Lumbee
The Lumbee, also known as People of the Dark Water, are a mixed-race Indigenous peoples of the Americas who comprise the federally recognized Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. Primarily located in Robeson County, North Carolina, the Lumbee claim to be descended from numerous Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands who once inhabited the region and have been shown to have connections with other tri-racial isolate groups, such as the Melungeons and Louisiana Redbones.
The Lumbee take their name from the Lumber River, which winds through Robeson County. Pembroke, North Carolina, in Robeson County, is their economic, cultural, and political center. According to the 2000 United States census report, 89% of the population of the town of Pembroke identified as Lumbee; 40% of Robeson County's population identified as Lumbee. The Lumbee Tribe was recognized by North Carolina in 1885. In 1956, the U.S. Congress passed the Lumbee Act, which recognized the Lumbees as being American Indians but denied them the benefits of a federally recognized tribe.
In 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to advance the tribe's recognition. On December 18, 2025, he signed the Lumbee Fairness Act into law, making them a federally recognized tribe.
History
Archaeological evidence reveals that the area now known as Robeson County has been continuously occupied by Native people for at least 14,000 years. Every named era found elsewhere in pre-European-contact North Carolina is also present in the archaeological record of Robeson County. All modern vicinities of Lumbee occupation contain numerous archaeological sites as recent as the Late Woodland period, and oral traditions about the history of some Lumbee families extend back as far in Robeson County as the mid-1700s. Virginia Demarce, as well as Tim Hashaw state some of the earliest documented Lumbee families are of Tidewater origin. Hashaw claims Lousiana Redbones, Melungeons, and the Lumbee all share the same free Black ancestors from historic Tidewater, noting that many surnames associated with them initially appeared in the records of Virginia from the 1630s-1690s, such as Oxendine, Gibson, Goins, Harris, Brooks, Johnson, and Driggers. Some originators of these names were Anthony Johnson, Emmanuel Driggers, and John Gowen. He states these progenitors often intermarried and adopted eachother's children, and later migrated south into North Carolina to both avoid the rising prejudice in Virginia and seek the cheaper land on the frontier.18th century
The earliest European map referring to Native American communities in the area of the Lumber River was prepared in 1725 by John Herbert, the English commissioner of Indian trade for the Wineau Factory on the Black River. Herbert identified some nearby communities as the Saraw, Pee Dee, "Scavano", and Wacoma. Many in these communities assimilated into the Catawba, but modern-day Lumbees claim connection to them, even though none of their tribes are located within the boundaries of present-day Robeson County.A 1772 proclamation by the governor of North Carolina, Arthur Dobbs — derived from a report by his agent, Colonel Griffith Rutherford, head of a Bladen County militia — listed the names of inhabitants who took part in a "Mob Raitously Assembled together," composed of "free Negors and Mullatus" apparently defying the efforts of colonial officials to collect taxes. The proclamation declared the "Above list of Rogus is all living upon the Kings Land without title." The Chavis, Grooms, Ivey, Kersey, Locklear, and Sweat families were all included on this list. A later colonial military survey described "50 families a mixt crew, a lawless People possess the Lands without Patent or paying quit Rents." Geneaologist Paul Heinegg claims this proclamation is referring to the first free Black people in what was then Bladen County.
Hamilton McMillan wrote that Lumbee ancestor James Lowrie had received sizable land grants early in the century, and, by 1738, possessed combined estates of more than 2,000 acres. Adolph Dial and David Eliades claimed that another Lumbee ancestor, John Brooks, held the title to over 1,000 acres in 1735 and that Robert Lowrie gained possession of almost 700 acres.
A state archivist noted in the late 20th century that no land grants were issued during these years in North Carolina. The first documented land grants made to individuals claimed to be Lumbee ancestors did not take place until the 1750s, more than a decade later. None of the various petitions for federal recognition by the Lumbee people relied on the McMillan, Dial, or Eliades claims.
Land records show that in the second half of the 18th century, persons since identified as ancestral Lumbees began to take titles to land near Drowning Creek and prominent swamps such as Ashpole, Long, and Back. One example is William Driggers, who improved land on a swamp east of Drowning Creek. He was of the Driggers family, stated by Lumbee historians to be one of the founding Lumbee families in Drowning Creek. According to James Campisi, an anthropologist retained by the Lumbee tribe to aid their petition for federal recognition, the area "is located in the heart of the so-called old field of the Cheraw documented in land records between 1737 and 1739." In 1771 William's brother, a Black outlaw by the name of Winslow Driggers, was reported in the South Carolina Gazette as captured by "Settlers near the Cheraws" and hanged under the Negro Act for cow theft, after his gang had "committed all Manner of Depredations upon the industrious settled Inhabitants". On the same page, the horses he stole were shown to be available to their previous owners in Charaws, South Carolina, where a heavy Regulator presence existed. This could possibly suggest the settlement of free Black people in the area descended from the former African slaves Emanuel and Frances Driggus, who were the great-grandparents of William and Winslow according to geneaological analysis.
