Brass Ankles
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| (Unknown) | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Orangeburg County and surrounding counties, eastern United States | |
| Languages | |
| English | |
| Religion | |
| Predominantly Baptist | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Melungeon, Lumbee Indians, African American, Beaver Creek Indians, whites |
The Brass Ankles of South Carolina were a "tri-racial isolate" group, as defined by anthropologists, that developed in colonial South Carolina and lived successively in the areas of Charleston, Berkeley, Colleton and Orangeburg counties as they increasingly migrated away from the Low Country and into the Piedmont and frontier areas, where racial discrimination was less. They were identified by this term in the later 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. They had a combination of European, African, and Native American ancestry.
Although the individuals were of mixed ancestry, after Reconstruction, white Democrats regained power in the South and imposed racial segregation and white supremacy under Jim Crow laws. (Note: United States Census surveys included a category of "mulatto" until 1930, when the powerful Southern bloc in Congress pushed through requirements to have people classified only as black or white. By this time, most Southern states had passed laws under which persons of any known black ancestry were required to be classified in state records as black, what is known as the "one-drop rule". of required classification as one race.
It forced people into the categories of white and black; this discounted and denied people's own identification as Native American or mixed race. Less frequently they were classified as Croatan, a designation in North Carolina of a tri-racial group. The surnames represented among the Brass Ankles have included Jackson, Chavis, Bunch, Driggers, Sweat, Williams, Russell, and Goins, some of which have been represented in other mixed-race groups, such as the Melungeons in Tennessee. Over time, people of mixed race identified with and married more frequently into one or another group, becoming part of the white, black or the Beaver Creek Indians community, for instance.
...
Wikipedia