. “William Byrd (ca. 1652–1704).” Encyclopedia Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/byrd-william-ca-1652-1704/. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

“Richmond, Virginia’s History Timeline -.” The Valentine Museum, https://thevalentine.org/explore/richmond-stories/interactive-timeline/. Accessed 18 Aug. 2026.

Rountree, Helen C. Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries. University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Stepping Back in Time at Henricus Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service). https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/stepping-back-in-time-at-henricus-historical-park.htm. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

The 1619 Landing — Virginia’s First Africans Report & FAQs | Hampton, VA - Official Website. https://www.hampton.gov/3580/The-1619-Landing-Report-FAQs. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

The Third Anglo-Powhatan War (1644-46). https://www.virginiaplaces.org/nativeamerican/thirdanglopowhatan.html. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

Tuckahoe, Historic. “Indigenous Peoples’ of Tuckahoe and the Richmond Area.” Historic Tuckahoe, 12 Oct. 2020, https://www.visithistorictuckahoe.com/indigenous-peoples-of-tuckahoe-and-the-richmond-area/.

Uncovering Powhatan’s Empire | National Endowment for the Humanities. https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2007/januaryfebruary/feature/uncovering-powhatan%E2%80%99s-empire. Accessed 18 Aug. 2026.

“Virginia Counties 1634–1640.” Encyclopedia Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/5737hpr-91fe5eb6aa7ae93/. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

Werowocomoco Archeological Site – DHR. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/036-5049/. Accessed 18 Aug. 2026.

Wolfe, Brendan. “Juan Baptista de Segura (1529–1571).” Encyclopedia Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/segura-juan-baptista-de-1529-1571/. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

Yorktown, Mailing Address: P. O. Box 210, and VA 23690 Contact Us. Werowocomoco - Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail (U.S. National Park Service). https://www.nps.gov/cajo/planyourvisit/werowocomoco.htm. Accessed 18 Aug. 2026.

Yorktown, Mailing Address: P. O. Box 210, and VA 23690 Phone: 757 898-2410 Contact Us. The Virginia Company of London - Historic Jamestowne Part of Colonial National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service). https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/the-virginia-company-of-london.htm. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

Wyatt Outlaw was born in Alamance County, North Carolina, in 1820. There is some question about whether Jemimah Phillips, his mother, was enslaved or not; there are some arguments that she was freed by Outlaw’s father or by someone else, or she might even have been born free. Accounts are unclear. What we do know is that Outlaw’s white father was likely Chesley Faucett, a merchant. There are several conflicting accounts of whether Outlaw was free or born enslaved before the war, but all sides agree that Outlaw became a skilled carpenter. When the South rose up against the United States, according to some accounts, Outlaw was forced into a labor camp near Petersburg, VA, making earthen works for the Confederate defense. However, Outlaw escaped the camp. When the Union finally began organizing Colored troops, Outlaw sought to enlist in the 2nd Regiment United States Colored Cavalry. The unit was involved in the Battle of Drewry’s Bluff, the Battle of Baylor’s Farm, the Second Battle of Deep Bottom, the Battle of Chaffin’s Farm, and the Siege of Richmond. It is important to note that Colored troops were treated poorly and often not considered for awards during the conflict. In spite of this, Outlaw proved himself loyal and brave.

Outlaw returned to a very different North Carolina. On May 29, 1865, President Andrew Johnson appointed William Woods Holden to be the Governor of North Carolina and to oversee its readmission to the Union. Little did Outlaw know what an outsized role Governor Holden would play in his life. Outlaw took the Union cause to heart and became very politically active in Alamance County. He would become a leader during the 1866 Freedman’s Convention. He was also known for crossing the color line to organize and rally both White and Black Republican voters to serve their community. Outlaw was appointed as Graham’s town commissioner in 1868 by Governor Holden and would later be elected to that position by the people of Graham.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, many of the landed gentry of the South did not appreciate the racial upheaval caused by the freeing and enfranchisement given to the formerly enslaved. “The Southern Way of Life,” as they saw it, was being threatened. These men, most of whom were either Confederate supporters, if not former Confederate soldiers, banded together to use force and intimidation to try to reverse the progress made by the end of the war. An organization was emerging all over the South thanks to the words and actions of men like Nathan Bedford Forrest; the Ku Klux Klan was a homegrown terrorist group that was determined to keep the societal order in place. They would use violence against those helping the newly emancipated, those who voted Republican, or those who sought to establish the newly recognized Black citizen. The organized war may have ended, but it was clear that hearts and minds had not been changed; they were now operating outside of governments.

In reaction to growing Klan violence in the region, in 1869, Wyatt Outlaw was selected by the mayor of Graham to be part of a group of Black and White men to be armed defenders, constables, in the region. Tensions were rising, and everyone feared that a war might break out from the intersectional violence brewing during Reconstruction. When the Klan came to Graham, they were met with an armed response from Outlaw and two other Black constables. The Klan, outraged to be met with an armed defense of the people of Graham, decided that an example had to be made of these men.

On the night of February 26, 1870, approximately sixty Klansmen armed with swords, pistols, and torches invaded Outlaw’s home, terrorizing and threatening his family. They swept Outlaw out of his home. The Klan took him to the Alamance Courthouse, where they lynched the Union veteran, Republican political leader, town commissioner, and constable. They then pinned a sign to him that read, “Beware, you guilty, both white and black.” This murder, along with the murder of a State Senator, John W. Stephens, in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, would lead to Holden enlisting the help of Union General George W. Kirk. Thus, the Kirk-Holden War had begun.

As a prelude to the start of the Kirk-Holden War, the Shoffner Act was passed, allowing Governor Holden to declare the North Carolina counties of Alamance and Caswell to be in a state of insurrection to suspend habeas corpus. This allowed General Kirk, along with his troops, primarily from Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina, to arrest approximately a hundred suspected Klansmen without warrant. Among those arrested were sheriffs and a former United States Congressman. The men who were arrested became outraged and sought help from the Federal Government in cases of suspected state government overreach. This act would cause the impeachment and removal of Governor Holden and bring the Democrats back into power in North Carolina. The Democrats of North Carolina went to work repealing the Shoffner Act and granting amnesty in 1873 for the Klan’s crimes in the region before September 1871.

In 1872, eighteen men were indicted in the murder of Outlaw, but they never faced trial. Klansmen would continue to be venerated as heroes in North Carolina until recent times, when statues were finally torn down and names were removed from buildings.

Wyatt Outlaw deserves to be remembered for his bravery, dedication, and his willingness to defend the law in the face of powerful, aggressive forces. The Klan would later admit that they targeted Outlaw because of his political strength and his ability as a leader of both races. It is clear they feared him and what he represented for North Carolina’s future. He was meant to serve as an example, a warning to any Black person who decided to stand up for themselves and their people. He is a North Carolinian worth remembering and celebrating. He may have died, but he died a hero and should be remembered as such.

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Sources:

Battle Unit Details - The Civil War (U.S. National Park Service). https://www.nps.gov/subjects/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm. Accessed 9 Aug. 2026.

Battle Unit Details - The Civil War (U.S. National Park Service). https://www.nps.gov/subjects/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.

Brisson, Jim D. THE KIRK-HOLDEN WAR OF 1870 AND THE FAILURE OF RECONSTRUCTION IN NORTH CAROLINA.

“Feb. 26, 1870: Wyatt Outlaw Murdered.” Zinn Education Project, https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/wyatt-outlaw-murdered/. Accessed 9 Aug. 2026.

“Feb. 26, 1870: Wyatt Outlaw Murdered.” Zinn Education Project, https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/wyatt-outlaw-murdered/. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.

Government, Heritage Library, and June 2023. Holden, William Woods | NCpedia. https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/holden-william-woods. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.

Government, Heritage Library, and March 2025. Vance, Zebulon Baird | NCpedia. https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/vance-zebulon-baird. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.

Gubernatorial Succession Early in the Civil War | NC DNCR. https://www.dncr.nc.gov/blog/2016/07/07/gubernatorial-succession-early-civil-war. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.

Harrison, Wade. “The Forgotten History of Wyatt Outlaw and Governor William W. Holden.” North Carolina State Bar Journal, vol. 28, 2023, p. 20.

“Lynching of Wyatt Outlaw & the ‘Kirk-Holden War.’” American Battlefield Trust, https://www.battlefields.org/visit/heritage-sites/lynching-wyatt-outlaw-kirk-holden-war. Accessed 9 Aug. 2026.

“Lynching of Wyatt Outlaw & the ‘Kirk-Holden War.’” American Battlefield Trust, https://www.battlefields.org/visit/heritage-sites/lynching-wyatt-outlaw-kirk-holden-war. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.

Lynching of Wyatt Outlaw and the Kirk-Holden War | NC DNCR. 26 Feb. 2016, https://www.dncr.nc.gov/blog/2016/02/26/lynching-wyatt-outlaw-and-kirk-holden-war.

Lynching of Wyatt Outlaw and the Kirk-Holden War | NC DNCR. 26 Feb. 2016, https://www.dncr.nc.gov/blog/2016/02/26/lynching-wyatt-outlaw-and-kirk-holden-war.

Richmond, Mailing Address: 3215 E. Broad Street, and VA 23223 Phone: 804-226-1981 Contact Us. United States Colored Troops 2nd Regiment Cavalry - Richmond National Battlefield Park (U.S. National Park Service). https://www.nps.gov/rich/learn/historyculture/2nduscc.htm. Accessed 9 Aug. 2026.

The Kirk-Holden War | ANCHOR. https://www.ncanchor.org/anchor/kirk-holden-war. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.

The Kirk-Holden War of 1870. https://docsouth.unc.edu/highlights/. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.

The Life and Tragic Death of Wyatt Outlaw | News | Thetimesnews.Com. https://www.thetimesnews.com/news/the-life-and-tragic-death-of-wyatt-outlaw/article_376194cf-37d4-5cab-a7a9-71f2cc54cd3a.html. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.

Timeline of Reconstruction in North Carolina | ANCHOR. https://www.ncanchor.org/anchor/timeline-reconstruction. Accessed 13 Aug. 2026.

“To Look More Closely at the Man”: Wyatt Outlaw, a Nexus of National, Local, and Personal History | JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23522167?googleloggedin=true&seq=1. Accessed 9 Aug. 2026.

In light of the recent administration work to roll back protections given to historical sites, Section 106, and the cutting of funding towards NAGPRA protection, I think it is time to address the history of Native American Grave exploitation and the long road to NAGPRA.

Europeans In North America

In December of 1620, according to Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of Pilgrims at Plymouth, the Pilgrims discovered an active grave of a man and a child. They searched through the grave goods, taking the fine items, even the beadwork found with the deceased child’s remains. They felt comfortable doing this because they believed Native Americans were not fully people (Midtrod 2019). This is the first recording of Europeans robbing Native Graves recorded by the grave robbers themselves. It would not be the last time the Pilgrims would plunder these sites looking for other trinkets, goods, and eventually taking the bones of the Natives.

During this time period and after the discovery of several more burial mounds, many European colonists refused to attribute these complex mound structures to the Native Americans who built them. In their estimation, the Natives were too simple to be able to build these all over the Americas and instead would attribute them to a “Lost Tribe of Israel.” President Thomas Jefferson had a burial mound about six miles just outside of Monticello. As a child, he had witnessed local Natives visit the mound to mourn their dead, and as an adult, he decided to collect archaeological evidence on the burial mound. While Jefferson did not display or collect any of the burial materials recovered, he did document and observe the individuals discovered. Jefferson knew this was an active place of mourning. He did not ask the Monacan Indian Nation before digging at this location. He did, however, believe the local Native group (later confirmed as the Monacan Indian Nation) was responsible for constructing the mounds. It is unclear whether he thought they were the possible “Lost Tribe of Israel,” but he at least credited the local Native population with their construction.

The 19th Century would continue with the plundering and disturbance of Native American Burial sites. Abelard B. Tomlinson would begin excavations of Grave Creek Mound in modern-day West Virginia in 1838. It was considered to be one of the largest conical burial mounds in the country. Driven by curiosity and not scientific inquiry, he would remove several individuals from the site and use his work to continue the false “Lost Tribe of Israel” discourse. Then there is Montoville Wilson Dickeson and his excavations of burial mounds in the Mississippi River Valley (Louisiana and Mississippi) during the 1840’s. Dickeson was a Pennsylvania physician whose interest in the past led him to become an amateur archaeologist. A common theme in the history of archaeology, for better or worse. He would amass an incredible collection of grave goods and human remains. He would eventually donate his findings to what is now the modern-day University of Pennsylvania Museum in 1899.

North Carolina Natives were not spared by this amateur collector-to-museum pipeline. The Valentines are a very prominent family in Richmond, VA. Mann S. Valentine II was already a very wealthy man when he invented his miracle Meat Juice as a way to extend his sickly wife’s life. He and his sons would use their incredible fortune to found and fill the Valentine Museum with artifacts from everywhere they possibly could. As part of their desire to document prehistoric North America and this “vanishing” Native culture. Valentine turned their attention and vast fortune to Western North Carolina’s burial mounds belonging to the Cherokee.

These excavations were more than simple discovery, curiosity, or scientific exploration. They sought to take many Native Grave artifacts back destructively to Virginia and display them at their museum. They excavated at least eight burial mounds associated with the Cherokee and their ancestors. Some of the more famous mounds they destructively excavated are the Peachtree Mound near Murphy, the Garden Creek Mound near Canton, Jasper Allen Mound near Sylva, and Birdtown Mound in Birdtown. This region of North Carolina is considered to be the Heart Land or Mother Town for the Cherokee Nation. These mounds date to long before there was ever a European presence in North America.

The Army Medical Museum: Scientific Racism

The Civil War brought many changes and opportunities for scientific inquiry, and it began with the goal of improving medical treatment and understanding. In 1862, the United States Army Medical Museum was founded by the Surgeon General William A. Hammond. The original intention was to collect specimens from war victims; first, the focus was on skulls, but it would eventually expand to include surgical, photographic, medical, and microscopic collections to better understand disease and injury found on the battlefield. However, in 1868 the museum added a comparative anatomical collection and requested help in procuring specimens from “Indian Country.” Now, they wanted and collected more than just Native remains; they would collect from those of European, African, Asian, and Oceanic ancestry. The museum worked with the Smithsonian to transfer over a large portion of their Native American remains to be added to this comparative collection. The main purpose of this collection was to identify, order, and rank people of different ancestral origins into the races. They used biological markers and identifiers to give an “order” to these races. The results of all this research, of course, proved that the White man was superior to all the other races found on Earth. George A. Otis, surgeon and Brevet Lt. Colonel, collected the data from the comparative collection and came to the conclusion that Native Americans were “lower on/in” the human hierarchy than previously believed. These kinds of arguments would be used to strip Natives of their lands as well as others of their rights in the American Legal system.

Visitors Welcome

Imagine your family’s graves being purchased by a private individual, and that individual discovers them. Amazed by the elaborate gifts and ceremonies that you had given your family in your time of grief, they decide to open up all the graves associated with your family and the community buried alongside them. The individual then decides to create a business around the remains of your loved ones, charging people a fee to come on their land and view them.

If you are a member of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, this is no hypothetical. Their ancestors were put on display as a roadside attraction in Lewistown, Illinois. People were charged fifty cents to see the human remains and grave goods uncovered by Dr. Don Dickson, a chiropractor, in 1927. He had unearthed 234-248 burials, built a protective enclosure around the site, displayed the remains, and charged fifty cents for admittance.

This “museum” in its first year had around 40,000 paid visitors.

Attendance at the private site would drop due to the Great Depression and World War II, leading Dickson to sell the site to the State of Illinois under the condition that he continued as the site manager until 1965, when Dickson finally gave full control to the state. As the Black Civil Rights movement reached its height in the late 1960s, Native Americans began their protest against the unconsensual use of their Ancestral Graves for scientific inquiries and tourism.

Reader, I want you to understand the kinds of individuals that were on display at this museum. There were many adults, but there were also young children, infants, and the very elderly. We’re talking about sensitive populations. Displayed among them was an unborn fetus, still wearing a shell pendant. Two men in their mid-forties lay nearby. A young woman rested with her hand over her pelvis and was buried with a shell necklace. It was stolen at some point, and even her jawbone had gone missing from the display. A man was buried with fishing hooks carved from bone; another with five arrows laid across his knees. A two-year-old had been buried with a rattle made of mussel shells that, too, disappeared. (Jaffe, Logan. ProPublica).

When we look at the types of individuals displayed, their treatment, and the lack of protection given to these individuals, we can better understand why many Native groups were outraged. That is why they began protesting these institutions. They had no control or protection over their dead, and they were dismissed because of the history of this country’s belief that Native Americans are either less than or no longer exist.

Dickson Mounds was not the only location where the Native Dead were put on display. You had Grand Mound in International Falls, Minnesota, and Camden Park Mound, which was a part of an amusement park in Huntington, West Virginia. Not to mention other museum locations across the United States not tied to a particular burial mound, just displaying human remains and grave goods like novelties or oddities for American consumption.

It was more than just the study conducted by archaeologists. It was also the commodification of the Ancestral Dead of American Natives.

Money for the Dead

Looting is a problem at every historical site; however, the looting of burial and sacred sites is especially egregious. Most intact artifacts recovered of Native origin typically come from burials. It has been a long-standing issue, but most laws before NAGPRA were barely enforced. The 1906 Antiquities Act was created to protect artifacts collected from Federal land. However, most violations were treated as minor offenses, and the individual would just be fined. This did nothing to protect those sites on private property. During the great depression, we have documented evidence of farmers looting Native Burials and selling artifacts recovered as a means of earning cash out of desperation.

The profit from antiquities selling reached its height in the 1960’s-1970’s in the United States. In the American Southwest, we get an interesting cultural practice of Skeleton Picnics in which people visiting local archaeological sites would loot and plunder Native Graves. Some researchers estimate that only one out of ten graves in the Southwest has been left untouched. One man, Earl K. Shumway, is claimed to have looted over 10,000 archaeological sites. Looting is so bad in these areas that Park Rangers in the Southwest often wear bulletproof vests and carry extensive firearms just in case they have a run-in with looters. It was clear that the Act of 1906 did very little to prevent the crime. In 1979, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act was passed, providing clearer definitions and real criminal prosecution for looters of archaeological sites on Federal land. Many people don’t understand why this is an important measure to prevent looting because they believe they are finding long-forgotten treasures. This simply isn’t the case; most of these sites are left alone because they are a part of the cultural heritage of people still living, and just because they aren’t there doesn’t mean it was forgotten. Also, as any archaeologist will tell you, the item itself is practically useless. It would be the same as having others bring you evidence of a crime scene piece by piece. The objects alone don’t tell a story; where they were found, what they were found in relation to, what color the soil was, etc., tell us something about the artifacts that are collected. We have to see everything surrounding the artifact to gather any data, because we are trying to understand what was happening at the site to explain why this artifact is there in the first place.

These acts did nothing to protect Native American graves specifically.

Maria Darlene Pearson aka Running Moccasins

Born in Springfield, South Dakota, and a member of the Turtle Clan of the Yankton Sioux Tribe, she was one of the leading voices for the NAGPRA movement. She married a district engineer with the Iowa Department of Transportation who was working on a highway construction project when they unearthed twenty-six white and two Native American remains. The white remains were reburied, but the two Native American remains were sent to the state for archaeological study. Pearson was confused and outraged that Native remains were up for study, while white remains were automatically reburied. She made it her life’s mission to protect the ancestors where they lie. She went to the Iowa state government, working tirelessly to get the Iowa Burials Protection Act of 1976. It was the first time that a law within the United States offered special protection of Native burial sites and required the reburial of Native Remains.

Pearson did not stop at Iowa; she began working with federal agencies and advocated for a national law to protect Native Burial sites.

In 1987, an archaeological site in Union County, Kentucky would be the fuel needed to get NAGPRA passed. Over the course of two months, around 650 graves dating to the Mississippi period were looted in an industrialized manner. While Slack Farm was technically private property, neighbors and law enforcement were horrified by the scale and brutality of the looting incident. (NAGPRA only protects those on Federal land, and there is still a gap in the law that would allow this to happen again, since Slack Farm was private property.)

Why we need NAGPRA.

Not all archaeologists agree that NAGPRA is necessary and inhibits our ability to study the past, and in some ways they are correct. Finding a skeleton on a Native American site can delay excavation, costing time and money. I would argue that after the history of the United States’ treatment of Native Americans, both living and dead, we have proven ourselves untrustworthy. History shows that we will give deference to white graves but then treat graves of Natives, Black, and other non-whites as objects that can be studied and used to whatever we deem appropriate. We had laws and study practices built and developed from a time when science was used to prove and enact racism. Studying humans requires special care and understanding, because while it might be just an artifact to archaeologists, to descendant populations, it is their history, a final act of love, and sacred identity. If we are fortunate enough to study the dead and past populations, we must treat it as a sacred and solemn duty. We are no different from undertakers; we interact with those who can no longer advocate for themselves, and they mean something incredibly important to those still living. Time and distance make no difference when looking at human life; it must be done with care and respect.

Current Attacks: Protecting Our History

These laws, which Americans have fought for and earned, are currently being undermined and attacked by Presidential Order. Not by voting or challenging court cases, but by a decree of a single man and his administration. As of writing, President Trump has rolled back protections given to Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Chaco Culture National Historic Park, and Oak Flat, aka Chí’chil Biłdagoteel, all of which are located in the Southwestern United States. As we have established, an area in the US has some of the most active areas of looting and disrespect for Native Protections. In the cases of two of the sites, Trump’s proclamation reduced the size of Bears Ears from 1.36 million acres to 121,100 acres, and Grand Staircase from 1.87 million acres to 181,500 acres. This order also dismantles the Bears Ears Commission, the precedent-setting Native American oversight committee to work alongside the American government to manage and protect these sites. This was a massive win for Native Americans having a say over the protections and rights of their past, stolen away by a proclamation.

