Mixed Race Studies

The Chowan Discovery Group: Documenting the Mixed-Race History of North Carolina’s “Winton Triangle”

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2013-03-20

Vikki Bynum, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Here’s another region of the South with a fascinating history of mixed-race ancestry. I discovered the Chowan Discovery Group after Steven Riley, creator and moderator of MixedRaceStudies.org, introduced me via email to the Group’s Executive Director, Marvin T. Jones. The “Winton Triangle,” located in Hertford County, North Carolina, encompasses the three towns of Winton, Cofield, and Ahoskie. Here, people maintain a distinctive identity rooted in Native American, European, and African ancestry.

According to Marvin Jones, the Triangle traces its origins to before the 1584 arrival of the English to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where Chowanoke (Choanoac) Indian settlements were prominent along the Chowan River. After the English invasion, diseases (to which Native Americans lacked immunity) and territorial disputes decimated and disrupted the Chowanoke settlements of present-day Hertford County…

Read the entire article here.

Opportunities for Academic Research

Chowan Discovery Group
2013-02-25

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director

The Chowan Discovery Group is inviting academics to partner with us to study the Winton Triangle.

The Triangle is a 260 year-old mixed race community of landowners in central Hertford County. Around 1960, its population was in the hundreds, and the land dimensions are 8 by 10 miles from east to west, and 8 miles from north to south with over 20 roads and streets. The Chowan Discovery Group has collected photographs, documents, interviews, books and maps. However, demographic and economic studies are needed. The incomes and occupations of Winton Triangle people were diverse, and the land ownership is estimated at over 20 square miles.
 
Please contact Marvin T. Jones at info@discovery.org or 202.726.4066.

Winton Triangle history in Chicago!

Chowan Discovery Group
2012-11-06

Marvin Jones

In Chicago, the CDG got the opportunity to introduce our history to a national audience of academics and students at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at DePaul University in Chicago.

Writer Lars Adams, of the Chowanoke Descendants website, presented the history of the Choanoac (Chowanoke) people from the earliest evidence in the 8^th century, to their encounter with the English in 1586 in Hertford County and to their decline and supposed demise in Gates County 1821. Adams finished his account by relating the re-assertion of Choanoac heritage: the growth of the Robbins family near Cofield, the rise of the Meherrin-Chowanoke people, based in the Hertford County, and the Choanoac marker in Harrellsville that was erected last year.

My latest presentation of the Winton Triangle has since added the recent findings and events of the past year and a new map of Winton Triangle schools. Several audience members told me that is was best presentation they had seen so far, and on that strength, several of them returned to attend the next day’s panel about Melungeons and other mixed-race people in Appalachia. S. J Arthur, President of the Melungeon Heritage Association, and Wayne Winkler, from East Tennessee State University and author of Walking Toward Sunset, documented the historical diversity of mixed-race people in Appalachia. This panel was moderated by the Chowan Discovery Group…

…I’d like to thank Laura Kina of DePaul University for paving the way for our two panels, Meherrin-Chowanoke artist Gerry Lang for moderating the Choanoac-Winton Triangle panel, and Mayola Cotterman, a longtime family friend, for taking me into her comfy, lovely and conveniently-located home and attending both panels. Our friends Steven Riley and Julia Cates of Mixed Race Studies attended, and as always, were supportive…

Read the entire article here.

Three Winton Triangle Presentations at Greensboro conference.

Chowan Discovery Group
2012-10-15

Marvin T. Jones

The Chowan Discovery presentations about the Winton Triangle, its Civil War history and Chowan Discovery historical markers attracted many enthusiastic attendees at the annual conference of the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society (AAGHS) in Greensboro. Included in the audiences were history professionals and authors.
 
One of the joys of having three presentations at the conference was that the reputation of each lecture fed the attendance of the next.  This also gave more people the opportunity to hear about our work.  And then there are those increased sales of Carolina Genesis and the CDG mugs.  Hawking those mugs are fun, whether they sell or not – and they sold.  I enjoyed all of questions and comments.

Among the participants, I saw growing awareness about tri-racial people and free people of color in North Carolina at the conference.  This is an important trend for our mission…

Read the entire article here.

Honoring Robert Lee Vann

The State of Things
WUNC 91.5, North Carolina Public Radio
2012-07-10

Frank Stasio, Host

Sarah Edwards, Co-Host

Guests

Marvin Jones
Chowan Discovery Group

Cash Michaels, Editor, Chief Reporter/Photographer and Columnist
The Carolinian

North Carolina native Robert Lee Vann was a pioneer of journalism during his lifetime. He served as editor of “The Pittsburgh Courier” which was the largest black newspaper in circulation until Vann’s death in 1940. He was recently commemorated in his hometown of Ahoskie, NC with a long-earned historical marker. Marvin Jones of the Chowan Discovery Group and Cash Michaels, editor of The Carolinian, join host Frank Stasio to talk about both Vann’s legacy and the legacy of the black press.

Listen to interview here. Download the interview here.