EFFORT TO PRESERVE RACIAL INTEGRITY 109 



the present. Old tax records in the State Library go further back, always 

 listing them as colored. The older families are also found in Woodson's 

 list of "Free Negro Heads of Families in the United States in 1830," taken 

 from the census report of that year. 



By means of these records, we have traced at least one large family back 

 to a slave woman who was freed prior to 1808 in another county and placed 

 on a tract of land with her two mulatto sons. One of these sons intermarried 

 into an old "free issue" family. The other styled himself an "Indian" and 

 mated with a white woman. In the particular line which we traced, a 

 son of this couple from this common-law marriage, or mating, mated 

 similarly with a white woman. Their son married a free issue woman who 

 claims to be white. Other descendants of this slave woman are pretty 

 well mixed with the remaining families of the group, making it easy to show 

 the introduction of the negro strain. 



Through the carelessness, to put it mildly, of a census enumerator, 278 

 of this group were enrolled as Indians and so classified in the preliminary 

 report for 1930. Our office has registered a protest against this classifica- 

 tion in the permanent report. In 1920 there were 304, in 1910 there were 7, 

 and in 1900, none classed as Indians. While this parent group was delighted 

 to secure enumeration as Indians through the negligence of an enumerator, 

 an offshoot from it over the ridge in another county actually secured enroll- 

 ment as white, through the ruling of the census supervisor for the district 

 to so classify them if their children attended white schools. Upon inquiry 

 this was of course claimed, upon the ground, presumably, that the special 

 school provided for them was a white one. 



In another county a group of negroes demanded "Indian" registration. 

 A mob of fifteen or twenty of them called upon the enumerator, demand- 

 ing that he change his classification from colored to Indian. He had already 

 sent his report to the supervisor of his district. What happened after that 

 I do not know, except that the Bureau of the Census published it as re- 

 ceived, but the preliminary report gave thirty-nine "Indians" from that 

 county in which none had ever before been heard of. A protest was filed 

 with the Director of the Census, who will add a footnote stating that their 

 classification as Indians has been questioned. The same footnote appears 

 in connection with all of the larger groups. 



We have another group living in a county which had no Indians in 1900 

 but which had 132 in 1930. A portion of the same group in the adjoining 

 county, probably listed by another enumerator, had 1 individual classified 

 as Indian in 1910 but in 1920 had 112, reduced in 1930 to 11. These ex- 

 amples show that the claims of these people to be Indians began after the 