In the case of Chaco Canyon, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) put forth a proposal that would open a 336,404-acre buffer to oil/gas/mineral leasing around the site. Inside the buffer zone, there are 7,552 known historic properties, 145+ traditional cultural properties, and 4 Chacoan great house outliers. This doesn’t even consider how heavy construction and equipment might impact the site. Chaco Canyon is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, one of twenty-seven sites located in the United States. Having these sites is more than a privilege; when used in conjunction with local marketing, the designation can help drive tourism and boost local economies. BLM's own draft environmental analysis concluded that revoking the protections could yield the equivalent of just over 2.2 million barrels of oil over the next 20 years. America consumes 2.2 million barrels of oil in under three hours. Do we as Americans really want to risk a globally recognized treasure to extract a very limited resource?

Flat Oak is a sacred site to the Western Apaches; it is important to their religious practices, and as such, it is also a sacred place for their dead. It also has a history as a copper mine, and Resolution Copper is a joint venture between Rio Tinto and BHP, two of the world’s largest mining conglomerates, that sought to obtain the land in 2014. The resulting mining operations would, according to a lawsuit filed by the Western Apache, result in a 1.8-mile-wide crater over 1,000 feet deep​. (Think a hole that would stretch from the Capitol Building in D.C. to the Lincoln Memorial). This contract involved a public land swap to private interests, championed by Senator John McCain and happened during the Obama administration, but Trump has made it one of his top priorities to see the swap go through. In 2025, the court case to protect this land went all the way to the Supreme Court, which promptly declined to hear it, allowing for the sale to be finalized. Justice Gorsuch, an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, dissented from that decision. He noted that the Western Apache believe Oak Flat is a place where they can speak directly to the Creator, and argued that the Court would likely have ruled differently if a historic cathedral had been at stake instead of a Native holy site. It was a pointed accusation: that his colleagues, in declining to even hear the case, were applying a double standard to a sacred place because it belonged to Native Americans rather than to a more familiar faith.

Then we have budget cuts to the National Park Service, the main actor in enforcing any cultural heritage law in the United States. They have lost approximately 25% of their workforce since January of 2025. And this administration is consistently pushing for deeper cuts to NPS’s budget, leaving more than half of an almost 3 million Native American remains still backlogged from the enactment of the 1990 NAGPRA law. The NPS has no clear ability to enforce the law as required, meaning the law still stands but is practically useless. For the 2027 Budget, which has not passed yet, the administration is asking for a 26% deeper cut to the NPS. The NPS is responsible for more than just regulating artifacts and cultural sites; it is also responsible for environmental emergencies on federal land. Forest fire prevention and intervention? I guess not.

Final Thoughts and Moving Forward

American history is complicated. Our ancestors did many things that we as Americans today would outright disagree with. While I learned much about the horrific treatment that Native Americans faced at the hands of the United States Government in college, that wasn’t where I first learned of the idea. It was my mountain family, my Appalachian family, who told me since I was a little girl that “We did wrong by the Natives.” It was said with shame. “We did not keep our word when it came to treaties. We stole everything from them for the sake of making rich men even richer.” There was always an undertone of helplessness to these statements, because they happened so long ago.

This isn’t the case; these actions and stripping of Native American cultural and spiritual legacy are happening in front of our very eyes. We can do something about it. We can do what we can to prevent history from repeating itself. We can call, email, mail, or even fax our representatives. We can advocate for the return of sacred land to Native ownership, like the North Carolina town of Franklin did in returning Noquisiyi, one of the largest unexcavated mounds in the Southeast, to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee. We can support the National Park Service by visiting our National Parks and telling our representatives to stop its defunding. We can also support Native American advocacy groups with donations or spreading awareness of the current attacks being done by the American government. And we all know, if there is one thing Appalachians love, it’s annoying and distrusting the Federal Government.

Our country is a beautiful and wild place. Our National Parks are our Crown Jewels, but they aren’t owned for the use of one single family. They are used by all Americans, Native Americans, and those descended from immigrants. They are truly what makes America great.

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Trump Administration Proposes Massive Cuts to National Park Service Budget (Again), While Asking for $10 Billion for “Beautification Projects” in Washington, D.C.

Our Public Lands & Waters

Trump Administration Proposes Massive Cuts to National Park Service Budget (Again), While Asking for $10 Billion for “Beautification Projects” in Washington, D.C.

“A cut this massive would be catastrophic. This proposal would only accelerate the damage, putting our national parks at even greater risk and further cut the park staffing that is needed to care for our national treasures.” - John Garder, Senior Budget & Appropriations Director at the National Parks Conservation Association…

Read more

5 months ago · 58 likes · Our Public Lands & Waters

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What if I told you that it wasn’t always a given in North America? What if I told you that many of the Native American tribes were more Matriarchal in nature? The Navajo, Hopi, Iroquois, and Cherokee, just to name a few. Inheritance and familial identity all ran through the mother’s line and not the father’s. Women were also allowed to hold leadership and political roles, and to depose their leaders. This is to say that in Native American culture, women had more political value than the European Colonizers were comfortable with.

Becoming Beloved

Nanyehi, also known as Nancy Ward by White colonists, was a Ghigau of the Cherokee. Ghigau, according to Robert J. Conley’s 2005 book The Cherokee Nation: A History, could mean several different things. It could mean a “Pretty Woman,” a “War Woman,” or a “Beloved Woman,” depending on the woman’s position and her actions within the Cherokee Nation. What we do know is that it allowed women to hold the position of elder within the community.

Nanyehi is believed to have been born sometime between the years 1736 and 1738. Several sources disagree on the exact date, which often happens during this period for women and Natives alike. What is known is that she was born near the border of Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina in modern-day Monroe County (TN). Her mother, Tame Doe, was the sister of Cherokee leader Attakullakulla and a part of a well-established political family within the Cherokee known as the Wolf clan. Attakullakulla was a great warrior, peacemaker (between the Natives and the encroaching European settlers), and a diplomat who was sent throughout America and even to England to discuss trade and peace deals. This doesn’t mean that everything was peaceful and utopian between the two groups, but Attakullakulla always tried to protect his people while seeking peace between the two nations. (More on him later in the series.)

Because familial identity is linked to the matrilineal line, Nanyehi was raised in a politically focused family. While leadership positions and authority were not inherited roles, being raised in a well-known family would have provided educational and experiential advantages. She likely listened in on political discussions from a young age, learned her family’s oral traditions, and probably witnessed firsthand how power worked in the Cherokee community of Chota.

Sometime in the 1750s, when Nanyehi was between 13 and 15, she married a member of the Cherokee Deer Clan named Kingfisher. Historical accounts tell us that she accompanied her husband in the 1755 Battle of Taliwa against the Cherokee’s long-time enemy, the Creeks. According to Cherokee accounts, she chewed on the bullets in Kingfisher’s ammunition while he operated the rifle. Chewing on the bullets caused the bullets to deal more laceration damage upon striking. Sadly, her husband died in battle, and Nanyehi took his rifle to help her people in battle. This was not the exception for Cherokee women; they were often active participants in military conflicts.

This is how Nanyehi earned her title of Ghigau. She participated in important rituals, attended council meetings, advised chiefs, and had absolute authority over the fate of those captured in battle.

After the death of her first husband, Nanyehi married an Irish trader named Bryant Ward. This is when Nanyehi gained the European name, Nancy Ward. Their marriage was likely not a true love marriage but a part of negotiations for trading between colonists and settlers. It worked as a way for these two very different people to learn about the other’s culture and society. It would have been mutually advantageous to both parties. As a Cherokee woman, Nanyehi was allowed to marry and divorce as she saw fit, and by 1760, her marriage to Ward had ended, and he returned to his White family in South Carolina. As a result of the marriage, Nanyehi became the de facto diplomat between the Cherokee and England and their colonists.

American Revolution/Cherokee Division

In March 1775, Richard Henderson negotiated with the Cherokee for a large chunk of land for the Transylvania Land Company, which would later become Middle Tennessee and Kentucky, in the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals. The Transylvania Land Company was made up of a collection of White men who were looking for land to settle themselves.

Now, was the treaty itself technically illegal?

Yes.

Britain had issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763. It made it illegal for any White settlers to purchase land west of Appalachia.

Did they do it anyway? You betcha! Besides, the American Revolution was about to start, and a probable open rebellion seemed like the more pressing issue.

It seemed like a done deal, but not all the Cherokee agreed to sell the land. Attakullakulla, Oconostota, and Sewanooko had agreed to the purchase, but a group led by Tsiyu Gansini (AKA Dragging Canoe), Attakullakulla’s son, did not want to see the colonists expand their territory into Cherokee land. He wanted to join the Royalists, since the Monarchy did not want the settlers to expand further into their territory. Plus, they were already fighting a common enemy, the Americans/the Patriots. Attakullakulla knew that the Americans were a direct threat to Cherokee people. The British government was far away and did not have the capacity to control the further outreaches of the colonial frontier. Attakullakulla chose to help find peace between the two factions before eventually siding with their closest neighbors, the Americans.

Nanyehi chose to follow her Uncle Attakullakulla’s lead and protect the White colonists from Tsiyu Gansini’s faction. She would warn settlers about any planned attacks, giving them time to leave, and if they were captured, Nanyehi would often intercede on their behalf.

In the Fall of 1776, a militia of Virginia and North Carolina forces decided to attack the Cherokee groups following Tsiyu Gansini. Chota, the home of Attakullakulla and Nanyehi, was spared destruction because of the help and protection that they had provided for American settlers in the region. However, this did not stop another militia group from Virginia from taking Chota in 1781.

According to reports delivered to then American Virginian Governor Thomas Jefferson, after Chota was taken, a well-known and influential Beloved Woman named Nanyehi met with the leaders of the militia. She offered them intelligence and an overture of peace. Jefferson, learning of Nanyehi and knowing her reputation for helping Americans, singled her out with respect and honor. He allowed her to decide what action should be taken since she had taken refuge with the American forces. He did not allow her to be ransomed or treated ill. It was one diplomat protecting the other in a time of great uncertainty.

Nanyehi’s role as Beloved Woman went beyond that of a diplomat; she was a representative of all women. In 1781, Nanyehi understood Western culture well and used her perceived lower status to her advantage when addressing the American delegation for a treaty. She spoke to them as a mother and as a representative of all women, asking them to allow their women to hear her words. She believed the two peoples would never know a lasting peace until each saw the other's sons as their own, and each other's women as their mothers, and they could learn to love each other as one tribe. After the treaty was signed, Nanyehi’s daughter with Bryan Ward, Elizabeth “Betsy” Ward, married the Virginia’s Indian Agent to the Cherokee, Joseph Martin. It is important to note that Martin was already married to two other women, Sarah Lucas and Susannah Graves. Apparently this was a fairly common practice among frontiers men.

Post-Revolution

The years after the American Revolution saw the White American population explode around the Cherokee lands. The influence of the Westerners around them had a great impact on Cherokee culture. The Cherokee Government began to operate more like a Patriarchy than previous iterations. They also began converting to Christianity. As Nanyehi grew older, she warned the young council members of the Cherokee nation not to continue to sell their land to White settlers in the 1817 Treaty. But her word fell on deaf ears, and the land was sold in exchange for land further west. It may have been too late that she realized that the White settlers never intended to peacefully coexist on the land with the Cherokee. They would eventually try to consume all the favorable land the Cherokee called home and remove them to other lands far away.

Nanyehi, Beloved Woman, Nancy Ward died working as an innkeeper. It is believed she passed sometime between 1822 and 1824. Sources disagree on the exact date.Her home and her people’s land were all sold away to the United States government.

Complicated Legacy

Nanyehi was a complicated woman dealing with a world shattering situation. The world the Cherokee had previously occupied as a nation no longer existed with first introduction of British, then White American, settlers to the area. When everything is changing at such a rapid pace it would probably feel impossible to navigate. In a way, Nanyehi, the Cherokee, and all of the Native Americans were flying blind and having to learn as they went in dealing with these new Americans.

With hindsight being 20/20, I can understand why many Cherokee take issue with the actions Nanyehi took during the Cherokee Wars. Her protection of those who would eventually consume everything in their never-ending thirst for property can appear as a betrayal to those living with, and grieving, those losses today. Their anger is righteous and understandable.

I empathize with Nanyehi. She chose to protect life. To protect women and children no matter their skin color or relation. Her sin was kindness and mercy. I personally believe that what happened because of her interventions does not shame what she tried to do. It says more about the people who took advantage of her principles and respect for human life. They were the ones who deserve the ire. They were the jackals. They were the thieves. Nanyehi's crime was showing mercy to those who did not deserve it.

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Sources:

“A Demand of Blood: The Cherokee War of 1776.” NMAI Magazine, https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/demand-blood-cherokee-war-1776. Accessed 30 July 2026.

Alderman, Pat. Nancy Ward, Cherokee Chieftainess: Dragging Canoe, Cherokee-Chickamauga War Chief. The Overmountain Press, 1990.

Conley, Robert J. The Cherokee Nation : A History. With Internet Archive, Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/cherokeenationhi0000conl.

General Joseph Martin and Betsy Ward | Native Heritage Project. https://nativeheritageproject.com/2012/04/07/general-joseph-martin-and-betsy-ward/. Accessed 30 July 2026.

Kirchberg v. Feenstra | 450 U.S. 455 (1981) | Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/450/455/. Accessed 29 July 2026.

Lefler, Lisa J. Under the Rattlesnake: Cherokee Health and Resiliency. University of Alabama Press, 2009.

Mann, Barbara Alice. Daughters of Mother Earth: The Wisdom of Native American Women. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2006.

Nancy Ward, Cherokee Beloved Woman | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/nancy-ward-cherokee-beloved-woman. Accessed 30 July 2026.

“Nanyehi Nancy Ward.” Women & the American Story, https://wams.nyhistory.org/life-story/nanyehi-nancy-ward/. Accessed 29 July 2026.

Position of Iroquois Women - Peace Mother. https://peace-mother.com/pdfviewer/position-of-iroquois-women/. Accessed 29 July 2026.

Suzack, Cheryl, et al. Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture. UBC Press, 2011.

The Treaty of Sycamore Shoals. https://tnmuseum.org/junior-curators/posts/the-treaty-of-sycamore-shoals. Accessed 29 July 2026.

Thomas Jefferson to Arthur Campbell, 17 February 1781. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-04-02-0804. Accessed 30 July 2026.

Polling shows Count Binface, a Novelty Candidate, has 33% of the vote, according to several news outlets, putting him well ahead of Nigel Farage, the incumbent, in the Clacton by-election for the MP seat. The election is due to Farage resigning from his position to sidestep an investigation into the money he received as an elected official. Farage then turned around and put his hat into the ring to reclaim his role as MP. Farage is trying to have his cake and eat it, too. No other major political party has put forth another candidate against Farage because they believe it is an unwinnable election. And if it weren’t for a 46-year-old comedian, writer and novelty candidate, Count Binface, real name Jonathan David Harvey or Jon Harvey, Farage would get away with this cowardly tactic to prevent accountability in UK elections. Damn meddling Intergalactic Space Lord!

This story is emblematic of the problems within the UK and US political systems. Our traditional parties are throwing in the towel before they even try to put up a fight. As someone who has seen what far-right politics has done to my country, I am cheering on Count Binface.

One of the reasons why so many Americans are upset with our political system is that the opposition side is handing over easy victories, allowing them to gain momentum instead of fighting them every step of the way. We feel as if Democrats are always on the defensive. For the most part, they have been. Until Democrats started using gerrymandering themselves, they hadn’t fought back much. I understand that money and resources are limited, and I get ten text messages a day asking for money. However, I feel that the UK is making a massive mistake by failing to block Farage from using this legal, expensive, and dirty tactic.

The UK has a secret weapon: the Novelty Candidate.

The History of the Novelty Candidate.

In 1963, a 22-year-old man named David Edward Sutch adopted the title “Screaming Lord Sutch” and, with the National Teenage Party, began standing in a by-election for Stratford-on-Avon following the Profumo scandal.

In 1961, John Profumo was the Secretary of State for War, MP from Stratford-on-Avon, and a rising star in the Conservative Party. Unfortunately, the 46-year-old Profumo had the same weakness that plagues many of our politicians today; he had an affair with a 19-year-old model and dancer, Christine Keeler. Investigations proved that Keeler was also having an affair with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché and suspected intelligence officer during the Cold War. It was a national nightmare.

Profumo resigned, and a by-election was held, with Angus Maude winning for the Conservative Party. Screaming Lord Sutch was trying to jump-start his career as a 1960s rocker and bring attention to his developing ‘National Teenage Party’ for those aged 18-22. He would continue to stand for other elections, and when asked why he chose to run for office with little hope of winning, Sutch responded that his main focus was a single issue: the voting age in Britain was 21, even though many Brits were working and having families at 18. They were adults by every metric, but unable to participate in the basic act of governance. In 1970, the UK lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

In 1982, Sutch founded the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, according to the party’s website (here). It has become the major national party for Novelty Candidates. You should check out their website; it is a hoot! It is filled with puns and takes the piss out of serious politicians. It lovingly makes fun of the ways government officials try to work around rules and their meanings to technically meet campaign promises, rather than offer actual solutions.

In 2015, Al Murray, an established British comedian, used his well-known alter ego, Pub Landlord, to stand for election to the South Thanet seat against Nigel Farage. Al Murray did not win, but the stunt was widely read as a deflation of the nationalist rhetoric Farage’s UKIP was built on, with the Pub Landlord’s bombastic campaign mirroring Farage’s own style back at him to expose its absurdity.

Before Count Binface, there was Lord Buckethead, who stood for four British general elections from 1987 through 2019. Lord Buckethead was based on a Science Fiction character from Todd Durham’s 1984 film Hyperspace. He is described as loosely based on Star Wars’ Darth Vader. Lord Buckethead’s helm has been worn by several people, including Mike Lee, Jon Harvey (before he donned the bin for Count Binface), and David Hughes. Each of the men brought their own goals and perspectives to the character. Mike Lee used the character from 1987 to 1992 to oppose Margaret Thatcher and challenge Conservative Prime Minister John Major. He also included satirical platform policies such as demolishing Birmingham to make way for a new spaceport in true Novelty Candidate fashion.

In 2017, Jon Harvey took his turn to become Lord Buckethead to challenge the conservative Theresa May for her seat in Maidenhead. This stunt would gain international attention, even earning Jon Harvey a spot on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight program to discuss the very proud political tradition of Novelty Candidates. (Watch it here.) Sadly, all this attention would result in a copyright dispute with Todd Durham, who claims ownership of the Lord Buckethead character. Harvey surrendered his control over the character and turned his attention to creating his own.

Then David Hughes, a film journalist, was selected by Durham to carry on the character in future elections. Hughes considered standing against Farage in the 2019 South East England MEP election. He would eventually decide not to, for fear that he would take votes away from more viable candidates, suggesting that perhaps the Novelty Candidates care more about the outcome for the people than some ‘real’ politicians do. Then, in the General Election of 2019, both Hughes’ Lord Buckethead and Harvey’s Count Binface would stand in opposition to Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

A Special Candidate

Whether it is the man himself or the length of his political career, I cannot say, but there seems to be something special about Farage as he brings out the ire of British comedians everywhere. There are Frankie Boyle, Nish Kumar, Joe Lycett, and Jonathan Pie, aka Tom Walker, just to name a few. (Language Warning on some of the links.) Then we have the British American host of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver. He has used his intelligence, wit, and charm to verbally destroy Farage at every opportunity, whether it was the showpiece on Brexit (starting at the 7:16 mark) or the Brexit Update, in which Oliver refers to Farage as the cover model for the world’s most punchable face magazine. Oliver has not held back his opinions on the leader of Reform UK, either. Is it any surprise that real-life comedian Jon Harvey has donned the Novelty Candidate as Count Binface to be the only opposition to Farage? In times of open political maneuvering and growing unrest among the population, Novelty Candidates serve as a direct manifestation of that discontent.

If the political system is unable or unwilling to address the underlying issues within, a looney wearing a mask screaming becomes a release valve for the people governed by the system. Making fun of these politicians flouting the system from news outlets, stand-up comics, social media, and traditional media all play an important role; they are inherently removed from the political arena. The Novelty Candidate is different because they are directly confronting a problematic situation in their territory. It breaks down the separation between the political world and the real world with a beautiful absurdity, reminding those in power that they are no different from those they wish to govern.

While here in America, we have had a few Novelty Candidates, such as Pigasus the Immortal at the 1968 Democratic Convention, Vermin Supreme, and Deez Nuts. We do not have the same traditions or organizations to put forth Novelty Candidates in the same way. It is a missed opportunity that we could use to combat systemic problems in the American system by having a more robust tradition of novelty candidates. Instead, we have a political system that cannot laugh at itself as we drift closer and closer to the absurd becoming reality. Our political traditions and decorum are things of the past as precedent keeps being shoved aside for ever further reaching power grabs.

Never forget that when Donald Trump first ran, everyone thought it was a joke. History has taught us that he was no Novelty Candidate.

We need something radical to change in our country.

Maybe America needs a new joke to run for office.

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Sources

“Al Murray’s Pub Landlord to Stand against Nigel Farage.” BBC News, 14 Jan. 2015. Kent. www.bbc.com, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-30819779.

Boffey, Daniel, and Daniel Boffey, Chief reporter. “‘He Goes a Bit Funny If You Use His Real Name’: The Unstoppable Rise of Count Binface.” The Guardian, 11 July 2026. Politics. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/11/unstoppable-rise-of-count-binface-clacton-farage.

