Dominickers

The Dominickers are a small biracial or triracial ethnic group that was once centered in the Florida Panhandle county of Holmes, in a corner of the southern part of the county west of the Choctawhatchee River, near the town of Ponce de Leon. The group was classified in 1950 as one of the "reputed Indian-White-Negro racial isolates of the Eastern United States" by the United States Census Bureau.

Few facts are known about their origins, and little has been published about this group.

The first known mention in print of the Dominickers' existence is an article in Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State, published by the Federal Writers' Project in 1939. The article "Ponce de Leon" identifies the Dominickers as being descendants of the widow of a pre-Civil War plantation owner and one of her black slaves, by whom she had five children. (A separate oral tradition has it that the slave was the mulatto half-brother of the woman's deceased husband, but this has not been verified.)

The unsigned article said that numerous descendants still lived in the area at the time of writing, and their children attended a segregated school (as required by Florida's Jim Crow laws). Dominickers were not accepted as social equals by the white community, but they did not associate with the black community, either. The Dominickers formed a small middle layer of Holmes County society separate from both whites and blacks (somewhat analogous to the status of Louisiana Creoles before the United States purchase of the Louisiana Territory).

According to the article, their appearance varied from very fair (white) to "Negroid" (black), even among the siblings of a single family. It also says the pejorative nickname "Dominickers" originated when a local man in a divorce case described his estranged wife as "black and white, like an old Dominicker chicken." Another account says the description applied to the man with whom she was living.

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