Pension records for veterans of the American Revolutionary War in Robeson County listed men with surnames later associated with Lumbee families, such as Samuel Bell, Jacob Locklear, John Brooks, Berry Hunt, Thomas Jacobs, Thomas Cummings, and Michael Revels. In 1790, other men with surnames since associated with Lumbee-identified descendants, such as Barnes, Braveboy, Bullard, Chavers, Cumbo, Hammonds, Lowrie, Oxendine, Strickland, and Wilkins, were listed as inhabitants of the Fayetteville District; they were all "Free Persons of Color" in the first federal census. Some of these surnames, such as Chavis and Cumbo, are known to be shared in common with Melungeons. Author Tim Hashaw notes that Cannon Cumbo, who is claimed as a core Lumbee progenitor, was directly descended from Manuel Cumbo/Cambow, an African free Black man from Virginia. He notes he was initially recognized as white in Bladen County, but as a free person of color in Robeson, and was sometimes regarded as Portuguese by his neighbors. He married Tabitha Newsom, who was related to one of the leaders of Nat Turner's Rebellion
Antebellum
Following Nat Turner's slave rebellion of 1831, the state legislature passed amendments to its original 1776 constitution, abolishing suffrage for free people of color. This was one of a series of laws passed by North Carolina whites from 1826 to the 1850s which the historian John Hope Franklin characterized as the "Free Negro Code", creating restrictions on that class. Free people of color were stripped of various civil and political rights which they had enjoyed for almost two generations. They could no longer vote or serve on juries, bear arms without a license from the state, or serve in the state militia. As these were obligations traditionally associated with citizenship, they were made second-class citizens.In 1853, the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the state's restrictions to prevent free people of color from bearing arms without a license. Noel Locklear, identified as a free man of color in State v. Locklear, was convicted of being in illegal possession of firearms. In 1857, William Chavers from Robeson County was arrested and charged as a "free person of color" for carrying a shotgun without a license. His counsel argued that he was a white man due to being five generations removed from his black ancestor, but Chavers was ruled to be a "free Negro" and like Locklear, was convicted. Chavers promptly appealed, his lawyer arguing that there was no evidence Chavers was a "free Negro", and that the judge had misled the jury on what defines a "free Negro". The court noted the definition of "free person of color" was poorly defined and reversed the previous decision, finding that "The indictment then, in the present case, may embrace a person who is not a free Negro within the meaning of the act, and for that reason it cannot be sustained."
Civil War
A yellow fever epidemic in 1862–1863 killed many slaves working on the construction of Fort Fisher near Wilmington, North Carolina, then considered to be the "Gibraltar of the South". As the state's slave owners resisted sending more slaves to Fort Fisher, the Confederate Home Guard intensified efforts to conscript able-bodied free persons of color as laborers.Despite the widespread sympathies among the Indian community for the plight of the participants in this guerilla warfare, nearly 150 Lumbee ancestors voluntarily enlisted in the Confederate Infantry, including the nephew-in-law of Henry Berry Lowry described below.
Lowry War
Early in the Civil War, North Carolina turned to forced labor to construct its defenses. Several people from the "free negro settlement" had been conscripted as laborers to help build Fort Fisher, near Wilmington. Henry Berry Lowrie escaped and several of his relatives joined him in the swamps where they resorted to "lying out", to avoid being rounded up by the Home Guard and forced to work as impressed laborers again, where they had complained of poor food and treatment.The Lowrie gang, as it became known, resorted to crime and conducting personal feuds, committing robberies and murders against white Robeson County residents and skirmishing with the Confederate Home Guard. They grew bolder as the war turned against the Confederacy. In December 1864, the Lowrie gang killed James P. Barnes after he had drafted workers, including the Lowries, for work on local defenses. Barnes had earlier accused Henry's father, Allen Lowrie, of stealing hogs. Next, the gang killed James Brantley Harris, a Confederate conscription officer who had killed a Lowrie relative.
After the Civil War, the Lowrie gang continued their insurgency, committing robberies and murders. The authorities' raids and attempts to capture gang members became known as the Lowry War. Lowrie's gang continued its activities into the Reconstruction Era. Republican governor William Woods Holden declared Lowrie and his men outlaws in 1869, and offered a $12,000 reward for their capture: dead or alive. Lowrie responded with more revenge killings. Eluding capture, the Lowrie gang persisted after Reconstruction ended and conservative white Democrats gained control of North Carolina government, imposing segregation and white supremacy.
In February 1872, shortly after a raid in which he robbed the local sheriff's safe of more than $28,000, Henry Berry Lowrie disappeared. It is claimed he accidentally shot himself while cleaning his double-barrel shotgun. As with many folk heroes, the death of Lowrie was disputed. He was reportedly seen at a funeral several years later.