“Count Binface.” Wikipedia, 16 July 2026. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Count_Binface&oldid=1364483521.

DAVID “SCREAMING LORD” SUTCH, POP STAR, POLITICIAN 1940 -1999. https://www.nme.com/news/music/nme-2316-1386773. Accessed 17 July 2026.

Editors, HISTORY com. “1968 Democratic Convention - Protests, Yippies, Witnesses| HISTORY.” HISTORY, 16 Mar. 2018, https://www.history.com/articles/1968-democratic-convention.

Forty Years of Monster Raving Loony Wannabe MPs. 24 Feb. 2023. www.bbc.com, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-64708154.

Fountain, Nigel. “Screaming Lord Sutch.” The Guardian, 18 June 1999. News. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/jun/19/guardianobituaries.nigelfountain.

From Lord Buckethead to Count Binface: When Farage’s Challenger Took on Theresa May - Slough Express. https://www.sloughexpress.co.uk/news/council-and-politics/707938/from-lord-buckethead-to-count-binface-when-farage-s-challenger-took-on-theresa-may.html. Accessed 17 July 2026.

Goodyear, Sheena. “Nigel Farage's Only by-Election Challenger Is Self-Proclaimed Space Alien Count Binface.” CBC Radio, 10 July 2026. CBC.ca, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/nigel-farage-versus-binface-9.7264908.

History – The Official Monster Raving Loony Party. https://www.LoonyParty.com/history-4/. Accessed 17 July 2026.

Jenkinson, Sofie. “Count Binface Represents the Silly Sausage Britain I Know and Love.” The Guardian, 13 July 2026. Opinion. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/13/count-binface-silly-sausage-britain-mr-blobby-liz-truss-boaty-mcboatface-clacton.

“John Profumo Affair Rocks British Government | Law | Research Starters | EBSCO Research.” EBSCO,

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Johnson, Taite. “Captain Beany to Return to Politics with Plans to Transform the Senedd Building.” Wales Online, 10 Mar. 2026, https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/welsh-superhero-captain-beany-returns-33559825.

“Mr Blobby Patriotism.” Renewal, 6 Oct. 2025, https://renewal.org.uk/blog/mr-blobby-patriotism/.

Nair, Anaka. From Lord Buckethead to Count Binface: When Farage’s Challenger Took on Theresa May. 14 July 2026, https://www.sloughexpress.co.uk/news/council-and-politics/707938/from-lord-buckethead-to-count-binface-when-farage-s-challenger-took-on-theresa-may.html.

Nigel Farage Expertly Mocked by Joe Lycett in Open Letter about Race Riots | The Independent. https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/tv/news/nigel-farage-riots-joe-lycett-letter-b2594333.html. Accessed 18 July 2026.

Nish Kumar: “Nigel Farage Is an Instrument of the Establishment.” https://inews.co.uk/culture/nish-kumar-nigel-farage-instrument-establishment-4301220?srsltid=AfmBOorHcv_K48OTGQhsUKFV0ENrDDnGYC88QkgECHy4rB0HjKWLE1b9. Accessed 18 July 2026.

Perraudin, Frances. “Al Murray the Pub Landlord to Stand against Nigel Farage in South Thanet.” The Guardian, 14 Jan. 2015. Politics. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jan/14/al-murray-the-pub-landlord-to-stand-against-nigel-farage-in-south-thanet.

“Return of Scandal Which Rocked Stratford and the Nation.” Stratford Herald, 28 Dec. 2019, https://www.stratford-herald.com/news/return-of-scandal-which-rocked-stratford-and-the-nation-9132306/.

“The Case for Screaming Lord Sutch.” Ramblings, 22 July 2025, https://rikramblings.com/2025/07/22/the-case-for-screaming-lord-sutch/.

The Last Laugh of the Monster Raving Loonies. https://time.com/archive/6943729/the-last-laugh-of-the-monster-raving-loonies/. Accessed 17 July 2026.

Ukip Is Fair Game for Comedians – and Why Shouldn’t It Be? | Frankie Boyle | The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/03/ukip-comedians-nigel-farage-leftie-comedians. Accessed 18 July 2026.

Whiteley, Paul. “Could Count Binface Actually Win?” The Conversation, 16 July 2026, https://doi.org/10.64628/AB.ne6f43smr.

William Boyd Allison Davis was born in 1902 to John Abraham Davis and Gabrielle Beale Davis in an affluent Black community in Washington, D.C. He would later only go by Allison Davis. His father, John, worked as the only Black employee at the Government Printing Office, but he was forced out of his job after Woodrow Wilson’s election and segregation policies in 1912. Thankfully, this change in economic standing did not prevent Davis from attending one of the nation’s finest Black schools. It did, however, give him a deeper understanding of how poverty compounds the effects of racism. It gave him the determination to become the best possible scholar he could be. He graduated from school as valedictorian, then earned his master’s in English from Harvard. Davis would then work as an English instructor at the Hampton Institute, now Hampton University, in Virginia.

While Davis loved being an educator, he longed to play a more active role in the Civil Rights Movement. In 1931, Davis walked away from his life as an English instructor and retooled himself as an anthropologist. This was a daring move for a Black man in the 1930s because, as I have stated before, anthropology has a very dark aspect to its history, such as the acceptance and widespread use of scientific racism. We have entire courses and disciplines within the field to directly address and mitigate this aspect of our founding. Ask a biological anthropologist, and they can probably give you a TED talk about it. However, there was a movement established by Franz Boas that argued that human behavior was more a product of culture than biology. Boas argued for the study of culture, and Davis thought this could be a different and advantageous way to study racism worldwide. He corresponded with Bronislaw Malinowski of the London School of Economics and decided to study in Great Britain and Germany before conducting fieldwork in Africa, according to David A.Varel’s 2021 biographical article, Allison Davis: A Social Scientist for Social Justice. Sadly, the 1930s had other plans for Germany, and a regime change that led to World War II dashed Davis’s hopes. Thankfully, Davis had established a friendship with a white social anthropologist, Lloyd Warner, at Harvard. Upon hearing his woes, Warner suggested that Davis could join Mary and Burleigh Gardner in doing field research in Natchez, Mississippi. The Gardners were graduate students at Harvard University. This would be a dangerous research area for Davis and his new bride, Elizabeth Stubbs Davis. Mississippi is very different from Virginia, and considering the work they would be doing, far more dangerous. Natchez, Mississippi, has a long and deep history with slavery and eventually the Confederacy. Natchez was a major center of human trafficking during the Antebellum period. Some claim that before the Civil War, Natchez had more millionaires per capita than any other city in the United States. The Civil War only helped it gain wealth and power, but after Union forces closed off the Mississippi River, Natchez was cut off from the rest of the South. Union forces never damaged any part of the city, instead using it to house injured Union troops and newly freed enslaved people. When I visited Natchez in the summer of 2013, the city was a shell of its former self. Empty mansions everywhere, extreme poverty in a lot of places, and many whites still clinging to the Lost Cause as the last vestiges of its former glory. In a way, Sherman did Atlanta a favor by burning it and forcing it to rebuild. Natchez is a place haunted by its former glory. Natchez in the 1930s would have been deep Klan territory.

The two couples decided that the best way to gain a better understanding of the culture of Natchez and the Deep South would be to serve as participant-observers for two years. This is qualitative research. They weren’t counting how many people filed reports on violent crime across Black and white communities; they were documenting what isn’t easily quantifiable. The unspoken rules of Natchez society are learned by living there, working there, and talking with the people who have lived there for generations. They actually had to be part of Natchez society, and the Davis family was living in opposition to the Natchez-established social order. They were Black and well-educated. In order not to raise the ire of the establishment, Davis and his wife chose to live in a Black neighborhood and focus primarily on the Black community. If anyone asked, they pretended to work under the white Gardners, a protective lie, for they were colleagues and their equal rank could be a potential liability.

Neither couple would discuss the details of their research while in Natchez, but would wait until they were safely out of the community to discuss their notes. This was to prevent each couple, in their separate community worlds, from becoming biased in their own racial perspectives. Anthropology, as it has developed, has been very focused on discussing and acknowledging our own personal biases. The interpretation of collected research data must be done with the understanding that bias is often applied unconsciously. To protect the research, you must actively and often seek out your own personal bias. Due to the nature of their research, confiscation was a real concern. To protect against the potential destruction of their research notes, they regularly sent copies back to Lloyd Warner at Harvard. The result of this difficult and emotionally trying study was Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class, published in 1941. This study and book exposed the dark secret of the American South to the entire world. Jim Crow had emerged as a caste system to replace the old Antebellum caste system. Union forces might have brought freedom to those formerly enslaved, but the collapse of Reconstruction gave way to a new form of legal oppression that kept people in strict social roles and obligations based on sex, race, and class. In the book, Davis et al. note the role that class played in modifying social position alongside race. There was always a clear separation between the white and Black communities. Interracial marriage or socializing would be anathema to the social system. A Black elite was emerging—those who gained an education, earned professional degrees, and ran successful businesses—and in some respects, they ranked socially above poor whites. While they would never be fully accepted by the higher-class whites, they were able to create a parallel society that was seen as separate but never equal.

The book also exposed a growing loophole in the Southern social system (one that could eventually lead to its downfall) and revealed how vital racial separation was to maintaining that corrupt order. Black communities could build separate, thriving societies with upward mobility, without any help—and often in the face of active hindrance—from upper-class whites. This proved that the idea that Black people are somehow intellectually inferior or less industrious than whites simply isn’t true. The notion of white supremacy would die if enough white people interacted and built community with their Black counterparts. They would see with their own eyes that Black and white people have more in common than not. Being white would lose its inherent privilege, and lower-class whites might come to see the Black community as a potential ally for change and power. To prevent exactly that, race had to be maintained as a social barrier.

Sadly, Davis’s work would have had limited success due to his race and the outbreak of World War II in Europe. However, the long-term impact of this study and understanding of the social system of the South would prove important to the future of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. It would provide an academic understanding of the South’s reaction to the 1954 overturning of Plessy v. Ferguson by Brown v. Board of Education. The court’s decision to force integration would expose the lie of the South’s caste system and why there are those in the South who point to integration as a major downfall in American society.

Allison Davis did not aspire to be a one-note academic but chose to follow his intellectual curiosity and delve into the role individuals play in maintaining social systems that actively harm them. Davis turned to a very small group within academia that studied the intersection of culture and personality, scholars such as anthropologists Edward Sapir and Margaret Mead, and psychoanalysts Karen Horney and Erich Fromm, to name a few. They were more psychologically focused social scientists, concerned with the role that individuals play in upholding systems of inequality and discrimination. Working with Yale social psychologist John Dollard, Davis produced the foundational work Children of Bondage in 1940, a year before Deep South was published. Children of Bondage is considered groundbreaking for a multitude of reasons, the first being that it was not an individual studying an outside cultural group. They did not have to travel to a far-off land, learn different languages, or worry about adapting to a national government they knew nothing about. This research was conducted within our own borders, in places like New Orleans, and focused on the lives of approximately twelve Black teens trying to grow up in the Southern social caste system. The book was also more than just research; it told complex, humanizing stories of a group often denied an empathetic narrative in research or literature.

After these two foundational works in the social sciences, one would be forgiven for thinking that it should be a no-brainer that Allison could get a job at a top-tier university. However, this was the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, and he was a Black man. Davis had been working as an anthropology professor at HBCU Dillard University in New Orleans from 1935 to 1939. Colleagues like Lloyd Warner—who was white—taught anthropology at Harvard without a Ph.D. Davis would have to earn his doctorate to be considered credible by white academia. Lloyd Warner had moved to the University of Chicago, and in 1939 Davis enrolled in the university’s anthropology doctoral program. In 1942, he graduated and was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, a predominantly white university. Even then, the appointment came on a three-year contract, and only on the condition that the Julius Rosenwald Foundation (JRF) subsidize most of his salary. Tenure, when it came in 1947, was its own fight. The university was wary of granting tenure to a Black academic, citing fears it would unsettle Southern students—an excuse many scholars argue was a thin cover for the prejudices of its own faculty. One scholar who actively worked against Allison Davis’s tenure appointment was the sociologist William Fielding Ogburn. Ogburn was a Georgia native and was convinced of white racial superiority. He was joined by Edgar Stern, a wealthy New Orleans philanthropist and JRF trustee, who argued that Davis’s appointment was a form of reverse racism. He felt that Davis was not being rewarded for his academic efforts or hard work, but that he was being given it because of others’ motives to challenge the social order. Thankfully, Davis’s academic work spoke for itself; with the support of academics like Ralph Tyler, the education chair, and anthropologists Lloyd Warner and Robert Redfield, Davis secured tenure. This didn’t mean the university welcomed him with open arms; in fact, the fight to get an appointment would lead to several more battles over university policies and practices. There was a debate about whether Davis should be allowed to instruct white students. He was not allowed in the Quadrangle Club, where faculty would hold meetings and have lunch. Davis might have had the job, but it did not mean he was accepted.

Davis would continue to be defined by no one particular field of study; instead of staying in anthropology, he eventually found his academic home in education. His research and academic background helped shape the field of education into a powerhouse within the social sciences in the post-war era. Davis turned his research focus to how social class stratification would shape and often limit the lives of poor Americans, many of whom were Black. This became another area that was unsafe to study due to rising sentiment towards communism. The 1950s investments in American infrastructure created the largest middle class in its history. The rising tides of the Red Scare and any suggestion that capitalism wasn’t all it was cracked up to be could put a large political target on your back. Davis argued that being poor was more than just a financial identity; it was a cultural one. He studied the cultural differences between the middle and lower classes, and he found that children from poorer backgrounds were constantly measured against middle-class standards, and when they inevitably fell short, it was treated as a personal deficiency. Not the truth that a student from the lower classes had to work twice as hard and overcome more adversity just to keep up with their middle-class counterparts. Davis often painted those who worked in blue-collar jobs or did shift work in kinder and more favorable terms than many in academia at the time did. The middle-class culture of the era often cited lower-class workers as unambitious, absentee parents, or intellectually inferior. Davis refuted these claims by showing that many shift workers had to leave their education to earn money to help their families survive. The jobs required more physical labor and longer hours; thus, their absenteeism was not a choice but a necessity for survival. This, in turn, affected the socialization of poorer children. Middle-class families could afford to enroll their kids in classes, programs, and summer camps to expand their children’s knowledge and social skills. Poorer families lacked the means to pay for those opportunities, and often those children had to work to support their families when not in school. Thus, lower-class children were more likely to fall behind during summer months and have less access to opportunities than their middle-class counterparts. Black families were assigned a lower social status regardless of their actual economic class.

Allison Davis followed his intellectual curiosity and turned his attention to the American concept of intelligence testing. The history of intelligence testing is long and rooted in concepts from the eugenics movement, and thus rests on weak scientific foundations. It started as a way to prove that some races were intellectually inferior to others, and it morphed into a means of weeding out the smartest from those deemed less intellectually capable. It created intellectual hierarchies within school systems, funneling the highest scorers into the best educational opportunities while holding back those deemed less capable. Davis showed that these tests were biased against those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, thereby preventing potential upward mobility between classes and reinforcing the established social system. These tests claimed to measure a person’s innate intellectual ability, but many parts of the IQ tests were based on words and references drawn from middle-class culture. Thus, children from a home without exposure to these middle-class references would never have encountered these concepts or ideas on their own. Poor children were being punished for not having well-educated parents, and thus were thrust into a vocational track because of ideas and concepts they never had the opportunity to understand. Davis argued that these tests were just a form of social Darwinism, and he used some of his own money to help develop tests that would take students’ socioeconomic backgrounds into account. His work and arguments led many school systems, such as Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco, to discontinue the practice of using IQ tests to differentiate students. Sadly, Davis never received as much credit for his contributions as his white colleagues did, but it does not change the fact that his role in rooting out classist and racial biases in education had a lasting impact on the goals and programs developed by the Civil Rights Movement.

Studying Allison Davis’s work and concepts during my time at UNC felt like meeting an intellectual hero. Many of the concepts I had developed from my personal experience and previous education had already been established by a man who died in 1983, the year I was born. His work shaped how I understood the world before I ever knew his name or background. The gift that UNC gave me was a name to go with the ideas and concepts already ingrained in me from childhood. While Davis’s work is neither complete nor perfect, even David A. Varel notes that it has real limitations such as a top-down point of view and a failure to account for the role of gender in the social caste system. Davis’s work is foundational to the social sciences, and he is often not credited with his contributions to their development in America. There is no doubt that Allison Davis was a brilliant, brave, and groundbreaking social scientist. He deserves to be remembered as a fearless badass.

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Sources :

Banks, William M. Review of The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought by David A. Varel. The American Historical Review, vol. 124, no. 4, 2019, pp. 1471–72.

Cornell University Library Digital Collections Bookreader. https://reader.library.cornell.edu/docviewer/digital?id=chla2932634#page/5/mode/1up. Accessed 28 June 2026.

DAVIS and DOLLARD. Children of Bondage (Book Review) - ProQuest. https://www.proquest.com/openview/87210d3004b815b91a319902fbda7dd1/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1816368. Accessed 29 June 2026.

“‘First, Tell the Truth.’” National Parks Conservation Association, https://www.npca.org/articles/3269-first-tell-the-truth. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Hillis, Michael R. “Allison Davis and the Study of Race, Social Class, and Schooling.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 64, no. 1, 1995, pp. 33–41. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2967282.

Resistance by Enslaved People in Natchez, Mississippi (1719-1861) - 2006-02. https://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/issue/slave-resistance-in-natchez-mississippi-1719-1861. Accessed 28 June 2026.

The Birth of American Intelligence Testing. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/assessment. Accessed 30 June 2026.

Varel, David A. Allison Davis: Social Scientist for Social Justice A Journal on Black Men, Autumn 2021, Vol. 9, No. 1-2, Black MaleIntellectuals (Autumn 2021), pp. 37-53. Indiana University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/spectrum.9.1-2.04. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Forgotten Black Scholar Studied – and Faced – Structural Racism in the 1940s | Urban Faith. https://urbanfaith.com/forgotten-black-scholar-studied-and-faced-structural-racism-in-the-1940s/. Accessed 29 June 2026.

When America’s Richest City Was in Mississippi: The Forgotten Story of Natchez | RealClearHistory. https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2026/06/10/when_americas_richest_city_was_in_mississippi_the_forgotten_story_of_natchez_1187095.html. Accessed 28 June 2026.

This doesn’t mean the two disciplines don’t ever cross paths. There are archaeologists and biological anthropologists who study human evolution (we are talking 7 million years ago (mya)+/-). They will often have some interaction and cross-study work done with paleontologists. While visiting friends in South Dakota this summer, I visited an active excavation site that is a perfect example of an interconnected paleontological and archaeological site. Known simply as the Mammoth Site, it is an enclosed, climate-controlled location you can visit anytime. It turns out that if you can control environmental factors, you can dig pretty much indefinitely. (Not that you would want to for many reasons.)

The Mammoth Site is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that serves as a hub for research and education at every level. The program offers summer educational programming, internships, and visiting researcher options. The site itself dates from the Late Pleistocene, 190,000-140,000 years ago, and contains remains of Columbian mammoths, woolly mammoths, ancient camels, llamas, pronghorn antelopes, giant short-faced bears, wolves, coyotes, badgers, and various other small mammals and rodents. The site itself is rare because of the natural phenomena that created it. It was a lake formed by a hot spring during the last ice age, with lots of vegetation, but slippery, difficult terrain surrounding it. An animal would get a drink, swim, or try to eat the plants around the lake, and then fall into the water, which was extremely difficult to escape. The lake’s victims would eventually be covered by sediment, burying and preserving their skeletons until they were discovered in June of 1974.

Landowner Phil Anderson was developing housing in the Hot Springs area when it was decided to level some of the hills. After heavy equipment driven by George Hanson unearthed a mammoth skeleton, Anderson decided to halt work on the land until a paleontologist could be contacted to excavate the site and determine its nature. Anderson contacted several universities, but received very little response. Thankfully, George Hanson’s son, Dan, had attended Chadron State College and had connections with the geology department. Dan Hanson showed his former college professor, Larry Agenbroad, Ph.D., a sample of the bones unearthed by his father. Agenbroad decided it was worth the time to check out the Hot Springs site.

The initial investigation of what the builders had uncovered showed there were at least four and as many as six mammoths, and Agenbroad knew there had to be more just beneath the surface. Knowing that the excavation season was soon ending, and that winter snows could be detrimental to the exposed mammoth bones, and that halting a building project would cost a considerable amount of money, Agenbroad had to send an excavation team immediately.

Agenbroad was already working with his teams on two different sites, Arizona and southeastern Nebraska, so he sent a colleague, Jim Mead, Ph.D., along with some of his team members to quickly excavate and assess the size and scope of the Hot Springs site. Mead and his team worked to stabilize and protect the site.

It was decided that the following year, 1975, Agenbroad and Mead would lead a more focused excavation in Hot Springs. The results of the excavation and the growing interest among visitors led Phil Anderson to decide against developing 14 acres of land. Instead, he established the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, SD, Inc. to protect and preserve the site for future generations of scientific researchers.

This site boasts amazing preservation; they even have intact hyoid bones, which are extremely rare. The Hot Springs site has proven useful for understanding the age at death of Columbian mammoths, their age distribution, and their relationships to the larger mammoth herds. It has driven discussion about mammoth social groups. In a 2013 article in the French publication PALEO, Sophie Louguet-Lefebvre discusses how the absence of juveniles at the site might indicate that most of the site’s victims were males isolated from the herd. The site’s overrepresentation of males might reflect how the matriarchal herd structure protected females and juveniles from environmental hazards such as the Hot Springs sinkhole, leaving solitary males most exposed.

