1 “Hill Dwellers Live Like Nomads,” Duluth News Tribune, May 29, 1921, 4.

2 Ibid.

3 “Town Puzzled by Wild Family,” New York Times, May 2, 1921, 16; William James Dobbin, “Wild Men Within Commuting Distance,” New York Tribune, June 12, 1921, D1; and “Village Shrinks From Contact with ‘Poor, Unwashed Whites,’” New York Tribune, May 1, 1921, 2.

4 “Family Living Like Barbarians,” Tulsa World, May 22, 1921, 4.

5 “Finds Wild Family From the Ramapos,” New York Times, May 1, 1921, 7. The racial ambiguity of communities like the Jackson Whites is also borne out in their name, which carried as much lore as the population itself. While two separate origin narratives are thought to explain the etymology of the Jackson Whites, the most common claims that the term is a contraction of “Jacks”—the term used by white northerners to refer to freed slaves—and “Whites”—the white mountaineers who lived in the region and intermarried with the freed slaves and local Native Americans. It should be noted that the term “Jackson White” is held in disrepute by a majority of this community, as the term is seen as pejorative in nature and a denial of their long-standing claim to indigenous ancestry. Known today as the Ramapough Mountain Indians, the shift in nomenclature is evidence of a decades-long battle to determine the boundaries of black and native identity. For the purposes of this paper, the author will use the terms “Jackson White” as well as “Ramapo people” as the historical texts used them. However, this usage should not be read as a commentary on the racial identity of the group in question, but merely in keeping with the usage of the time. For more on the nomenclature and identity struggles of the Ramapough Mountain Indians, see Cohen, David Steven, The Ramapo Mountain People (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

6 “Hill Dwellers Live Like Nomads.”

7 Calvin Beale coined the term “triracial isolates,” although these communities are known by a number of derisive names, including “racial dropouts,” “racial miscreants,” and sometimes “racial islands.” Beale, Calvin L., “American Triracial Isolates: Their Status and Pertinence to Genetic Research,” Eugenics Quarterly 4 (Dec. 1957): 187CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 “Hill Dwellers Live Like Nomads.”

9 For examples of scholarship illuminating this thread of progressive reform, see Petit, Jeanne D., The Men and Women We Want: Gender, Race, and the Progressive Era Literary Test Debate (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Southern, David W., The Progressive Era and Race: Reaction and Reform, 1900–1917 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2005)Google Scholar; and Spiro, Jonathan Peter, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 “Strung Up A Negro: Lynch Law in the Mountains of New York State Effect,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Apr. 21, 1899, 5; and Dobbin, “Wild Men Within Commuting Distance.”

11 Jersey's Poor Whites: Inhabitants of the Ramapos,” St Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct. 18, 1884; Dobbin, “Wild Men Within Commuting Distance”; and “A Visit to the Jackson Whites of in the Ramapo,” Washington Post, Feb. 28, 1909.

12 In this essay, I rely on Jill Olumide's definition of “mixed-race,” which she defines as “the patterns and commonality of experience among those who obstruct whatever purpose race is being put to at a particular time.” Olumide, Jill, Raiding the Gene Pool: The Social Construction of Race (London: Pluto Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

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14 Lawrie, Forging a Labor Race, 157.

15 This characterization is not to suggest that racial boundaries became somehow impermeable, only that a majority of scholarship has treated it as such. For examples of this work, see Lubin., Alex Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945–1954 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004)Google Scholar; Takaki, Ronald, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin Books, 1989)Google Scholar; Molina, Natalie, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Smith, J. Douglass, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Svingen, Orlan J., “Jim Crow, Indian Style,” American Indian Quarterly 11 (Autumn 1987): 275–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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21 Those states included Montana (1909), Arkansas (1911), Nebraska (1913), Oklahoma (1917), Tennessee (1917), Virginia (1924), and Alabama (1927). Pascoe, Peggy, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 118Google Scholar.

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33 “Strung Up A Negro.”

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48 John Hartigan, Jr., has argued that southern migrants from Appalachia—both blacks and whites—shared commonalities of speech and lifestyles, yet he nevertheless designated them into two groups: blacks and hillbillies. See Hartigan, John Jr., “Name Calling: Objectifying ‘Poor Whites’ and ‘White Trash’ in Detroit,” in White Trash: Race and Class in America, ed. Wray, Matt and Newitz, Annalee (New York: Routledge, 1997), 41–56 Google Scholar.

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54 Arthur Estabrook, “Blood Seeking Environment,” Eugenical News (1926): 106–14; and Roland Harper, “The Most Prolific People,” Eugenical News (1938): 29–31.

55 Ibid., 30.

56 Vincent, “A Retarded Frontier,” 4.

57 “The Jackson Whites: Strange People Living Between New York and New Jersey.”

58 Estabrook, “Triple Crosses in the South,” 58–59.

59 James Lane Allen, “Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback,” Harper's Monthly Magazine, June 1886, 69.

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87 Kite, “The Jackson Whites.”

88 Ibid.

89 Ibid.

90 Ibid.

91 Ibid.

92 “Blood Combination Has Bred Moron People,” National Labor Tribune (Pittsburgh, PA), Nov. 24, 1932, 5.

93 Both the Jukes and the Kallikak families, the subjects of the two most popular eugenic studies, were believed to have engaged in interracial sex. See Estabrook, Arthur H., The Jukes in 1915 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dugdale, “The Jukes”; and Henry H. Goddard, The Kallikak Family.

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104 The one-drop rule is a legal and social convention asserting that any person with at least a drop of black blood is considered black. It has historically operated in the United States as a cornerstone of America's racial formation project, whereby mixed-race persons become illegible because they are routinely assigned the racial status of the subordinate group. See Davis, F. James, Who Is Black? One Nation's Definition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.