The Mammoth Site is educational and fun for the whole family, and a great way to introduce young academics to a working paleontological dig. The museum also includes several items associated with nearby kill and processing sites for mammoths, where humans would have left material remains alongside the mammoth remains. They also include the difference between archaeologists and paleontologists, which made me far happier than I should have been.

It truly was a pleasure seeing a site open to visitors that had a strong academic focus. If you find yourself in the Black Hills, I would highly recommend visiting the Mammoth Site. It gives the average person a true representation of an academic excavation and what we can learn from studying the past.

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Sources:

History - The Mammoth Site. 31 May 2022, https://mammothsite.org/history/.

Isotopic Analysis and Mobility Mapping of Mammuthus Columbi from the Mammoth Site in South Dakota - ProQuest. https://www.proquest.com/openview/90bf0e71ec811fcf02ccb765278ba79f/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y. Accessed 25 June 2026.

Louguet-Lefebvre, Sophie. “The Columbian Mammoths from the Upper Pleistocene of Hot Springs (South Dakota, United States).” PALEO. Revue d’archéologie Préhistorique, no. 24, Dec. 2013, pp. 149–71. journals.openedition.org, https://doi.org/10.4000/paleo.2861.

The movie is based on Leonie Swann’s 2005 novel Three Bags Full, which, originally written in German, is a murder mystery set in Ireland. The movie follows the same basic setup, save for a location change to England: a loner, vegetarian shepherd, George Hardy, played by Jackman, is mysteriously murdered one night, and his sheep have to help the hapless human police officer, played by Nicholas Braun of Succession fame, solve the mystery of who killed their kind and protective shepherd. The duty of solving the murder falls to Shepherd Hardy’s smartest CGI sheep, Lily, voiced by Louis-Dreyfus.

Very early in the movie, the audience learns that the flock has a superpower: together, they can close their eyes and willfully forget any bad memory or thought. If the knowledge of something was too sad, they would close their eyes together, and like magic, the memory would be gone from the collective. Except for one sheep, Mopple, for some odd reason, doesn’t have the ability to forget. Mopple, voiced by O’Dowd, can’t forget, so he alone has to carry all the collective bad memories for the entire flock. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he has to keep the lie the flock comes up with to deal with discrepancies in the collective memory. A role he willingly accepts until the death of his shepherd, Hardy. The flock wants to immediately forget their kindly shepherd because the knowledge of his death is too much to bear. A younger lamb suggests that perhaps their shepherd was murdered because that is what happens to all the humans in the books their shepherd would read to them each night before bed. Lily, who had always been the best at solving the murder mystery novels, is convinced that she has to get justice for Hardy, and so gets the rest of the flock to agree to remember.

Throughout the movie, you learn more about the complicated lives of the shepherd and the others in this quaint English town. The sheep must get out of their comfort zone together and try to find a way to shepherd the town police officer to the correct murderer of their beloved Hardy.

At several points in the movie, the main character, Lily, has to relearn some hard lessons she had willfully forgotten. One main idea that the whole herd has forgotten is death. That sheep can and do die. They had bought into the lie that sheep just turn into clouds when they die, and not the reality that death comes for us all. In an incredibly heartbreaking scene, Mopple has to help Lily realize that she had willfully forgotten her parents and other loved ones from the flock, all because the memory of them was too sad to handle. Lily apologizes to Mopple for having to carry the weight of all this sad knowledge alone. Mopple tells Lily that, while some of his memories are sad, he also keeps all the good stuff. He can actually remember his mother’s face, the happy memories of his friends he lost along the way, and he also understands that life with humans is far more complicated than the sweet, safe life he had with their shepherd. He remembers it all, and that erasing the bad stuff also erases the good. This is where I broke, as a parent broke, and I couldn’t hold it in any longer. My son, all pink-faced, is watching these sheep humorously lead a human around by his nose, and I am trying to hide my big alligator tears in the popcorn bucket.

I identified way too much with a sheep for comfort. I am a historian on many levels for my family and publicly here on this Substack and as a volunteer at the Poe Museum. I am confronted at every level by people who would rather forget than face the harsh reality of our collective past. People will actively cringe when I bring up slavery as a part of Edgar Allan Poe’s life, even though by definition, he grew up in the Antebellum South. I make mention of his primary caregiver, an enslaved woman by the name of Nancy, and for some people, you can feel their sphincter tighten. When asked how Poe came up with ideas for his horror, my personal belief is that what he wrote probably stemmed, on a subconscious level, from things he saw or experienced because of that vile practice. It isn’t like slavery was compartmentalized from the rest of Southern society; it was an evil that corrupted all parts of life. Just saying the words “enslaved person” to some people makes them all blink and pretend they didn’t hear it.

As a country, we are watching monuments change, and narratives erased from the hard but critical truth of our nation. We don’t get to keep the glorious parts of our history and erase all the pain and blood that it cost to get there. We don’t get to keep the beauty of jazz, southern cooking, barbecue, and all of the wonderful things that are a part of national identity, while erasing the hardship of Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian, and Native people. The United States of America has been a bloody, complicated struggle in the making, and erasing just one part of that tapestry unweaves it. Our country cannot afford to blink and forget all the troubling aspects of our nation.

Maybe now you can understand why, after all these attempts to change our nation’s education, books, and monuments, I found myself crying in a bucket of popcorn while watching CGI sheep choosing not to forget. The keepers of our history can’t forget. It is our sacred duty to remember the good, the bad, and the ugly bits of our shared past. We preserve it even when everyone else would rather forget. We do it out of love and knowing that we cannot hope to reshape our future if we remember only the good parts of our past.

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It wears on a soul like a nagging invisible weight, that somehow you are presenting yourself in a way that will harm your future employment, community, or even change the way people treat you. It is society’s snap judgment to place labels on individuals, so they think they know you. And you can twist yourself into knots trying to be seen in the way you wish to be seen.

This is a con.

You will never be able to make others understand you who have no desire to ever truly understand you. It is a hard lesson I have struggled with: the idea that if I just do the right things, check off the right lists, someone somewhere will actually see me for who I am. Not the labels that get attached to me so quickly, the assumptions, the ever-present marketing research that is supposed to know me better than I know myself.

If Appalachia had a single defining sentiment, it would be the refusal to accept another definition. “You think you know us, but you know nothing.”

When I think of a voice that is powerful and unapologetic, and that refuses to be defined by outsiders, it is that of the great Black Appalachian poet Nikki Giovanni. While I am as pale as the day is long on the summer solstice, she was a light of radical self-determination that spoke deeply to me. Her race was something she refused to let anyone define for her. Her poor background was not to be used as pity against her. Her role as a mother and her sexuality were not up for discussion or debate. They were hers; she defined them. If she made you uncomfortable, then that was your problem, not hers.

I am no fool, and yes, she probably wouldn’t have trusted me. And given the history, if I were in her position, I wouldn’t trust me either. No one can deny that she lived by her own rules, and fuck anyone who tried to tell her otherwise. She was a Black woman, born poor in Knoxville, Queer, and proud.

She Did Not Hide.

On June 7th, 1943, Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni Jr. was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her parents were educators, Yolande Cornelia Sr. and Jones “Gus” Giovanni, who would move to Lincoln Heights, Ohio, to work at a school when Nikki was four years old. She would live in Ohio with her family until 1958, when she would move back to Knoxville to live with her grandparents for high school. In 1967, Giovanni would graduate with honors, a B.A. in History from Fisk University in Nashville. During her time at Fisk University, she would publish and edit literary journals on campus and be a part of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

Birth of an Artist

After the death of her grandmother, Giovanni would turn to poetry to cope with the loss. Over the next few years, she would try out different paths, such as getting her Master’s in Social Work, a semester or two in an M.F.A program, but all the while she was actively immersing herself in the late 1960’s Black Arts Scene. In 1968, she published her first collection of poetry, Black Feeling Black Talk. And in 1969, most scandalously of all, she gave birth, unwed, to her only child, Thomas Watson Giovanni.

To better understand Giovanni, I read Conversations with Nikki Giovanni, edited by her wife, Virginia Fowler, which has made this one of my most interesting and exciting research topics. Hearing Giovanni, in her own words, discuss certain aspects of her life has given me insight and made me adore the author even more. In an interview with Ebony magazine, Giovanni discusses why she chose to be a single mother and how she feels about outsiders, particularly White people, who impose their own stigmas on her work.

Giovanni could not muster enough care to register others’ complaints. Reading her words when she was a young black woman, Giovanni couldn’t give a shit. She had a child because she wanted one and could afford to have one. She didn’t need your permission or acceptance on any of her life choices, and it was her life to live. If you didn’t like it, then you could let the screen door hit your ass on your way out. Giovanni owned her past, present, and future. Society’s expectations, or even its interpretation of her past, were not welcome for discussion.

She took critical reviews of her work with a grain of salt; they were not for her. She did not perform for them, nor did she accept her own people’s advice on how to be successful. In an interview, Giovanni discussed how Black publishing companies would often tell her not to publish with White firms or do White media. She was first and foremost for the Black Community, but she would not follow rules dictated to her from on high that she did not agree with. Giovanni had to walk her own path, make her own rules, and do things in a way that made sense to her. She, like her poetry, was a non-conformist, challenging, and fearless. Playing a game was not something she was interested in. She was far more concerned about the future of Black Americans and how she could help shape the world for herself and her son. She loved her people, and anything short of pushing forward a better future wasn’t up for discussion.

Her Own Evolution

Motherhood changed Giovanni, as becoming a parent changes all people. She turned from the external and began to explore the internal aspects of herself. Who was she? What did she want to pass on from her ancestors to the next generation? What made the fight worth fighting for? Her answers turned towards her own family, community, and most importantly, her son.

During this period, Giovanni began to question whether a revolution was worth any cost, and, according to a 1973 interview with Lynn Litterine, a writer for The Record of Bergen County, New Jersey, she did not want to see harm done to others. New York at this time was facing an increase in crime targeted toward the poor and elderly of all races. She had seen several elderly people robbed or raped by young people. If this was going to be the shape of the Revolution, then Giovanni wanted no part of it.

She wanted a Revolution in knowledge, thought, and a way for Black people to think for themselves. She did not wish for anarchy and crime. She wanted Black minds to be free to determine their own fates, make their own choices, and exercise their agency. For Black people to seize Democratic power through Supreme Court justices, Judges, Congress, and collective action. She wanted empowerment, not destruction.

In 1971, Nikki Giovanni released Truth is on Its Way, an album that married spoken-word poetry with Gospel music; her most ambitious work to date for its fusion of two distinct art forms. It was a tribute to her family’s love and upbringing. It was a celebration of Black joy, hope, and community; Giovanni cited the Gospel music of her childhood as being instrumental to her development as a poet. By using music, she was able to reach a larger audience and bring in an ancestral art practice, with her words contributing to the evolution of the culture.

As Giovanni grew and matured as a woman, this was reflected in her work and the audience she began to reach. She began publishing poetry and children’s books, her first being Spin a Soft Black Song (1971). The book received much praise for its celebration of childhood joy and the way Giovanni wrote to children. She spoke to them as equals and not in a condescending manner. Of course, it spoke to the Black childhood experience, with love and joy.

Giovanni would write thirteen children’s books from 1971 until 2022, covering topics from the Black experience, history, and the magic that could be found in libraries. In 2001, Nikki Giovanni even appeared on Reading Rainbow, hosted by LeVar Burton, to read her book My America: A Poetry Atlas of the U.S. She felt it was a privilege to write for future generations of America.

Soft Heart, Firm Mind, and Identity.

In later interviews, Giovanni showed a softer and more hopeful side, but she never apologized for her identity or beliefs. In a 1983 interview for Claudia Tate’s Black Women Writers at Work, Tate asks Giovanni about her growth as an artist and her thoughts and feelings on the 1950s and 1960s ideas about “The Revolution.” Giovanni talks openly and honestly about the great strides made during the Civil Rights Movement, and she discusses perspectives on the division between the sexes. It is interesting to note the change in Giovanni’s thinking from that of a young Black mother in her interviews from the late 60s. She seemed firmly dead set against her son marrying anyone other than a Black woman, but during this interview in the 1980s, she seems to be encouraging Black women to explore the variety of options available to them. Giovanni wants Black women to view the world as their oyster and explore whether a man from a different cultural background might love and worship them. Giovanni doesn’t want them to limit themselves, but to find love with someone who truly wants and desires them. It is a beautiful and empowering shift that fits with the cultural changes of the time. Giovanni is also quick to avoid defining or limiting what is considered Black culture. In her mind, if a Black person is creating art, any kind of art, it is inherently Black and a part of the culture. And if there is anything Giovanni believes in, it is Black cultural power. She grew up in a world in which White Supremacy was the accepted norm, and looking at the history of Black people in America, their ability not only to survive, but to thrive in spite of the open hostility, it is hard not to agree.

Teaching and Love

In 1987, Nikki Giovanni was recruited to be a professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Giovanni taught creative writing and literature. Virginia C. Fowler was responsible for recruiting the influential Black poet, and while it is unclear when or how it happened, Giovanni was private; the two began a relationship that would last until Giovanni’s death in 2024. They shared more than a life together; they also had a close personal and professional relationship, which led to the Giovanni-Fowler Endowment for the Humanities in 2010. The focus of the endowment was to provide financial support to voices from underrepresented communities.

In the 2000s, Giovanni would find herself in the midst of another American cultural epidemic, a mass shooting. One of her students in 2005 had caused problems for the professor, citing his menacing behavior in her classroom. That student was Seung-Hui Cho, and on April 16, 2007, he would kill 32 people at Virginia Tech, resulting in one of the most horrific shooting sprees at an American University. Cho would eventually take his own life before the nightmare was eventually over. Giovanni would be asked to write a speech for the reeling Virginia Tech student body, despite her fear that her emotions would prevent her from bringing the community together. Giovanni proved once again that she was a poet and speaker for the ages, meeting the moment with honesty and hope when her academic community needed it the most.

Legacy

On December 9, 2024, with her lifelong partner, Virginia Fowler, at her side, Nikki Giovanni left this world. She was a strong, creative voice during one of America’s most tumultuous times. Giovanni was the queen of her own narrative, unashamed of her background, and did not diminish or shrink herself for anyone’s comfort. She owned her experiences, growth, and herself. And that is why she will forever be a Badass of History.

If you are interested in Nikki Giovanni, check out the documentary Going to Mars, currently streaming on Max.

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Sources:

Giovanni, N. (1992). Conversations with Nikki Giovanni (V. C. Fowler, Ed.). University Press of Mississippi.

Giovanni, Nikki. “Nikki Giovanni.” Nikki Giovanni,

https://nikki-giovanni.com

. Accessed 3 June 2026.

———. “Nikki Giovanni.” Nikki Giovanni,

https://nikki-giovanni.com

. Accessed 10 June 2026.

I’ve Done My Job: An Interview with Nikki Giovanni – The Fight & The Fiddle. https://fightandfiddle.com/2020/10/31/ive-done-my-job-an-interview-with-nikki-giovanni/. Accessed 10 June 2026.

lkapoet. “I’ve Done My Job: An Interview with Nikki Giovanni.” The Fight & The Fiddle, 31 Oct. 2020, https://fightandfiddle.com/2020/10/31/ive-done-my-job-an-interview-with-nikki-giovanni/.

Neal (T/X: @NewBlackMan), Mark Anthony. “‘Truth Is On It’s Way’: Nikki Giovanni Takes the Revolution to Church by Mark Anthony Neal.” Medium, 28 Feb. 2024, https://medium.com/@tnimixtape/truth-is-on-its-way-nikki-giovanni-takes-the-revolution-to-church-by-mark-anthony-neal-1122fc36d5de.

“Nikki Giovanni.” National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/nikki-giovanni. Accessed 11 June 2026.

“Nikki Giovanni.” The Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/nikki-giovanni. Accessed 10 June 2026.

Nikki Giovanni, Black Queer Icon, Dead at 81 | Advocate.Com. https://www.advocate.com/news/black-queer-poet-nikki-giovanni-dies. Accessed 3 June 2026.

Poets, Academy of American. Reading Rainbow: “My America, A Poetry Atlas of the U.S.” Text. https://poets.org/text/reading-rainbow-my-america-poetry-atlas-us. Accessed 11 June 2026.

“Protecting Our Southern Heritage” has always been coded for White Supremacy. Spoken as both a threat and an excuse to do whatever is deemed necessary to protect the established social order. An aristocracy built on subjugation and cultural hate. Anyone who tries to break the established rank and order could be at best ostracized and at worst killed.

The “South” forgets one thing: they oversimplify themselves into a broad term. They forget the history and cultural nuances that make up various regions. And as I have been told in both good and bad ways, that Southern Appalachia ain’t really the South. Because no great plantations covered the region, there was slavery, and it should not be minimized. It didn’t thrive there because the region has historically been poorer than the rest of the country. In fact, when most people think of Appalachia, they don’t even think about the Brown and Black people who call these mountains home. As if our lack of investments in the peculiar institution of slavery should be seen as counting against us. Also, many Eastern Tennesseans joined the Union during the American Civil War, leading many within the Southern Plantation class to view them as traitors. This can lead a person to desperately seek acceptance from the Southern Aristocracy, as President Andrew Johnson did. He famously gave the former Confederacy everything they asked for without any consideration of the fact that they had just led a rebellion against the country. Or one could exploit outsider status to critically criticize the culture, as writer Wilma Dykeman does.

Wilma Dykeman was born in Buncombe County, North Carolina, on May 20, 1920. She would often cite the region’s land and culture as instrumental in developing her voice as a writer. She was known for both fiction, such as The Tall Woman (1962), and non-fiction works, such as The French Broad (1955) and Neither Black Nor White (1957). She would go on to serve as a State Historian for Tennessee while living in Newport with her husband and sometimes collaborator, James R. Stokely, Jr. She worked at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and was a foundational educator in Appalachian Studies. After her death in 2006, she was returned to her childhood home in North Carolina so that she could be buried next to her mother. It was a fitting return to the land that raised her, and a final connection to the culture that had inspired her to speak truth rather than settle into quietly loaded complacency.

The French Broad (1955)

When discussing the emergence of Environmental advocacy writing, many cite Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (1963) as the first. However, this overlooks Dykeman’s book The French Broad (1955), in which she documents the river’s historical importance to the region. She echoes what Emma Bell Miles wrote in 1905 in “The Spirit of the Mountains,” demonstrating that the Appalachian people depend on the land for their survival. This region is historically known for using personal farming, hunting, and foraging to fill gaps that would otherwise lead to food insecurity. Practices that are still used by many Appalachian Families today.

Dykeman makes a compelling argument that the health of the people is directly tied to the health of the land, and that all Appalachians have a duty to protect the environment that sustains them. She points directly to industrialization and extractive economies for harming the river and the Appalachian people, making The French Broad a call to environmental activism before that term existed. She called on everyone to protect the river, for while it belonged to no one, this meant it belonged to everyone. She believed, along with other authors such as Miles, that if the river were poisoned, the community would be as well.

Neither Black Nor White (1957)

I am not going to lie to you, my readers; it terrifies me that certain aspects of this book are still relevant today. First, Dykeman criticizes how people view the South as a monolith, and how many times have I heard a fellow Southerner complain about this? “I am from the Old South, not the Deep South! We are two different places.” Hell, I have even written about it myself, but what unsettles me is to hear the same arguments used against Black and Brown people today, coming from the pages of a book now sixty-nine years old!

It is always something to the effect of, ‘Working-class Whites are complaining that they are being taxed to care for the Blacks, when they believe that Blacks don’t pay taxes!’ All you need to do is switch out the word Black for Immigrants or Mexicans, and that could come from a TikTok video from today. I will tell you that this book has some issues in its portrayal of the South at the start of the Civil Rights Era; it is told from the perspective of White Southerners, and interviews conducted with Black Americans would have been influenced by the fact that they were interviewed by White people. All of these are honest and justifiable criticisms of the book, but the truly terrifying part is the part that still applies today.

Looking at the book Neither Black Nor White, along with other critical articles such as “What is the Southern Way of Life,” Dykeman knows that the complexity of Southern life is key to understanding and rebuilding. No matter how we try to remove the stain of slavery from our history without addressing it, we weaken the structure upon which we hope to build a New South. We have to address our past with honesty and directness, confronting the lies upon which all this stereotypical rhetoric is built. If we are to have hope and a future, we must confront both the ugliness of our past and the promise of a better, more equitable future.

Another interesting point made by Dykeman and Stokely is the lack of a common shared reality between White and Black Southerners. Misunderstandings and stereotypes plague the interactions, for many White Southerners falsely believed the paternalistic view held by them was seen as a net good for both communities. They truly believed the lie of the “White Man’s Burden,” and lacked the empathy, or perhaps were disinterested in understanding the perspectives of the descendants of the Freed People. Some White people seem genuinely surprised that anyone would want to disrupt the status quo of the American South. In her book, she spoke with Black academics at the forefront of challenging these long-held perceptions and showed that most of the rhetorical arguments were based on misconceptions and lies. The talking points of their day were fed to them by the powerful White elites who were seen as their betters in the Southern Power structure.

It is a direct reflection of the pyramid scheme that is social power within the American South. Only those descendants of the plantation class, with all the wealth and power at the very top, have all the others having to struggle or bend to the whims of those above them. It is America’s caste system, with a vague promise of hope to those just beneath, that one day they will be good enough to be allowed at the very top. However, we all know that is not how pyramid schemes work. If there were truly upward mobility, then the societal scheme would collapse. (See Anthropologist Allison Davis for more, Future Bad Ass of History Part IV)

Dykeman, with her husband, Stokely, would criticize the lies and false rhetoric that would continue to plague the Civil Rights movement in the American South. It makes me wonder what she would have to say about the Civil Rights black slide, the Supreme Court striking down important parts of the Civil Rights Voting Act, and the anger towards the Hispanic and Latin American communities, and the recycled hateful slogans being used from their day. Such as the idea that these groups pay little to no taxes while benefiting from government support. This was an argument made against Black people in the South, which we all can categorically agree is a falsehood. In the same way that people try to say the immigrant community profits from our social systems without paying any taxes, another easily disproven claim.

Appalachian Bad Ass

Wilma Dykeman was raised in the Blue of the North Carolina Mountains, wrote and taught in the midst of the Smokies. Perhaps it was her outsider status as an Appalachian that gave her the ability to see through the power structures at play that sought to silence her for her views on Environmental Protections and her frank, honest discussion of the Civil Rights movement occurring throughout the American South. She had protections that many Appalachian women did not; her husband inherited a successful canning business founded by his parents. She was also White, so any direct attack could be seen as an attack on societal norms and expectations. She used her advantages to speak truth to power and call out coded words and phrases, in the hope that knowledge could lead to true liberation for all Southerners. Not just the ones at the very top of the protected pyramid. She is an example of using your privilege for change and progress.

Wilma Dykeman should be remembered as a woman who used storytelling to bring truth to her fellow Southerners and the American people. She challenged the accepted norms and decoded the hidden meanings behind phrases used to silence Southerners and mislead those outside of the South. She cut through the Public Relations tricks of those trying to maintain the South’s aristocracy. She carried the Appalachian tradition of speaking truth, and we, her cultural descendants, have the obligation to speak truthfully to all sides for the betterment of our home and all our people, no matter their skin tone, sexuality, gender, or country of origin. The South is diverse and beautiful, and it is up to us to carry on this proud legacy of speaking up for all who call this land their home. Then this will truly be a land of beauty, hospitality, and riches, as it has always claimed to be.

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Sources:

“About Wilma Dykeman.” UNC Asheville, https://go.unca.edu/wir/about/. Accessed 25 May 2026.

AMoH. April 24, 1955: Wilma Dykeman’s The French Broad - Asheville Museum of History. 24 Apr. 2022, https://www.ashevillehistory.org/april-24-1955-wilma-dykemans-the-french-broad/.

Dykeman, Wilma. The French Broad. Rinehart & Company, 1955.

Dykeman, Wilma. “What Is the Southern Way of Life?” Southwest Review, vol. 44, no. 2, 1959, pp. 163–66.

Wilma Dykeman and the Women of Appalachia: The Ecology of Mid-Century Environmental Activism on JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40004615?seq=1. Accessed 25 May 2026.

Wilma Dykeman Legacy - About Wilma Dykeman. https://www.wilmadykemanlegacy.org/who-we-are/about-wilma-dykeman. Accessed 25 May 2026.

Dykeman, Wilma, and James Stokely. Neither Black Nor White. Clarke, Irwin, and Company, 1957.

Woody, Robert H. “The French Broad by Wilma Dykeman.” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3, July 1956, pp. 397–98. Silverchair, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-55-3-397.

For further information on Wilma Dykeman, please visit the Legacy Foundation in her name. https://www.wilmadykemanlegacy.org/

My article on Emma Bell Miles

My favorite is Cthulhu, the giant monster hidden away deep in the ocean and time, sleeping, waiting for humans to call him forth in acts of self-destruction. He has many tentacles, and when you think of an octopus’s tentacle, it can be extremely scary. They can open jars, solve puzzles, and even lay traps, all with these muscular appendages. Think of the famous movie scenes where sailors fight the mighty kraken. If it were just one object, the sailors could work as a team and easily defeat the beaky monster. But its tentacles act individually, dividing our sailors, leading to their death and destruction. It is just one monster, but it is so smart and nimble that it easily divides them. Lovecraft was pretty right to be terrified of octopuses; if they ever overpowered us, we would be doomed. We could never go to the beaches again.

In anthropology, we learn a multitude of words and terms to help us quickly describe the world around us. One way in which anthropologists interpret the world around them is through power structures, governmental, social, and political. To understand how a culture assigns power, status is typically divided into two types: ascribed and achieved. Ascribed status is assigned at birth. Achieved status is something you earn. Almost all cultures use both forms of ranking; your identity is complex and derives from a multitude of attributes. And your status can fluctuate depending on the situation you are in. If I walk into a room full of historians, politicians, or academics, I am no one. But if I walk through my front door, I am the most essential person in the world. Think of it as a sliding scale: some cultures are more ascribed-status-oriented, others more achievement-oriented, but 95% of cultures fall somewhere on the spectrum.

Sometimes, when I am working on a history project, my anthropological lens takes over, and I can’t stop it.

I have been working on Part II of my Badass series, Wilma Dykeman, and reading books and news articles from the 1950’s about Racism in America. You start to see that much of Southern “Heritage” is based on ascribed status. With some extremely limited achieved status. This makes sense if slavery was based on skin color. How you look tells everyone around you how to treat you and whether or not they are better than you. How you present tells everyone how worthy you are of your humanity. When they say they are defending our Southern Traditions, they are essentially just defending a heavily ascribed status social structure.

When so much of a culture is based on ascribed traits, it also plays into the difficulties we see with Trans Rights. If you present one way, but your ascribed-at-birth status is different, then they have not kept to their own defined social minimums. They could have treated you better than they had to because you are now presenting as a man of a higher social rank. Besides, who wouldn’t want to be a man? That is trading up in power. The opposite, and probably, in their minds, a worse offense, is treating someone as a lower-status individual when they were born higher-status. By treating someone like a woman who was not born a woman, they are negating their own vestige of power. It doesn’t matter how you feel on the inside, because why would you choose to be weaker and lose power? What is the gain? For some, this is the only claim to any social power at all, and the idea that someone would “willingly” give it away would prove that their idea of manhood and their right to power is not based on biological truth.

To win the power is to have a cultural bingo card of all the right ascribed traits, or to cobble it together with a little of ascribed status; then, your children will finally one day hold all the right traits. Born wealthy, Cis, White, male, and hetero. It’s a Bingo! That is why they are saying there is a baby crisis, because there aren’t enough poor Whites who are just one Bingo Ball away from a win! Because that’s the most dangerous time for a person, what if I just held out one more generation, and my line could have all the right traits? Why should I break the system if I am this close to winning?

The Bingo Ball is a lie.

There is another layer. Old money vs new money. And there will always be another trait that you don’t have that will always keep you away from power. You will always be consumed.

Maybe that is why the best horrors are set in the South. The cultural power structure of the South has been based on being born to the right family, the right religion, the right looks, liking the right things, and loving the right people. It is a checklist that, if you can just sell enough of your soul, maybe just maybe the powers that be won’t consume you.

Cthulhu will always eat you, but maybe you are just bargaining that he will eat you last.

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To my readers, Wilma Dykeman will be out next Friday for my Badass series. Thank you for your understanding.

I had the privilege of attending my first-ever RISC town hall-style meeting in March of 2026, and it was fantastic. Being from North Carolina and knowing next to nothing about the organization or even what local Richmond politics looks like, I certainly did not know what to expect. I was thinking of the small organizations that my Aunt Rose often participated in with her work on victims of violent, sexual, or domestic crimes. These organizations were important and fairly substantial — but they didn't prepare me for what I encountered that night.

The goal was to have 2,700 people in attendance from Richmond and the Greater RVA area, with 22 congregations from various religious backgrounds represented, and I was humbled. It was a massive turnout. I believe they reached their goal because almost every seat was filled, and people were out in the halls. A wide variety of congregations, with three different interpreters, were needed to ensure that all members could follow the conversation. It was beautiful.

What impressed me most about this organization, more than the great breadth of people who composed it, was its focus on accountability. The organization votes, researches, and reaches out to local public officials, working with them to create plans that are both winnable and actionable. They also monitor whether laws, once passed, are followed to the letter.

I can understand why this organization can strike fear into the hearts of many elected public officials, and it did. One public official, Mayor Danny Avula, was on the fence about attending the meeting, but mustered his courage and faced the people. For that, he earned my respect; it is often difficult to enter a room knowing you will face backlash. Another official, one of my local county officials, Mark S. Miller, Ph.D, lost his courage and decided it was too much to face. I cannot say how other constituents will react, but I can promise you that I will remember that come next election season.

The meetings are like a semi-casual church service with music, humor, and joy. They start the meeting by going over the issues this organization has voted on to take up for each year. This year, the three main focus points were the affordability issues in RVA, the Teen Mental Health Crisis in Chesterfield County, and the rising gun violence epidemic—three concerning issues here in RVA and nationwide.

Before the meeting started, because many of the people there were quite passionate about these topics, the leaders set out some ground rules. The RISC team would present an argument or plea on the issue, along with a possible solution. The audience was encouraged to cheer and respond with phrases like “It’s the law” or “worth the risk.” But we were not allowed to boo if we received a response we were not happy with; instead, we were to remain silent while the leaders worked to negotiate a possible alternative request. Hopefully, something the local official could say yes to.

The first on the docket was the price of rental properties in RVA, which have been escalating at an alarming rate. The average price of a one-bedroom apartment is about $ 1,600, according to Zillow. Which, if I were working on the national minimum wage, would be near impossible.

This is why, in 2020, RISC helped draft and pass a law creating a trust fund to provide low-income earners with access to rent assistance, so they could afford to rent in the neighborhoods where they work. Pretty solid victory.

However, it became apparent in 2022 that the local administration had no intentions of following this ordinance, and RISC stayed on top of the public officials. (Read more about this trust here.) They persisted and insisted that this law be followed, and the current Richmond City Mayor, Danny Avula, ran on a promise to fulfill that budget obligation. Since his election, Avula, a Democrat, has waffled on his promise of allotting the correct amount of money to the city’s budget. You can understand why Mayor Avula was hesitant to make an appearance; after all, every elected official has their job at the people’s pleasure. They serve us. And as of the March meeting, the city’s budget still did not include the legally required monetary allotment. Mayor Avula overcame his misgivings and attended as the RISC leaders put forth their arguments.

However, with Avula’s attendance, he and the people who elected him were able to address the issue head-on. And Avula promised once again to correct the budgeting error and comply with the law. At the time of this article’s publication, Avula has kept his word. An important victory for Richmonders.

Another part of the affordability crisis they hope to address is the decline in mobile/manufactured homes. Having grown up in a mobile home for most of my childhood, I know they are not built to last. They are made cheaply and can house some of the most vulnerable members of our population because of their cost-effectiveness. As these homes age, the breakdown happens much faster, and with their limited insulation, rodents and the weather will quickly affect those trying to find shelter in them. RISC is working with local contractors to provide maintenance and repairs to residents of aging, low-income homes. Ensuring that these homes provide protection and safety from the elements for their occupants.

Next on the community docket was the growing teen mental health crisis in my county of Chesterfield. As a mother of two boys in the Chesterfield County School system, I am still very upset that Mark S. Miller, Ph.D., did not have the courage to attend and at least discuss what the Board of Supervisors plans to do about this growing emergency. The near-constant influx of internet access, as well as the use of social media to bully students, is a national problem. Every parent that I know, no matter what side of the political spectrum they are on, is deeply concerned about this issue. Parents try to limit access to social media and group chats, but these are teenagers, and they will try to find a way around parental rules. It’s almost like rebellion is a normal part of human development.

What is exacerbating the mental health issue is the lack of available mental health providers for children and teens. According to local news reports, children and teens living in Chesterfield County have to wait up to 6 months to be seen in an emergency. Leaving parents and families without any professional help as they try to prevent their own child from hurting themselves.

RISC had developed a plan to work with local leaders in Chesterfield County to use an app for parents that would help them gain faster access to mental health care providers. It is an app that is already used in several RVA counties and has been shown to reduce wait times. The suggested app would also account for insurance coverage, or lack thereof, giving parents more options in critical moments.

Sadly, in Dr. Miller's absence, the lone Board Member, Jessica Schinder, promised to work on this issue with RISC and for the families of Chesterfield County. I know that Chesterfield County has a help line, and the local schools are providing their best, given their budget constraints. I think the larger issue we, as parents, must address is securing more funding for schools so they have enough staff and resources to handle this worsening issue. As of now, we will have to wait and see whether the Chesterfield Board of Supervisors will work with RISC in the future.

One of the toughest issues on the event's docket was the growing gun violence in the Richmond area. Gun-related deaths in Richmond have increased. In 2014, 38 people were killed by gun violence; in 2025, there were 54. We all understand that gun violence is a multifactorial problem; contributing factors such as low income, a lack of well-paying jobs, childcare, and after-school activities have all been shown to increase violence and crime in all areas. This makes neighborhoods dangerous to live in and puts law enforcement, emergency personnel, and bystanders at increased risk. You do not have to be an active participant in crime to become a victim of it.

RISC’s plan is to implement an evidence-based gun violence intervention program - either Group Violence Intervention (GVI) or Gun Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS), programs that have already demonstrated success in cities like Baltimore. These programs tackle gun violence as a multi-factorial issue, incorporating increased access to social services for those who need it, bridging a relationship with community leaders and local law enforcement, as well as an active pathway out of local crime groups. The people of the City of Richmond deserve for their children to grow up, and those who have lost their way due to a lack of economic opportunity deserve a clear path out.

Mayor Avula listened to the plea of those at RISC and agreed to push for the implementation of these programs in Richmond. He promised to continue working with RISC to align city strategies with the best evidence-based practices.

I have to admit that I am very impressed with Richmond and its justice-focused interfaith community. The program is well-researched, non-confrontational, and still holds political leaders accountable. RISC is a grassroots, community-based organization focused on serving RVA's needs.

The gutting of the Civil Rights Voting Act by the United States Supreme Court has been a harsh blow to many justice-focused Southerners. We know we are the battleground of American Justice, Freedom, and Civil Liberties. On social media, I see anger and depression coming from my fellow Americans who feel helpless and hopeless.

Instead of hopelessness, I offer an idea: find a local grassroots program you could work with to address your community's issues. This is how we build back the America we want, deserve, and need. Being a lone voice on the internet is difficult, but joining a group that is already fighting on the issues that you believe in is incredibly easy. You won’t be alone, and you don’t have to save the world by yourself. With a community, you can contribute what little time or money you have, and that small contribution will have a far greater impact. I alone cannot help Richmond, the South, or the United States. We all need a chorus of voices so loud we can never be silenced.

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Cited:

https://www.wric.com/news/local-news/risc-calls-on-richmond-and-chesterfield-leaders-to-act-on-housing-mental-health-and-gun-violence/

https://www.rva.gov/police/homicides-year

https://assets.nationbuilder.com/riscrichmond/pages/1/attachments/original/1769637775/What_is_RISC.pdf?1769637775

https://www.riscrichmond.org/

My paternal Grandfather is from Indiana and Michigan. I have visited there a few times; they were friendly, but I still felt awkward. My accent, language, and expressions stood out, clearly marking me as an outsider.

My paternal Grandmother’s home in Eastern Tennessee felt like stepping through a mirror into a place where I was seen and accepted. That my own perceived weirdness wasn’t shamed. Maybe playfully picked on a little, but never shamed. I was surrounded by people who wished to be perceived for who they are, not for what they are expected to be. We seemed to share the desire to be seen, and the wish to disappear into the self-chosen isolation of nature felt comforting and healing. Never truly choosing one thing or another, but a wish to somehow live in a third space of both. The desire to determine who you are, how you wish to be perceived, and that strong connection to the land always spoke to my own inner desires, despite the fact that I lived hundreds of miles away.

I don’t know if it is the ancient rocks, the sound of the river, or the occasional visit of black bears, but I long to wake up in those mountains and feel safe.

I know it was the women who took care of me there. The careful thread they try to weave around to protect against harmful forces unseen, and others seen and helpless to do anything. Because life, love, and society make everything so damn complicated. Those women made me safe, because it has been a long, difficult battle to ensure that I had more protections than they did.

It is difficult to love a place with so much beauty and yet watch as forces both inside and outside the community tear that world apart. Through poverty or skeletons hidden in ancient closets, some people wish long forgotten. Dark stories of pain, family turmoil, poverty, and isolation.

The mountains can feel like a cage, and it can feel like the rarest form of freedom on earth. People who want to be seen for who they are, not for who their family was, or for whatever preconceptions other people have of them. A place where you don’t have to explain yourself, a place to both be seen or unseen, depending on your mood. For many, it is a place they must leave to seek opportunities for themselves and their families. Sadly.

Appalachia is a beautiful, complicated mess for me, and I still love it. The mountains are just different, in both good and bad ways. You think that you can just leave them behind, but then let fog hit those trees in just the right way, or smell the chill in the air, and you long to run back there. Those woods speak in a way that no other could. That mossy stream that lives in your mind’s eye, or the way dark green grass looks on a partly sunny day, black cows standing next to a hollowed-out dead tree. It pulls at your heart and says, “Come home.”

You remember your Grandma yelling at her mother about her health, and your Great-Grandmother saying, “Oh, shut up, Marie!”

And you are back to the happiest place on earth, with never-ending food, company when you want it, and alone time when you need it. An old tire swing on the side of the hill, and clouds so close you swear you could touch them.

Appalachia has always haunted her people, and no matter how far they travel, we all seem to feel the call to come home. It is no surprise that Appalachia has produced so many poets, writers, naturalists, and environmentalists.

I have had a difficult time narrowing down some of them for my Bad Ass Sensitive People. (My last piece on Elizabeth L. Van Lew was the first of this series.) There have been some I have come across that I can’t just put into the series, but whose stories have profoundly spoken to me.

I am talking about Mrs. Emma Bell Miles, an artist, writer, and naturalist. The daughter of two teachers, Benjamin and Martha Bell, in Indiana, her family first moved to Kentucky, but it was Eastern Tennessee that Emma would call home. She would spend her formative years running around Walden Ridge (now known as Signal Mountain). She spent her time learning every stream, flower, and bird she could find on that hill. Documenting all her finds in her personal journal, the start of a true Naturalist.

Emma began to show interest in a local man named George Frank Miles, who went by Frank. According to George Brosi, the Miles family was one of the oldest in the area; his parents were folk healers who used Cherokee and European folk practices. Emma’s parents were concerned about the attention she paid to Frank and pushed her to focus on her education.

While visiting St. Louis in 1899 with a teacher, she applied to and was accepted into the St. Louis School of the Arts. She discovered Henry David Thoreau’s books, which inspired her to become a writer. While attending school, she soon became homesick. The more metropolitan life of St. Louis was not exciting, but tiresome, and she would yearn to return to the mountain ridge she called home. After two years, she left, leaving her degree behind.

Returning home, Emma’s mother, Martha, was suffering from Malaria and would eventually succumb to pneumonia on Oct. 3rd. Martha had intended to leave her Signal Mountain home to her only child, Emma. On Oct. 30, just weeks after her mother’s passing, Emma Bell would marry the man her parents despised, Frank Miles, in a secret elopement. They would move into Martha’s old home with Frank finding work at a nearby orchard, and Emma selling her artwork.

The couple welcomed their first children, twin girls, on September 8, 1902, with Frank’s mother serving as the midwife. Despite the odds, both twins and Emma survived the difficult birth. The following July, Emma’s father remarried and sold the house Martha had intended to leave to Emma. Due to the inheritance laws of the time, Emma and Frank would have no recourse but to seek help from Frank’s sister, Laura, who placed a makeshift tent on her property. This would be the first of many stints in which Emma and Frank had to live in tents on nearby family land.

In 1903, Emma Bell Miles had her first poem, “The Difference,” published in Harper’s thanks to a chance meeting with Alice and Grace MacGowan, daughters of the editor for The Chattanooga Times. They provided a powerful connection to the literary world that would have otherwise been closed to a mountain woman. Thanks to that connection, Emma had several other pieces published in Lippincott’s and Century, with her breakout piece, “Some Real American Music,” published in Harper’s. This essay led to Emma Bell Miles’ first book, “The Spirit of the Mountains,” published in 1905. Her work was praised for offering an insider’s perspective on the Southern Appalachian region, looking beyond stereotypes and providing a deep, personal understanding of the land and its people.

In 1905, before the publication of her story, Emma and Frank had purchased a home near the Miles family, and they welcomed their first son, Joe. Later, after the success of her book, Emma and Frank got an apartment in Hill City, just north of Chattanooga. Laura, Frank’s sister, joined the couple as she struggled to feed her newborn son. Emma would assume the role of wet nurse for her new nephew and feed her own little boy, Joe. During these moments, she was inspired to revisit her love for Henry David Thoreau, culminating in a poem dedicated to him, “On Reading Thoreau,” in 1906. This poem caused a woman from New Bedford, Massachusetts, named Anna Ricketson, to write a letter to Emma in response. According to Brosi, Ricketson’s father had been a friend of Thoreau, and a lifelong letter-driven friendship emerged. During times of financial hardship, Ricketson would send Emma items and goods to make her life easier or just to lift her spirits.

As time went on, Emma would struggle to write while taking care of domestic duties and earning enough money to keep the family out of poverty. Frank, as he grew older, either became too sickly or too lazy, depending on who you asked, to maintain a steady job. The couple welcomed their third daughter, Katherine, affectionately called Kitty, in 1907. Emma sold her first visual art piece to a national magazine called Nautilus in 1908. At the end of the year, Emma would publish her first short story, “The Common Lot.” It is important feminist work in which a woman must decide whether she wants to be a servant in her father’s home or her husband’s. It is a critical work that examines the stereotypical expectations of women in Southern Appalachia, which, sadly, still ring true today.

In 1909, Emma gave birth to her second son, Frank Mirick Miles, who was called Mark by friends and family. Later that year, Emma and her whole family were invited by a close friend, Edith Catlow Stroop, and her son to winter down in Florida. While there, Emma was offered the writer-in-residence position at Lincoln Memorial University. She gladly accepted, and they offered Frank a job caring for the University’s Jersey Cattle Herd. Despite this happy time, when both Emma and Frank were able to work, Emma began showing signs of illness, and according to George Brosi, she would receive a tuberculosis diagnosis in mid-March of 1910. This would be the start of the darkest part of Emma’s life.

The family returned to Signal Mountain in June of 1910. In 1911, Emma’s illness would greatly impact the family’s income. A wealthy family friend offered to nurse the writer, but as soon as she was well, she returned to the mountains to care for her children and husband. In 1912, Emma experienced several miscarriages due to her poor health. In 1913, her youngest son, Mark, would succumb to Scarlet Fever, emotionally devastating Emma. She blamed herself for being unable to pay for her son’s medical care until it was too late for the four-year-old boy. According to Brosi, Emma then vowed never to bring into the world another child she could not afford to care for.

In 1913, Emma reached out to lifelong patrons of her work to arrange for her twin daughters to attend John Spead Seminary School in Alabama. She then rented a room near Chattanooga for herself and her two remaining children. She lectured to schools and community groups, made portraits, and sold a little book of poetry wherever she could.

In 1914, she landed a job at the Chattanooga News as a writer for $9.00 a week. She wrote in the section titled “Fountain Square Conversations,” where she published poetry, reviews, and other pieces. In June of 1914, Emma was forced to leave her job behind, pregnant and too sick to continue working. She would have a miscarriage, but after moving back in with Frank, he refused to let Emma return to the newspaper job. She began to seriously consider divorce from Frank on the grounds that he refused to support the family.

In February of 1915, Emma Bell Miles moved into the Pine Breeze Tuberculosis Sanitarium near Chattanooga on charity care. However, being away from her family proved difficult, and by March, Frank had convinced Emma to move into his family’s home. By the time summer hit, Emma could be found on the side of the road, sick, trying to peddle her art and poetry to make enough money to feed her family.

The last years of Emma’s life would show no improvement. In 1917, Joe, Emma’s son, would be admitted to Pine Breeze Tuberculosis Sanitarium with Tuberculosis. Her daughters would be sent away to different educational institutions. Emma would follow Joe into the Sanitarium. Her husband, Frank, would live with his parents on the mountain. World War I would impact Emma’s care as her physician would be required to help with the war effort, leaving her care to charlatans and spiritual healers.

Emma would never regain her health, nor would she publish again. On March 19, 1919, Emma Bell Miles died. She was surrounded by her children and husband.

I want to take a moment to discuss an important part of the Academic discussion involving Emma Bell Miles, but I decided not to include it in the story as a whole because it is not widely discussed in the academic resources I currently have available to me. George Brosi, as well as Kay Baker Gaston, has made the argument that some of Emma Bell Miles’ patrons, the MacGowan sisters, for example, may have published some of Miles’ work under their own names. We know from Emma Bell Miles’ diary account that she felt anger and resentment towards the wealthy people who claimed to support her.

“I should think these rich people would be ashamed to let me
die unnoticed at their very doors. Their ignorance of the value
of art is appalling . . . why do all these women call themselves
my friends . . . They have always beat me down to ridiculous
and humiliating prices for my pictures; now they promise and
promise my husband work, and then turn the job over to
someone else. What sort of friendship is it that rolls in ease and plenty, and condemns me to want like this?”-Emma Bell Miles, recorded by George Brosi’s essay.

They, in my opinion, make a very successful argument that Miles’ social status was often used against her. The wealthy often weaponized her poverty. Sadly, I think this narrative still rings true today.

Emma Bell Miles was trapped by her class, love, and home. She fought hard to provide for her family and to create opportunities for her children to succeed in ways that would otherwise be unavailable to them. That is what parents are supposed to do for their children. They try a little harder, make magic from nothing, and do all that they can to bring safety to the next generation. It is a part of the culture of the mountains, as it was taught to me by my great-grandmother, grandmother, aunt, and father. We do what we can, in spite of limitations and difficulties that we have been born into. In the hopes that when we take on the mantle of parent, caregiver, and elder, the next generation will have fewer difficulties than we did. All while knowing that the best laid efforts will go astray, and you can never truly know the future. We add to the weave of protection, teaching our children the values and ideology that were passed down to us. Because we were taught that life is like the mountains, it will be breathtakingly beautiful one moment, and extremely difficult the next. Life can be tough, but we are tougher.

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Sources:

appalachianplaces. “Emma Bell Miles: A Place of Her Own.” Appalachian Places, 5 Apr. 2022, https://www.appalachianplaces.org/post/emma-bell-miles-a-place-of-her-own.

Brosi, George. “The Heart-Wrenching Life of Emma Bell Miles.” Appalachian Heritage, vol. 33, no. 4, Fall 2005, pp. 11–21. University of North Carolina Press.

Edwards, Grace Toney, editor. The Common Lot and Other Stories: The Published Short Fiction, 1908–1921. By Emma Bell Miles, Ohio University Press, 2016.

Engelhardt, Elizabeth S. D. “Placing Their Feminism in the Southern Appalachian Mountains: Emma Bell Miles, Grace MacGowan Cooke, and the Roots of Ecological Feminism.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 20, no. 1, 2001, pp. 11–31. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/464465.

Gaston, Kay Baker. “Emma Bell Miles and the ‘Fountain Square Conversations.’” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 1978, pp. 416–29.

Harrison, Beth. “Women Writers, Ethnography, and Regionalism: A Case Study of Emma Bell Miles and Mildred Haun.” Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association, vol. 5, 1993, pp. 142–50.

Rust, Randal. “Miles, Emma Bell.” Tennessee Encyclopedia, https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/emma-bell-miles/. Accessed 6 May 2026.

“The Spirit of the Mountains.” By Emma Bell Miles. 1905 (Book Review) - ProQuest. https://www.proquest.com/openview/1a72861ea0a04733057f492c094febd5/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=2029886. Accessed 12 May 2026.

I grew up in an aggressive Evangelical church and was taught to believe that anyone who did not believe in Jesus, the same way we did, would die and go to Hell, even if they had never heard the word of Christ. If they died before Christ came, then they also went straight to Hell. This idea physically hurt me and caused me to react to my Grandmother viscerally. I told her that didn’t seem fair, that seemed like an unjust act. She told me that I was too sensitive, and if anything, that it should cause me to spread the gospel more fervently. When I insisted that it seemed like an evil action, she told me I was being difficult or that I didn’t understand. That instead, I should just be grateful to know that I was saved. And that should be the most important thing to me, to let the world worry about itself. Her words were hurtful, and I just learned to shut my mouth, ignore my Grandmother and her hateful beliefs. Which just meant I was all the more ready for my teenage rebellion, and boy, was it rage-fueled and geared towards the religious beliefs that I knew in my heart were wrong.

Sensitive people are silenced, called emotional or difficult, put in their place, and dismissed. These words and reaction crushed me until my Aunt, also sensitive, taught me a loophole: be right. They may call you too sensitive, but if you speak the truth, they must confront their discomfort. Perhaps their anger stemmed from a refusal to challenge their own beliefs. And let’s be honest, sometimes being “too sensitive” just means you noticed the inherent injustice that the room is quietly accepting.

Sensitivity is not weakness; in fact, it can be a source of strength. This belief that sensitivity equals weakness is learned, not innate. The strongest women in history—often labeled emotional or difficult—prove otherwise. In Richmond, Miss Elizabeth L. Lew—abolitionist, Unionist, Union spy, and intellectual—was called overly sensitive. I argue that her sensitivity gave her the moral strength to act in the face of injustice. She was right, slavery, the deliberate taking of another person’s self-autonomy, is inherently evil and wrong. Her sensitive nature refused to accept this as the status quo. The point I am making is: sensitivity, far from weakening, can fortify moral conviction and drive courageous action.

Consider Elizabeth L. Van Lew herself: smart, sensitive, and empathic, yet anything but weak—a true American Badass. And what do I mean by that? To me, an American Badass is someone who defies expectations, faces down injustice with courage, and chooses action over silence—even when the world would rather she sit quietly and behave. Elizabeth truly fit this definition. She was willing to upend social expectations to do what was right. While others ignored injustice, she refused to comply. Hated and mocked by neighbors, her grave stayed unmarked until those touched by her kindness remembered her. Many blamed her spy work for the suffering during Richmond’s recapture.

Elizabeth knew that being ostracized was a cost, yet she acted anyway—because it was right. Her sensitivity gave her the courage to endure hatred in her hometown. Patriarchy calls sensitivity weakness, but, in reality, sensitivity fortifies resolve and moral conviction. As it acts on our fortitude and resolve, we can use it to make a change around us.

Sensitivity and Justice vs Comfort and Compliance

To better see how sensitivity drives change, let us look more closely at Elizabeth’s early life. Elizabeth L. Van Lew was born on October 12, 1818, to John and Eliza Van Lew. John, originally from Long Island, moved to Richmond for his health and became a prominent, pro-slavery hardware store owner. No one expected his daughter to become an anti-slavery, Southern Unionist badass.

Her father, John, doted on his children and valued education. He and Eliza spent $50 per month on books—about $1,114 in today’s dollars. Education was prized in the Van Lew home, and Elizabeth benefited.

During his health trips to nearby hot springs, Elizabeth met the daughter of a slave trader who shared a tragic story.

The story haunted Elizabeth: A mother and baby were sold separately. Learning her child would be taken, the mother died of heartbreak. Elizabeth didn’t see the mother’s death as weakness but as evidence of powerful love—a love so strong it broke her heart. As a mother myself, I cannot even begin to fathom the pain and terror this woman experienced. It is no wonder that this story planted the seeds of abolitionism for Elizabeth.

This sensibility was further shaped after Elizabeth attended a Quaker school in Philadelphia, where educators and peers shared her abhorrence of slavery.

Supported by her new community, teachers guided her readings, encouraged feminist education, and helped her develop tools to fight a system she despised. On returning to Richmond, Elizabeth fought slavery with sensitivity and intelligence, even daring to disagree compassionately with her ailing father.

Taking Action

In 1848, her father died of respiratory illness. His will left the estate to his wife and daughter, and his son inherited the stores and money. Elizabeth convinced her mother to emancipate their enslaved people, using her inheritance to reunite families as freed Black people (Ryan, 1996). While this action could end slavery, it helped make right what Elizabeth knew was wrong, and the byproduct of emancipating people created tension in Richmond. Elizabeth did it anyway, despite the backlash from her neighbors.

After years of quiet resistance, outside events soon changed everything. John Brown’s failed Harpers Ferry revolt and execution became a pivotal moment, leading Elizabeth to write about the ensuing rage and fear for the enslaved and the Union.

Elizabeth wrote, “Mobs went to private houses to hang the true of heart. Loyalty now was called treason and cursed. If you spoke in your parlor or chamber, to your next of heart, you whispered” (p.19, Ryan 1996).

As the country moved closer to war, no one could blame Elizabeth for considering a move to safety in the North, especially after John Brown’s hanging. While most considered leaving the sane choice, Elizabeth, clever and thoughtful, instead channeled her sensitivity into defiance against the Confederacy. Her heart gave her the courage to become a hellraiser.

Sensitivity as Fuel

With war underway, Elizabeth turned her sensitive focus to the suffering of Union soldiers in Richmond’s makeshift prison camps.

Richmonders treated enemy soldiers with contempt and often ignored their suffering. Men were packed in, officers separated from enlisted. At Libby Prison, officers at least had walls for protection. The enlisted lacked shelter, medical care, and food, and faced rat-infested punishment for defiance.

On Belle Island, enlisted men suffered in an open-air camp, exposed to the elements, disease, and hunger. The suffering was immense and mostly ignored.

To operate undetected, Elizabeth relied on being underestimated. Richmond’s powerful men saw her as harmless. By exaggerating her eccentricities—dressing down, mumbling, inventing nonsense songs—she earned the nickname ‘Crazy Bet.’ She hoped that by playing crazy, she would have a cover to work covertly, but not all bought the act. Fortunately, during the war, no one was ever able to tie her to any anti-Confederate actions successfully.

Despite appearances, Elizabeth brought food and books and sometimes successfully advocated for the care of sick officers. She was one of the very few people to provide comfort to these men in such a hostile city.

Major Paul Joseph Revere, captured in 1861, was moved from Libby Prison to Henrico County Jail for exchange. Elizabeth brought him and seven others books, food, and conversation. Revere’s family never forgot her kindness—when Elizabeth died unmarked, they provided a headstone.

Elizabeth’s comfort to Union officers allowed her to relay messages to the Union Army. Some books held hidden pockets or false bottoms for officers’ messages. It was through these modifications to everyday items that Elizabeth began spying for the Union in the Confederate capital.

Spy, Spy Master, Plotter

As her activities expanded, Elizabeth established a way to get messages out of Richmond and broadened her spy network. A key recruit was the brilliant Mary Bowser, formerly enslaved by the Van Lews, educated in Pennsylvania, and working for them at the start of the war.

In the hopes of hindering the Confederate Army’s success, these two women worked to spy on Jefferson Davis’s household. A friend suggested to Mrs. Verna Davis that she hire a servant. Mrs. Bowser, pretending to be uneducated and free, was hired.

Due to war and time, precise details of Mrs. Bowser’s intelligence are lost. Still, accounts from those who acted on her tips attest to her value to the Union spy network.

Bowser was highly intelligent, with a keen memory and quick mind, risking her life for abolition. She was crucial in the Union spy network—a courier and strategist trusted by Elizabeth. One story comes from Union Spy Thomas McNiven, as retold by his grandson Robert W. Waitt:

According to this account, “Her [Miss Van Lew’s] colored girl, Mary, was the best as she was working right in Davis’ home and [she] had a photographic mind. Everything she saw on the Rebel President’s desk she could repeat word for word. . .. She made a point of always coming out to my wagon when I made deliveries at the Davis’ home to drop information [off with me] (p. 24, Ryan, 1996).

As a result, Elizabeth Van Lew and her team sent messages to Generals Butler, Mead, Grant, War Secretary Stanton, and President Lincoln, earning her the code name “Mr. Babcock” to mask her identity and exploit gender prejudices.

Besides intelligence, Elizabeth helped plan prison escapes, some successful, others not. She begged for a Union raid on Richmond, but bad weather and poor leadership doomed it. Thankfully, Elizabeth and her team remained undiscovered.

Throughout the war, Elizabeth, her mother, and her brother funded the spy efforts using inheritance and store profits. However, when the Union triumphed, the Van Lews were left broke and vulnerable, ostracized from their community. Turning to those she helped, Elizabeth wrote Union leaders for daily aid.

When Ulysses S. Grant became the 18th president, he did not forget Elizabeth L. Van Lew or her costly work in restoring the Union and helping defeat her internal enemies. He appointed Elizabeth Postmaster General of Richmond, a position she held and successfully ran for eight years despite the animosity of many Richmonders. Even those who hated her said that she did the job effectively and admirably. Sadly, after Grant left office, the Van Lews would once again find themselves unable to support themselves. She would spend the rest of her days pleading for a job that would support her. While some tried to help her, such as her niece, who moved into her Richmond home to help support her. Elizabeth Van Lew was a proud woman who had always found a way to care for herself. Eventually, the families and the men that she helped care for while they were kept in Libby Prison, collected enough money for her to at least not suffer for the rest of her days.

Throughout her life, Elizabeth’s actions were driven by her empathy and conviction—hallmarks of sensitivity. In her last years, she became an avid advocate of women’s suffrage. She called it taxation without representation and argued that if women had to pay taxes, they deserved to vote. Her life demonstrates my central argument: sensitivity, rooted in empathy and conviction, was the foundation for her activism. Elizabeth L. Van Lew died on September 25, 1900, at the age of 82, leaving a legacy that proves sensitivity is a source of strength, not weakness. Here is what she wanted her epitaph to be:

If I am entitled to the name of “Spy” because I was in the secret service, I accept it willingly; but it will hereafter have to my mind a high and honorable signification. For my loyalty to my country I have two beautiful names—here I am called, “Traitor,” farther North a “spy”—instead of the honored name of “Faithful.” (P. 36, Ryan, 1996).

Important Note

Elizabeth L. Van Lew had every benefit of an upper-class white woman in the South. She had no reason, from the outside, to try to end slavery. However, it was Elizabeth’s sensitivity, her inability to turn away from the pain and suffering of others, that made her an advocate for freedom, a fighter, and a spy. It was her heart that led her to do courageous and dangerous acts for others and her country. She could not disregard the horrors that come from slavery. She could not turn her heart hard to the stories of pain and suffering of others, whose only sin was being born Black and without freedom. She could not stand by as she watched her country divide itself over an economy built upon blood and shame.

At the same time, we need to acknowledge that Elizabeth’s race and class gave her protections and advantages that her Black collaborators, like Mary Bowser, did not have. They faced greater risks, violence, and eventual erasure. After her work as a Union spy with Elizabeth, Mary would go on to give talks in New York about her time as a spy, working in the Freedmen’s Bureau as a teacher, and, in 1867, she disappeared from the historical record.

No one is quite clear on what happened to her, if she got to enjoy her freedom, and if she is remembered by history, it is usually just as a side note to a white woman. This erasure is partly because, as a formerly enslaved Black woman, Mary lived in a society that rarely recorded the achievements of Black individuals—especially women.

The dangers of her work meant she had to keep her identity secret even after the war. Documents were destroyed to protect her, and societal racism made it easy for her legacy to be minimized or even forgotten. Yet her intelligence, bravery, and dedication were essential to the Union’s victory. To honor Mary Bowser’s legacy and the work of unknown black men and women who worked alongside her, we can seek out her story, discuss her courage, and ensure she is remembered as more than a footnote. We can credit and uplift the contributions of Black women in history, advocate for greater visibility, and support research and teaching on figures like Mary Bowser so that future generations understand her impact.

Let Your Sensitivity Be Your Warning Light

When others try to convince you that your sensitivity makes you weak, that your inability to distance yourself from the pain suffered by others is a problem. Remember, women like Harriet Tubman, Mother Jones, Ella May Wiggins, and Elizabeth L. Van Lew. They are proof that sensitivity is not a weakness, but the most powerful force in the Universe. It can lead you into scary, harrowing situations, but it can also force the world around you to change into a place where fairness and justice can be extended to everyone.

I am grateful every day that I did not kill my sensitive nature. I had someone like my Aunt Rose, who advocated for me to embrace it. Even when it made her uncomfortable, she taught me that it is a superpower anyone can use to drive change in the world around them.

So, the next time you feel the mistreatment of others moves your emotions, try something small. Even the tiniest act matters: you might share an article or social media post that shines a light on an important issue, or have a thoughtful conversation with a friend or family member about what you have learned. If you feel ready, you could build up the courage to call your representatives, attend a protest, or reach out to a local advocacy group to volunteer or donate. Find a group of like-minded individuals and discuss how you could better serve this marginalized community. Find people in your area who are part of the group, listen to them, and learn from them. Gaining a better understanding from those directly impacted can help you better serve their goals and plans already in progress. Every act, no matter how small or insignificant it may feel, can multiply and amplify the work already being done. Think of it like a song; if only one person sings it, the world may never hear it. But in a loud and steady choir, the sound, the beauty, and the message all get amplified.

We may never be in the position of these great, compassionate women. We may never have to risk our lives to provide safety or spy on enemies in our midst. (I would argue that it is a good thing!) We can help change the world around us by learning from those in the impacted community, helping out by annoying lawmakers, and choosing our sensitive hearts when everyone around us is more comfortable with complacency. So, be grateful for your tender heart, and never neglect it. It is the foundation of why you know it is right or wrong, and it is what will break cycles of injustice the world over. It is only by embracing the uncomfortable that growth can happen.

The next time your heart speaks to you about injustice that you have seen or learned about, I would ask you to listen to it. Listen to that sensitive heart of yours, and not to silence it or look the other way. Embrace it, follow it, and see where your inner light takes you. And if enough of us band together through small acts of kindness, we can help move the wheels of justice forward. We can see the injustices and work together to ensure justice is served for all of us, not just some.

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Sources:

Bierle, S. K. (2019, April 18). Paul Revere and the Civil War. Emerging Civil War. https://emergingcivilwar.com/2019/04/18/paul-revere-and-the-civil-war/

Leveen, L. (n.d.). Mary Richards Bowser (fl. 1846–1867). Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved May 3, 2026, from https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/bowser-mary-richards-fl-1846-1867/

Mary Bowser: The Civil War’s Most Productive Spy. (2023, March 9). TogetherWeServed Blog. https://blog.togetherweserved.com/the-civil-wars-most-productive-spy/

Van Lew, E. L. (1996). A Yankee spy in Richmond: The Civil War diary of “Crazy Bet” Van Lew (D. D. Ryan, Ed.). Stackpole Books.

I’m glad my sons are of average height because being short can make school or work tricky to navigate if anyone thinks it’s fun to draw attention to my height. I also face physical challenges every day. Do you realize how much is out of my reach daily? I’ve learned to adapt by using stools and chairs, climbing, and being firm with my boundaries around those who are way too excited about my lack of height. The thing I didn’t realize was how much my height would shape my parenting until my son started getting taller than me.

Now that my sons are getting bigger, they could accidentally hurt themselves or me when we play. My height might make it harder for them to take me seriously as a parent, and I wonder what other kids say. Because they are both sensitive, it’s even more challenging, so I’m thinking about how to adapt. I set boundaries, work through strong emotions, and try to communicate clearly.

I’m a playful parent—I love getting on the floor, tickling, making up silly songs, and chasing my kids around. I grew up in a playful family, long before ‘Bluey’ was on TV. Playfulness is just part of who we are. Lately, I’ve had to remind my nine-year-old that he’s almost as big as me. He’ll try to jump into my arms or throw himself at me, and honestly, he can almost knock me over. Luckily, neither of us has gotten hurt, but it’s been close. After a lot of therapy and research, I’ve tried a bunch of different ways to handle things, and so far, they’re working.

When I say, “Stop, I need a minute,” they have to stop right away. No argument. All action stops. It’s the same rule we use for tickle fights: if someone says stop, we all stop until they say it’s okay to keep going. I’ve explained why this matters, especially as they get bigger. Soon, they might be stronger and heavier than I am, and they could hurt me without meaning to.

Let’s say I am playing crazy pillow with my six-year-old (it is a game where the kid pretends to be a pillow and then tickles you or wiggles around to aggravate you while you are trying to sleep), my nine-year-old will sometimes turn into Thanos or Godzilla and attack us while we are ‘sleeping.’ You know, like big brothers are likely to do. The nine-year-old ran up to the bed and just jumped on top of me. I yelled out, “Stop, I need a minute.” Both boys stepped back and checked on me to see if I was okay. Once they knew I was alright, we came up with a different way for the nine-year-old to carry out a surprise attack. Nobody got in trouble, no one was hurt, and the game changed form into a safer but still fun way.

It can’t be easy for them to hold back their playfulness and worry about being extra careful of their size and strength. If they were girls, it wouldn’t be any easier. I had girl cousins who grew much bigger than me, and their roughhousing was just as wild as the boys’.

My cousin, let’s call her Angela, was about 9 years younger than me. She was bigger than me by the time she was six. The lucky girl was born to a very tall mother, and her dad is the tallest among my dad’s brothers. We could play wrestle, tickle, and roughhouse just like always, but very early on, she was physically stronger and bigger than I was. She would be a normal kid and run up to me to tackle/hug me, and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor. I know my cousin; she is sweet, funny, and one of the most charming people you could ever meet. She would never intentionally harm anyone, but simply by being a normal kid, she did. That is what happens when you are just my size! I feel as though my kids are starting with a disadvantage because of my height!

Another thing we deal with, since we’re an ADHD household, is emotional outbursts. Many families go through this, but in my case, the kid running at me is my size, which can be scary. And it can be scary for the kid experiencing that flood of ADHD emotion in the brain. It can be terrifying to feel like your emotions have control over you and not the other way around. When this happens, we try to use some of the grounding exercises that we have learned from books, talk therapy, and occupational therapy that we got early in my eldest’s diagnosis. (I.e., My personal favorite 5-4-3-2-1 Method: Identify 5 things you see, 4 you can touch, 3 you hear, 2 you smell, and 1 you taste.)

We then try to focus on naming our emotion, connecting to its impact on us, and redirecting that energy in a different, safer way while still releasing it.

Once, during a big fight between the boys, my oldest ran up and tried to square up to me. My first instinct was to hit him, but I’m going to be better than what I learned growing up. I tried to think about what my son was feeling and remember what it feels like when those emotions hit you. I take a breath and try to lower the tension in the interaction. I calmly asked, “What are you doing?”

He turned away in a huff and said, “I don’t know.”

I responded, “Okay. Let me show you very slowly how this move you just did to me, and you tell me what it makes you feel.” I take a few steps back, then, quickly but without any emotion, square up to him and ask, “What does this action make you feel?”

He looks at me like a wide-eyed deer and says, “Like you are going to beat me up. It makes me feel scared.”

Wrapping my arms around him in reaction to the fear in his eyes, I ask, “Is that how you want to make me feel?”

His hazel eyes tear up, “No. I don’t want that.”

“Okay, what can we do with that anger instead?”

Then we come up with other things he can do, like scream into a pillow, take a break, or write in his journal. Anything is better than reacting in a way that’s scary or violent to another person. Because little brothers are going to make us mad, there is no way around that. We will get mad even as adults, and we have to find ways to process our own anger. So, he decided that he was going to take a moment for himself and draw in his comics. Excellent use of taking a moment to calm down. Victory!

I am sure all parents have found themselves in a similar situation. Helping kids manage their emotions is the main job of parenting. My lack of height only intensifies the situation for me.

With clear boundaries, more communication than is probably necessary, and learning to redirect our emotional outbursts, I am hopeful that my kids will never feel the guilt of accidentally harming me or others. I want to still play with them and be the fun parent. (I love my husband, and he would most definitely cop to being the more serious parent.) My partner does try to step in when he sees the play getting a little too rowdy. But I also don’t want him to interfere too much because I want to be in charge of my own body. Plus, I don’t want my kids to treat me as if I am so fragile that I could break at any moment. So, he will wait until I ask for help before stepping in with playtime. I hope that, with all our work, we can find the happy medium where they can be normal kids, I can play with them, and I don’t end up with a broken nose.

On the flip side, now that my son knows he’s almost my size, he’s started trying to pick me up! It’s sweet that he thinks I’m light enough, but why do people always want to pick up smaller people? Seriously, it’s embarrassing! The child I carried and brought into this world now wants to pick me up!

As they continue to grow bigger than me, it makes me wonder when they’ll start taking me less seriously just because I’m short. It’s bound to happen. I haven’t met a man who didn’t treat me differently because of my height. I have to be firmer with my boundaries than most people. You’d be surprised how many men think my height means they can take advantage of me or treat me like a kid. If you’re also very petite, you probably understand. I know I look cute when I’m angry because I’m short. There are TikTok videos that prove it! I can’t help it. But trust me, there’s a thin line between a small, angry woman who looks a little cute and one who will absolutely put you in your place if you push her.

All parents have to deal with the height/authority issue with their children at some point. I mean, isn’t that what the teen years are all about, dealing with the changing dynamics of growing children into adulthood? As they learn to exert their own growing power and burgeoning autonomy.

And maybe having a very petite mom will give my boys some advantages. Maybe it will help my kids grow up to be kinder and more compassionate people. After hearing about my experiences, seeing how my height hinders me, and how some people treat me differently because of it. When they see someone shorter, just out in the world, maybe they’ll stop others from picking them up without asking. Maybe they’ll call out dumb jokes and remember to keep the things we use the most on the lower shelves. Maybe they will stand up for the short kid in class, or the tall one who also gets made fun of at school. It might help them understand that people can’t always control how they look, what their bodies can and cannot do, or the various forms the human body can take, and that no one should ever make another individual feel less than because of their differences. That human variation is a feature, not a problem to be othered.

In the end, I want my kids to be well adjusted and have as normal a childhood as humanly possible. I want to help them grow into decent human beings. I would also like to make it through their childhood without a broken bone or dislocated knee; that would be the best of both worlds.

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This is a brief story of Rhoda Strong Lowrie, Queen of Scuffletown. Her husband was the leader of the Lowry Gang, Henry Berry Lowrie, North Carolina’s Robin Hood. Unlike some other Robin Hoods, historians can say this man actually existed. By all accounts, she was a petite woman of rare beauty; even white women who had been held captive by her and her husband felt compelled to admit it. She was not the sweet, submissive Maid Marion from the English Robin Hood tales. She was smart, clever, and proud to be a part of the fight to defend and protect her people from the unjust treatment at the hands of the plantation class.

Pembroke during the Civil War and Reconstruction Era wasn’t the Pembroke we know today. The area was a loose group of townships belonging to the Dark Water Indians, now known as the Federally recognized Lumbee Tribe. They did not have the ability to own weapons, and they were being captured and taken as forced labor by the Confederacy. They constructed Fort Fisher under horrible living conditions and treatment. Some Lumbees decided that they would rather live freely in the swamps than face disease-ridden forced labor camps, and turned to theft of goods in order to survive. This is the world in which our Robin Hood, Henry Berry Lowrie, would assemble his gang to fight for the survival of family and community.

Most scholarship focuses on Henry Berry Lowrie/Lowry* and his brothers, as well as other male members of the gang. History is often more concerned with the actions of men over women, because many people falsely believe that women do nothing when war is on their doorstep.

Rhoda Strong Lowrie's story is just one of many true historical accounts that prove women have always taken an active role in resistance, war, and governance, even if not directly credited. When the entire Southern world was being turned upside down, Rhoda used her charm, smarts, and bravery to keep the Lowrie Gang moving and working towards protecting her people. Some historians called the Queen of Schuffletown because of her beauty. She may have been beautiful, but I think she earned the name through action, leadership, and sacrifice. I think they called her Queen because she did as Queens did: she protected, she led.

Rhoda Strong would have known Henry Berry and his family; they would have grown up together in the community. Henry Berry, 20, and Rhoda, 16, married after a short courtship. Henry Berry had a $10,000 bounty on his head on their wedding day, Dec. 7, 1965. (That would be the equivalent of a bounty worth about $198,800 in today’s money.) A bounty large enough to attract the attention of the Home Guard to cut short the wedding celebration. Henry Berry was persuaded to go quietly with the Home Guard so as not to start a bloodbath on their wedding day. I would even bet that it was Rhoda who convinced him to stand down. He wouldn’t be in jail long; she was already working to get her husband free.

Henry Berry Lowrie was held in a Winterville jail about thirty miles away from Schuffletown. During his stay at the Winterville jail, Henry Berry was described as aloof during preliminary courtproceedings. He did not appear concerned with the court or any outcomes the local government had intended. One day, Rhoda went to visit her new husband and bring him a cake that she had made for him. The officers thought nothing of it because it was just a cake, and she was just a typical young bride. What was the worry? Inside the cake, she had placed a file, which Henry Berry promptly used to break out of jail while still handcuffed, and walked all the way back home to his Queen, Rhoda (Pugh 2002, Wilkins 1996).

Most stories about Rhoda claim she was never involved in the gang's work, but she focused on keeping them out of jail. Made sure they had the supplies they needed, and she would help gather information and keep their community together. There is a story that Rhoda created notches in her shoes so that she could scale a brick wall to break her husband out. In another story, the final time that Henry Berry Lowrie was held in a jail in Wilmington, Rhoda walked on foot from Scuffletown with a cake and a gun hidden inside. Which he promptly used to force his way out of jail.

We do not know what fate befell Henry Berry Lowrie after 1872. Some people like to think he escaped from North Carolina and ran away to live a long, happy life elsewhere. I don’t think this is the case. There is a tale that he died from an accident while hunting, and I am inclined to believe this to be the case. After every prison break, robbery, or military action, he always returned to his Rhoda. I do not believe that he would ever leave her behind for any reason. I think she might have come up with the idea that her husband ran away, so that no one would ever mess with his body, and that his legend could live on in the minds and hearts of the Lumbee Tribe. I have no real proof of this, but I just don’t think that a man who would walk miles in handcuffs through the woods just to make it back to her could ever leave her behind.

Rhoda, like many women throughout history, used the ideals of the patriarchy against those in power. In North Carolina during the Lowrie War, the white male officers thought nothing of a doting wife bringing her husband food; they never thought a woman would be daring or clever enough to sneak escape implements to her husband. These patriarchal ideals still pervade when we think about women in history; we don’t see the wives, daughters, and mothers of heroes or villains as taking any part in their actions. Even though these men in history have the ability to act, no small part of it is thanks to the women who supported them. Women allowed men to “lay out” from conscription during the American Civil War by providing food and safe havens from the Confederate Home Guard. Women have been a part of battlefield tactics, sneaking supplies and information to the fighters and causes they supported. Even if they were simply providing cover or safety to these participants, they were playing an active role in these events. They were not helpless bystanders, and Rhoda Strong Lowrie is a prime example of the erasure of female power in the Americas.

If you would like to learn more about Rhoda Strong Lowrie and better understand the power of Lumbee women, I highly recommend Strong Like Rhoda by Dana Lowery Ramseur. Ramseur is a living descendant of Rhoda and Henry Lowrie, and the book is based on her experiences as a Lumbee woman, and how the stories of her ancestors continue to drive and inspire her. It is an excellent read, and you will be supporting a Native North Carolinian writer.

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*The spelling of the last name could be Lowrie or Lowry, depending on the source of the material. I will be using the spelling used by the Lumbee Tribe on their website. They are the authority of their own history.*

Pugh, E. S. (2002). Rhoda Strong Lowry: The Swamp Queen of Scuffletown. American Indian Culture and Research Journal , 26(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.17953 Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4mc5m5bx

Wilkins, David E. “Henry Berry Lowry: Champion of the Dispossessed.” Race, Gender & Class, vol. 3, no. 2, 1996, pp. 97–111. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41674791. Accessed 13 Jan. 2026.

The Eastern part of North Carolina is filled with vast rivers, marshes, and swamps. It is the only place in the state where black bears live alongside alligators. The air can be suffocatingly humid in the summer, and sometimes a frozen, brown mess in the winter. If waters with gators freeze over, you can see their snouts peeking through the ice. It is both cute and oddly terrifying.

Southeast North Carolina: the Sandhills are named for their well-drained sandy soil, which supports the state tree, the longleaf pine (Pinus palustris), and wiregrass (Aristida stricta), among others. The eight counties that make up this regional ecosystem are Richmond, Scotland, Hoke, Cumberland, Harnett, Lee, Montgomery, and Moore, located between the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain of North Carolina.

It is considered to be one of the most biodiverse regions in the state, with 150-300 different species of groundcover plants, more breeding birds than any other southeastern forest type, about 60 percent of the reptiles and amphibians found in the southeast, and about 122 threatened or endangered plant species(the Wildlife Society). It is no wonder that Native American groups have made it their home for thousands of years.

After contact, this region would end up being the shelter for what was left of the several North Carolina and Virginia Coastal Native groups after their populations were decimated by much warfare and disease transmission. The story of the Lumbee is one of determined survival. It highlights the complicated history of what happens to Native societies when met with a legal system built by English colonizers, and a racial system that was quantified by appearance, and shunted the white purity system onto oppressed groups to ‘prove their Nativeness’ in order to get help from the Federal Government, keep possession of familial land, and to have the ability to govern themselves.

There are many ways to start the story of the Lumbee, but I will start from their role in early English-Native American interactions. In 1587, the island that is now Roanoke Island was the site of the first English colony in the Americas to be established as an English town, under the leadership of explorer and artist John White. The colony was not able to fully establish itself, even with the help of the local Native group known to the English as the Croatoan. John White had to return to England to resupply the colony, but was unable to do so for many years. When he did return, the settlement was empty, and the letters CRO were carved on a tree. John White and the English government considered it to be a great mystery. No bodies living or dead, and no sign of the settlers. Spooky!

Well, there was a story, and no great mystery. According to oral traditions, the Native people in southeastern North Carolina tell a story about what happened to the lost English citizens. They took in those families instead of allowing them to die from the weather and starvation. The Lost Colony’s children grew up, intermarried with the tribe, became part of the society, and survived and thrived.

The descendants of the Croatoans told the English, after encountering them much later, that they had taken in those English Settlers, but, like most colonizers, the English refused to believe them. Even though a not small portion of the tribe carried names like Strong, Sampson, Locklear, Dail, and Pugh (just to name a few), which were the same surnames as those of the English colonists. It wasn’t until recently that archaeology proved (yet again) that the Native Group was telling the truth.

This group’s willingness to accept others should be their strength, but for many, many years, they were called into question for not being ‘Native Enough’ for Federal recognition. The Lumbee Tribe is a group that formed, much like the Cherokee, as a result of the decimation of the Native Groups that once called the Eastern part of North Carolina and Virginia home. War, disease, and death crashed the Native American Population as they were introduced to viruses and bacteria they had never experienced on the North American continent. What Indigenous people remained banded together in the hopes of not being completely wiped out by the Europeans.

Native Tribes came together in hopes of survival; some came from Southern Virginia, others from several different parts of North Carolina, and others had been living around the Lumbee River. That is why the Lumbee belong to three Native American linguistic families: Eastern Siouan, Algonquian, and Iroquoian.

Part of the reason the Lumbee settled in this area was that it offered some geographical isolation from these intruding colonists. There is a lot of swamp land in Robeson, Hoke, Cumberland, and Scotland counties, and the Lumbee used it to their advantage throughout history.

Native Land, white Man’s Hands

The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson in 1830, and Southeastern North Carolina was running out of space for the ever-expanding European population. And, well, anything west of the Falls line was much more difficult to transport; Lumbee land was starting to gain value. While Lumbee ancestors did not practice owning land, as white settlers encroached, many began purchasing land in hopes of avoiding removal from what the government recognized as legal property. It was the act of participating in Christianity and the act of owning land that disqualified them as ‘Indian’ concerning the wording of the law. However, some Lumbee were taken away and forced to relocate to the reservations out west.

Compliance with participation in ‘Western society’ did not mean the European settlers welcomed them; white farmers would try other ways to remove Lumbees from their land. Some white farmers would sneak onto Lumbee land and place some of their livestock with the Native farmers’ animals and then accuse them of stealing. Because Lumbees were not trusted by North Carolina's criminal justice system, many Lumbee farmers would give in to white farmers’ demands rather than involve law enforcement. This is how many Natives in southeastern North Carolina would have their legal property taken away.

Until 1835, the Lumbee tribe had some rights, such as owning firearms and voting, but rising tensions in the United States led to legislation stripping them of these rights.

During the American Civil War, many young Lumbee men were conscripted into the Confederate Army. As they were not allowed to carry weapons, they were forced to build and work salt mines in horrible conditions. Fort Fisher in Wilmington was built by Lumbee Conscripts who had to face horrible working conditions. A Yellow Fever epidemic hit Wilmington, causing the population of Native forced labor to be decimated. Young Lumbee men took the practice of lying low in swamps and around the river to hide from the forced conscription. (If you want to see more about Fort Fisher’s exhibit on this dark piece of North Carolina history, check out this video with Fort Fisher and the Lumbee Tribe.)

From this dark piece of American history, a Lumbee Outlaw/Folk Hero would arise: Henry Berry Lowrie (Lowry/Lowery; spelling varies across sources; I will use the spelling used by the Lumbee Tribe in its documentation).

Henry Berry Lowrie’s gang and their war began at the close of the Civil War and lasted throughout Reconstruction and its inevitable failure. The Lowrie Gang would steal from the former Confederate Plantation owners, stealing from them and seeking revenge for any wrongs done to their fellow Lumbees, such as assault, rape, and murder that would never be brought to trial because of the perpetrators' class and racial identity (Lumbee Tribe). *extended story of Henry Berry Lowrie and his bad ass wife, Rhoda, coming in the following weeks*

In 1868, North Carolina finally enacted a law granting Native Americans the right to bear arms and to vote. Thanks to the Lowrie War, the Lumbee finally created a community that needed an identity. Before this point, the Lumbees were known simply as Indians because they were the remnants of several decimated tribes, and their shared identity did not come naturally. But thanks to the struggles of the Civil War and now Reconstruction, the group that remained came together on the shores of the Lumbee River. Many had suppressed their history and identity in order to survive in this new country. However, when black-and-white public schools were established in North Carolina, Native people were excluded from participation, making it clear that if they wanted change and progress, they would have to create a political identity capable of negotiating with local, state, and federal governments.

In 1885, North Carolina state senator Hamilton McMillan conducted research into the history and oral traditions of the Natives of Robeson County. Thanks to his investigation into the names of some Native people of Robeson County and Native oral traditions, he first proposed that the Native people of Robeson County were descendants of the Croatan of Lost Colony Fame. The Croatans saved the lives of those lost colonists and intermarried with them, creating the tribe that now inhabits the Lumbee River. McMillan secured recognition for the tribe as the Croatan Indians and secured funding for a school under the tribe’s control. In 1887, Senator McMillan also secured funding for the Indian Normal School, which later became UNC-Pembroke.

Unfortunately, like many things surrounding cultural identities, when dealing with a White Supremist world, the term ‘Croatan’ by 1911 was a derogatory term. The Croatan Indians would change their name to the Indians of Robeson County. This did not last long because many Natives lived in adjoining counties, not just in Robeson. In 1913, another white democratic state senator concluded that the Indians of Robeson County were not a distinct group and placed them in the same ancestry as the Cherokee, calling them the Cherokee of Robeson County. Despite the senator’s shoddy research and lack of understanding of the people of the Lumbee River, this name would stick until 1953.

In 1953, the Lumbee River Natives would finally have a say in what to call themselves. And they chose to name themselves after the river they had long called home, the Lumbee People. This name encompassed their complicated history following colonization and evoked images of the land that had supported and sheltered them in times of joy and trouble.

It is important to note that the need for both state and federal recognition stemmed from the need to provide services such as education to the Lumbee Tribe. Before state recognition, many Lumbee children received little to no formal education. With recognition comes access to grants to pay for educators, buildings, supplies, and food, everything needed to educate children. In spite of North Carolina’s willingness to recognize the Lumbee Tribe, the federal government would not recognize them until 2025.

The main difficulty the Lumbee Tribe faced was the Blood Quantum rule. It was a way of classifying people by their ‘Blood Percentage’ of a constructed racial group. These laws arose to codify Race into our legal system. The first law was the Indian Blood Law, passed in Virginia in 1705, which quantified how much blood you needed to have “in you” to be considered White, Black, Mixed, or Native. At first, this was done by focusing solely on physical features. For purposes of rights, status, or freedoms within the early American colonies. Later, when dealing with treaties and forced removal, it was a way to remove large numbers of Native peoples with ‘mixed heritage.’

The worst of these laws was the Dawes Act of 1887, which forced all Native American groups to operate in a Western Capitalistic society, whether they wished for it or not. It broke up communally held land into individual ownership and encouraged these groups to adopt sedentary farming. This was seen as a way to ‘Civilize’ the sometimes nomadic Native peoples, to make them more White.

In 1887, when DNA was not even a thought in the human imagination at this point, how did law markers determine who was Native, and had rights to Native Lands, and who wasn’t? They looked at your physical features and told you if you looked Native, brown/dark, or if you had more ‘White’ features: light colored hair, eyes, and pale skin. As anyone with an Anthropology degree will tell you, this is terribly stupid because not all Native Peoples look the same. There is significant genetic variation within every ‘racial’ population. It has never been as clear-cut as: if you look brown, you must be Native; if you are super pale, you must be White. Genetics is wild, and we are still trying to figure it all out because genes and their expression are influenced by a variety of factors, not just your lineage.

Those with a lesser Native Blood Quantum (BQ) could sell their land to the tribe, and the tribe could sell any ‘excess lands’ to White people. It’s a win-win, right? Spoiler alert: it was most definitely not a win-win.

It is because of the Dawes Act that the United States established the Tribal Rolls. This would become the list in which different Tribal Governing Bodies would determine who is a member of their Tribe by tracing your ancestry to these rolls.

As if it wasn’t enough to destroy entire communities, way of living, and create the mechanics of a legally codified racism, the system that White Colonizers created would be used to disenfranchise and keep out specific Native Groups from gaining authority and autonomy over themselves. Most of this money is given to Tribal Governments as grants, in hopes that Natives can recreate a Western-acceptable community. From schools that took Native Children away from their parents, homes, and traditions, to the forced settling of the Nations, America has done everything it possibly could to get rid of Native Culture, Traditions, and Lifeways.

The Federal Government has long argued that the Lumbee Tribe’s BQ was too low to be accepted because of the mixing of several other tribes, as well as the intermarrying with white and black people. Things that would have resulted from living around the colonialists and their disgraceful practice of slavery of black people. Their act of survival was used against them to keep them from getting the help they needed to support this descendant population.

The United States first punished Natives for not being Western enough, only to turn around and claim that they are not Native enough.

While I dislike many things President Trump does, I must begrudgingly admit that the federal recognition of the Lumbee was one thing that he got right, and it was at least one promise he kept. Not that it washes out all the other terrible things done, but a blind hog and all that.

The long road to recognition has made the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina a persistent and resourceful group of people. They used churches to create religious and social connections. Red Man Lodges, also known as the Improved Order of Red Men, is a social and political organization created for leaders throughout Native Communities. In the early 1900s, the Lumbee joined this nationally recognized group.

In 1968, the Lumbee Regional Development Association, Inc. was formed to provide services and programs needed by the Lumbee people. This would function as the governing body of the Lumbee until 2000, when the Lumbee Tribe established its own tribal constitution, creating the Lumbee Tribal Government.

Federal Recognition gives the Lumbee people greater control, autonomy, and a greater say in their future. While protected in their status at the state and local levels, they had no special protections and needed protection from other states or the Federal Government. Something all Native Groups deserve and need, but it provides more funding and support to help this underserved community. It will grant them more opportunities to attract jobs and businesses to the area. It will also allow them to receive grants and funding to create scholarships, provide childcare assistance, and more. It gives the Lumbee the ability to protect their culture and land and to improve their members' lives.

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Here are some famous members of the Lumbee Tribe:

Freda Porter- One of the first Native American women to receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics

Malinda Maynor Lowery- award-winning filmmaker, writer, professor at Emory University, and historian. Her works include Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (UNC Press, 2010) and The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle. Her filmography includes Peabody Award-winning A Chef’s Life (PBS, 2013-2018), Somewhere South (PBS, 2020), Road to Race Day (Crackle, 2020), the Emmy-nominated Private Violence (HBO, 2014), In the Light of Reverence (PBS, 2001), and two short films, Real Indian (1996), and Sounds of Faith (1997).

Chris Chavis- Known as the professional wrestler, Tatanka, or “the Native American,” is now retired.

Kelvin Sampson- the first and only Native American Coach to lead a basketball program to the final four.

Bibliography

https://dsi.appstate.edu/projects/lumbee/tata001

https://www.lumbeetribe.com/history-and-culture

https://mathwomen.agnesscott.org/women/porter.htm

https://www.malindalowery.com/

https://www.naiahf.org/kelvin-sampson

https://www.ncscp.org/conservation

https://ncwf.org/blog/sandhills/

http://www.redmen.org/redmen/info/

https://sandhillsecological.org/

Carson, William Oyenque. Identity Formation, Tribal Enrollment, and Blood Quantum Laws. Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. https://crowcanyon.org/resources/historical-and-modern-challenges-of-native-american-identity-formation-tribal-enrollment-and-blood-quantum-laws/

Dawes Act of 1887 https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/dawes-act

Hite, T. B.(2022).“Whoz Ya People?”: Defining Lumbee Citizenship and Belonging in the 21st Century.(Master’s thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/6713

Livermont, Tamee. Kinship Blues. WERNative. https://www.wernative.org/articles/kinship-blues

OAKLEY, CHRISTOPHER ARRIS. “The Legend of Henry Berry Lowry: Strike at the Wind and the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 1, 2006, pp. 59–80. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26467042. Accessed 4 Jan. 2026.

Pearson, E.M. (2017). Native American Injustice and the Mathematics of Blood Quantum. In: Sieh, E., McGregor, J. (eds) Human Dignity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56005-6_18

Pharr, Lauren. Fort Fisher State Historic Site Debuts Lumbee Indian Exhibit. North Carolina Sea Grant. https://ncseagrant.ncsu.edu/currents/2021/06/fort-fisher-state-historic-site-debuts-lumbee-indian-exhibit/ 28 June, 2021.

Stacy, Robin Purser and Kelly Agan. "McMillan, Hamilton." NCpedia. State Library of NC. December 2021. https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/mcmillan-hamilton.

Wilkins, David E. “Henry Berry Lowry: Champion of the Dispossessed.” Race, Gender & Class, vol. 3, no. 2, 1996, pp. 97–111. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41674791. Accessed 4 Jan. 2026.

It wasn’t until I attended a North Carolina history class that I even knew there was a medical school in Raleigh. Not only was it Raleigh’s only medical school, but it was also housed at one of the nation’s best HBCUs, Shaw University. I knew about its very prestigious school, established in 1865 as the Institute for Freedmen. I had never heard of Leonard Medical School, a medical school established to educate the newly Freed People of North Carolina, giving them the chance to become physicians and return to their communities to provide much-needed health care services. White doctors were not required to see black patients, leaving a large number of North Carolinians without access to medical care.

Established in 1880, it was the first four-year medical school program in the United States and trained more than 400 Black physicians in its brief 40-year existence. Leonard Hall accepted its first students in the spring of 1881, with two white doctors from Raleigh who provided their expertise to the first graduating class. The first graduating class consisted of six men, all of whom passed the licensing board. The valedictorian of the first graduating class was Lawson Andrew Scruggs, a physician and pharmacist who would become a resident physician at Leonard Hospital. Born to enslaved parents in Bedford County, Virginia, on January 15, 1857, he would become one of the first three board-certified doctors in North Carolina History.

Being born to enslaved people, Scruggs had very little formal education, but this did not deter him. He would work several jobs, such as farming and construction, and spend his nights studying to achieve his dreams. He would graduate from the Leonard School of Medicine, work at the hospital, and eventually start his own private practice. He would go on to educate and help establish the Old North State Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Society for black physicians, dentists, and pharmacists. The Raleigh chapter even bears his name. (Please check out their website, it is super cool. https://onsms.org/)

Being the first doesn’t always mean you’ll last. Due to a lack of economic support, the Leonard School of Medicine could not keep up with other black medical schools that opened after it, such as Howard Medical College and Meharry Medical College in Nashville. The last classes were offered during 1918-1919.

Why did this first Black Medical School fail? It is a question asked by some historians, and the answer is complicated. One big reason Leonard Medical School failed was the Flexner Report. In 1910, this report was published in the hopes of providing a ‘Gold-Standard’ medical care that would mean that no matter where you go in the United States, you could expect the same treatment in care. Good idea in theory, but what it actually did was far more sinister. It established the requirement that all medical/surgical schools be linked in a University model, the standard we know today. Still, any medical school that may be struggling for financial backing due to its location or the population it serves may not have the capacity to meet the new financial requirements to survive. For example, Shaw’s Leonard School of Medicine did not receive the same level of state financial support as UNC. Leonard operated with the aid of several charities and religious organizations. They could not afford the required full-time faculty or facilities requirements (Hine 1985).

While it had the veneer of being about improving the quality of care, the words in the report, as well as who wrote it, leave many historians wondering about the report’s true intent.

The report was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Family and was given to Abraham Flexner. Flexner was not a medical professional and had never studied any health-related field; he earned a bachelor’s degree in the Classics and Humanities from Johns Hopkins University. He was a very well-known educator(Duffy 2011), but it is unclear why he was picked to “standardize and improve medical education in the United States and Canada. The goal was to evaluate medical schools based on scientific rigor and adherence to the biomedical model (Leister 2025:Phsycology Today).” Why he was chosen instead of a medical doctor or scientist may never be known, but his report led to the closure of over half of the medical schools operating in the United States. This report guided the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Family to pull funding and support to already precariously funded schools in regions and communities that desperately needed these services. Leaving under-served community-based medical schools scrambling to find other avenues of funding to produce quality medical professionals to help treat and care for those who need it.

One of the more telling details of the report involved Leonard Medical School. Because of its location in Raleigh, the same place where the state Medical Certification Board operated, it showed that black doctors who attended the school passed at higher rates with higher scores than their white counterparts. Instead of seeing the fact that some of the doctors teaching at the school were also board members who developed the questions, and that these lucky black professionals were being trained by the doctors setting the medical standard, the report concluded that these black doctors must be receiving an unfair advantage. That they were being given answers or special treatment, thereby calling into question the standard of care these doctors were providing(Hine 1985). I mean, there is no other logical conclusion to come to because most white Americans accepted that black minds were inferior to white, “biologically speaking*.” Not that these doctors worked ten times harder, because many did not have the same quality or availability of formal education as their white counterparts, leading many to seek out further outside educational opportunities, because it wasn’t available to them.

While other black medical schools found different ways to find outside funding to protect their medical schools from this form of institutionalized racism, Shaw University was not as successful. Leonard Medical School went from the first to offer a four-year medical degree to a two-year program, and finally closed its doors in 1920.

Institutional racism isn’t just one person or one group actively acting against a person. It isn’t an organization saying we don’t like a particular group, so we will outlaw their right to exist. It is a way to change the legal landscape, remove funding, or create standards that will make it nearly impossible for those trying to provide aid and services to the community. You don’t have to outlaw black doctors; you have to make it nearly impossible for schools that train them to provide funding or meet a new ‘standard of care.’ It is the very reason why, today, black doctors are treated as less qualified even in emergencies on airplanes, for example.

The difficulty in dealing with systemic racism is the racism baked into the cake at the inception of our institutions, such as hospitals, education, prison systems, and the like. When they were developed, designed, and conceptualized, they were not informed by modern thinking, understanding, or, hopefully, by the progress we have made in the Civil Rights Movement. These were developed by people whose “scientifically informed view” was based on ideas of eugenics and White Supremacy. It was the accepted view of those in leadership positions. It was even taught in colleges and universities. While we, as a country, have changed and grown, the foundation will remain rotten unless we address the underlying ideologies polluting our systems. Just because it doesn’t impact you directly doesn’t mean you will not feel its harm. It will negatively affect economic growth, innovation, and the quality of life for all Americans. How many potential doctors, lawyers, educators, and scientists have we potentially lost due to this absurd idea that the color of one’s skin is linked to perceived intellectual social order? And the only way we can pretend that our neighbors, friends, and community members are not suffering under these systems is to look the other way and remain comfortable, knowing we are too cowardly to deal with the problems caused by our past.

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https://caro.news/shaw-univ-law-school-the-mother-of-southern-legal-minds/

https://www.theeduledger.com/students/article/15092750/tales-of-desegregation-east-carolina-university

https://www.unc.edu/story/bhm2024/

https://www.ncpedia.org/leonard-medical-school

https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/scruggs-lawson-andrew

https://onsms.org/about/#history

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-leading-edge/202502/the-medical-monopoly-on-mental-health-and-the-flexner-report#:~:text=The%20Flexner%20Report%20was%20commissioned,largely%20from%20the%20Rockefeller%20family.

https://www.shawu.edu/meet-shaw/a-history-of-progress/

Duffy TP. The Flexner Report--100 years later. Yale J Biol Med. 2011 Sep;84(3):269-76. PMID: 21966046; PMCID: PMC3178858.

Hine, Darlene Clark. “The Anatomy of Failure: Medical Education Reform and the Leonard Medical School of Shaw University, 1882-1920.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 54, no. 4, 1985, pp. 512–25. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2294712. Accessed February 3 2026.

*Scientific Racism, when you still want to be a bigot but feel the need to hide pseudo-science while you do it.

Here is the challenge: you are in the middle of a governmental upheaval and are facing down forces trying to strip you and your fellow citizens of power. Your country has always had problems, corruption, scandals, the occasional regime change, and a war on the poor. There is, then, a rise in terrorism, more wars, and complacency, leading to fear and a loss of truthful narratives, with the masses relying on themselves to report their own stories and advocate for their own people. In this not-as-futuristic version of reality, you get all the questions and uncertainty, without the neon lights or robotic implants… at least not anytime soon. Capitalism has run amok with Dr. Reganstien’s monster, with the last little bit of General Lee’s goodwill. When it cloaks itself in faith, love, and religion, and creates cultists in government! ( Honestly, I might need to change this bit; I worry that the writers of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex might sue me for copyright infringement. Technocities?)

Your government has never been good, but there was a time when you knew it was better and was showing it could get better. This world saw movements toward social rights and the dismantling of systemic discrimination. Maybe that’s why Reaganstein decided to create his monster, with the blessing of rightist ethno-centric necro-regilion and their money? They looked into the void, and the void looked back. You will have to explore that fun little side story.

With this social, legal, philosophical, environmental, and historical upheaval, what do you do? What factions do you align yourself with, those currently in control of the government? Or their traditional nemesis, the fools that grew too fat on corporate money to see right from wrong? Or a new group emerging from the roots of the ground, cloaking themselves in the colors of recognition? For a mere chance to change the bloated past party? Or do you align with no one? Or create your own movement? Hide in the shadows, waiting to see the outcome before deciding to act. I mean, that is always a choice, but it makes for a fairly boring game; it does give me the Lorekeeper ideas. Yes, there are always options. And I promise you won’t like any of them. So, take a risk and have a little fun.

Okay, so here are the rules of this little HB: you gotta play in this micro generation to the next micro. Otherwise, your character is only going to get about half the references, and that’s no fun for anyone. So you can be born between just before Reagan and the end of Dubya. You also gotta be from a majority English-speaking country that occupies a North American Native Territory. Bonus points to character creation if it is a country that requires you to pay for medical care. Minus two points if you have socialized healthcare and don’t have people begging others not to call the ambulance because you can’t afford it. Points will fluctuate depending on the other characteristics you choose, depending on various socioeconomic indices. There will also be other points, such as your region, religion, political interpretation of skin color, educational level, and family characteristics across generations. And for extra flavor, we could do a random draw and let the dice predict where you start out. And let fate take the wheel and live dangerously. I promise, the feel will be dystopic.

You and your party will tackle huge problems with terrible and uncertain outcomes that we can’t even begin to calculate! Friends will turn faux, and you might have to make hard choices. All the while, try to walk the fine line between action and knowledge, without losing your mind to the chaos around you. You will be unable to trust your eyes, your family, or long-time friends. And how will you prevent yourself from slipping into madness?

So join us in the making of this fantasy world’s New Order!

Something new and cool? Or has it all been done before? No, it’s too unbelievable.

Dammit.

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That’s what started me down this road of giving my unasked-for opinions, takes on history, and storytelling. I was tired of these things getting trapped in my head and never going anywhere.

During this time, I have met many well-meaning people who have tried to tell me what to do and how to do it. Most with the very best of intentions. To build things for success, marketing, and maximum reach, things that would be good if I truly understood what I want this(gestures wildly) to be.

If you have spent any time at all reading this collection of thoughts, you would already know… It’s a cryptid.

It’s either a raccoon that has learned to type on a computer while wearing black cat-eye glasses, a perimenopausal woman slowly losing her mind as her country eats itself, or a younger, more feminine “Cousin It”. (All things I have been called IRL.)

I have always been quick to explain myself or force myself into a clear category, to avoid being misunderstood. Not to bury the lead, but I am always misunderstood, and over-explaining myself has never helped. People are going to think what they are going to think, so I am going to do the opposite of what everyone is telling me, via every Facebook/Insta/Threads/TikTok ad.

I am going to take it slow.

In the early 2000s, before the world went into hyperdrive, it would be enough to try to be consistent; now it strikes fast and gets on that viral thing before it peaks. I am going to be a fossil, and I am just going to take my time and see what shakes loose. Let the rest of the world try to ride the ‘tsunamis’ of our world. I will take calm seas, red sky at night, and the steady deep river. Hurricanes suck. Tornadoes are only good at destroying everything in their path.

I want to build. I want to be. I want to survive on my own terms with my sanity as intact as it’s going to be, given the circumstances.

I am working on creating my community both in the world of ones and zeros and in the real world.

I joined a church.

Before you think that I am something I am not, I am joining a Universal Unitarian Church.

It’s less about the different things we all might believe or not believe, and more about coming together to create a community around shared ideals.

The Seven UU Principles (https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/principles)

1. 1st Principle: The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

2. 2nd Principle: Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

3. 3rd Principle: Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;

4. 4th Principle: A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

5. 5th Principle: The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;

6. 6th Principle: The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;

7. 7th Principle: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

(My husband calls it codified liberalism. He’s not wrong. He’s a Secular Humanist.)

I like it because everyone listens respectfully to how other people think, believe, or worship (or lack thereof, depending on the person). They ask my kids what they think. What makes sense, feels right, and focuses more on accepting our perceived differences. They talk about helping others, systemic change, and trying to be the light we want to see in the world. The congregation is multiracial and multicultural, and it focuses on being loving and accepting. “It might not work for me, or I might not understand it, but that doesn’t make it wrong. It makes it the wrong choice for me.” That there is a HUGE difference.

The church I am currently attending and hoping to join uses its offerings to help the community directly. I cannot explain to you how wonderful it is to have such transparency in tithing. In most of the churches I grew up in, I was just told that money was for the church’s discretion, so it would depend on the church’s leadership, where and, if at all, whether that money would actually go to help people.

At my church, they actually bring people in from the organization to speak with us. Here is a list of organizations that the church I attend is supporting. If you feel moved to donate to any of them, please do.

• Chickahominy Tribe Day Care. The Child Care and Development Program is a program funded by the Office of Child Care to provide funds for Native American Children to attend quality childcare programs. The program also allows for relative care providers. Donate Here.

• Health Brigade. In 2020, Health Brigade celebrated 50 years of serving the community. To really appreciate the legacy of Fan Free Clinic and how it grew into Health Brigade, it is helpful to take a glimpse of the culture from which it sprang. In the era of Woodstock…of peace and love and Vietnam…two doctors, a nurse and a minister began an effort to serve those who lived mostly in the shadows of Richmond’s inner city–the poor, the sick and the forgotten. (Citation) Donate Here.

• Soar and Elevate. Their mission statement: Soar and Elevate is dedicated to addressing food insecurity, empowering youth, and fostering well-being for underserved communities. Our mission is to ensure every individual has access to the resources they need to thrive. Donate Here.

• The Living Legacy Project. The Living Legacy Project’s vision is a just and equitable world free from racism and other systems of oppression. Donate Here.

• Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy. Their mission is to engage people of faith and goodwill to advocate for economic, racial, and social justice in Virginia’s policies and practices through education, prayer, and action. Donate Here.

These are just a small sample from my local UU. I know that your closest UU (even if you never go) can provide you with a list of local nonprofits that could use your support directly. It might be interesting to check out their local list of organizations if you want to donate time or money, or raise awareness of causes in your community. I can say without hesitation that I feel good giving my money to these kinds of organizations. I feel much better doing this than handing over a single penny to the mega churches down the road. No church will ever be perfect, but I love the transparency that I have found from the several UUs I have attended randomly throughout my adulthood.

I am also volunteering my time getting myself back into the world of history in the Richmond area. I will be using my ADHD powers to spew history info and its impact at the Poe Museum.

And Poe is not an easy person to tackle; he has a lot of problems from his views on slavery, his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin, alcohol, addiction, and death. It gets complicated, and it’s a good way for me to practice what I preach!

Poe was an artist; entire genres of literature exist today thanks to his foundational work. But he is not someone I want anyone idolizing. Understanding his world, the impact of historical events/environments, and his uses for them as an artist and truth teller?

Yes!

Please! Remember, sometimes fiction tells more truth about a society than history or non-fiction. He was a man struggling in a world that was just being made from the concept that might makes right, and the certain power of being white. He lived in a world without germ theory, and a nation was heading for a head-on collision for its first existential crisis. He was born the same year as Lincoln and the year Thomas Paine died. He is a layer in our American Complexity.

Plus, nearly all of Poe’s stories are in the Public Commons, meaning you can use most of his work without worry about copyrights! And that is how it should be; this allows artists to do what they do best. Put their own mark on Poe’s words, subvert it, and recycle it to create new art that speaks to future generations. Old art is used to create new, more powerful art that speaks to the moment. It should be a Green Craft.

Creation takes time and is not the most glamorous idea. It cannot be done with a quick montage or a three-minute video, but stone by stone, clearing and burning away all the things that no longer serve me. It’s going to take some time, but I do believe I am finding my light through this dark time.

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