We did not disapear. We have done what we have always done. We hide in plain sight.

The first arrivals were brought by the Spanish in the late 1500s. Spain was unsuccessful in colonizing the Americas. They left many behind in the area that would be known as the Rowland/Orange/Person counties of North Carolina.

The second group would be brought here from the Netherlands and England. Some before the Puritans, New Amsterdam. For the next 75 boatloads of Roma from all over Europe would be used as labor and explorers. Who else to explore a new frontier than those who had 500 years of history being in a strange land surrounded by strange people?

The next wave of Roma would come from Scotland and Germany. The Scottish were often expelled Jacobites.

“Scots Banished to the Plantations” is an excellent source to see who was sent here and for what crime.

All of these different groups of Roma migrated into NE Eastern Kentucky, specifically Wolfe and Magoffin County. We stayed there from 1790 until about 1920.

The racial purity laws of that time made it very difficult. Starting around 1880, the people in north eastern Kentucky started traveling to Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. They would then go through the mid west Arkansas, Missouri, and over to Colorado. They would go south to Florida over to Texas.

We would change our names from Roosa to Rose. Brandenburg to Brennan. Nickel to Nicholson. We’d change our first names from Elvira to Evelyn. Josephus to Jo.

We’d join Baptist churches. We’d start churches. We’d hide among the Freemasons. We’d become governors and lawyers. We’d start cults. We’d start homeless shelters.

We do all the things everyone else does. Some good. Some bad.

We’re people just like anyone else. We’re Jews, and Muslims, and Atheists, and Mormons. But on the inside we are Roma. Among friends we are Roma.

Some still travel to this day. Others haven’t traveled for hundreds of years.

But we didn’t go anywhere. We’re right here as we’ve always been. Hiding in plain sight.

Haven’t finished the book, but would think that if there was a Islamic core to the Tribe of Ishmael it would have been noted by those railing against it.

JP Lambert: Pretty sure Canton MI was not founded by Chinese, ;-), but I did grow up in the western burbs of Detroit and there used to be a Nankin and Pekin townships in western Wayne Co. Nankin Mills is still there on the Rouge River. Apparently there was a China-mania back in the 1800′s. And admiration for the Greek general of the 1800′s Ypsilanti. Someone took an interest in the wider world. Cheers.

Kramer, Elsa F. Recasting the Tribe of Ishmael: The Role of Indianapolis’s Nineteenth-Century Poor in Twentieth-Century Eugenics. Indiana Magazine of History 104:1 (March 2008): 36–64.

https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/1932 (downloadable PDF)

This makes me suspicious of the claims about the other town mentioned. What next, will people try claiming the first settlers of Canton, Michigan were Chinese?

Secondly, the government is shady and will do anything to continuously keep in the forefront of all Americans that Black people never have been anything and never will be. Make you wonder why the effort?

Peace
(The Universal greeting of a 5%er)

The idea that the Ishmaelites were Muslims doesn’t seem to hold much water, frankly, there’s no solid proof of it, and therefore, it must be viewed as speculative only.

But they were classified as a group and–for all intents–wiped-out through eugenics laws after 1907 under the “Indiana Plan” where “degenerate” populations were forced sterilized and/or incarcerated under the law. That’s a much more significant story because it could very well be cultural genocide, a high crime that might have to be confronted as a part of Indiana’s history.

The fact is, they didn’t have much of a problem associating with and even interbreeding (sorry for the term, it’s meant technically only) with Blacks and Native Americans and simply didn’t fit-in. The Deutsch book sounds like it might have few answers in it, at least one can hope so.

Fard? Well I guess I cannot say that in truth about the 5 Percenters since their founder was black, albeit also a conman of great ability.

from the introduction to Nathaniel Deutsch’s
“Inventing America’s “Worst” Family”

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/11113/11113.intro.php

“There is only one problem with Hugo Leaming’s ingenious and inspiring portrait of the Tribe of Ishmael: it isn’t true. Ben Ishmael was not an “Islamic saint or Imam,” his name does not reflect a corruption of the Arabic “ibn Ishmael,” as Leaming also suggested in his essay. Nor was Ben Ishmael of African descent. Moreover, the Tribe of Ishmael was never an Islamic community, and the vast majority of the people identified as Ishmaelites over the years were of Western European background, although a relatively small minority did possess some African or Native American ancestry. Indeed, as I will show, a careful examination of all the published and unpublished sources on the Tribe of Ishmael reveals that only one of Leaming’s major claims remains a possibility, namely, that some of the individuals identified as Ishmaelites may have become early members of the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. In light of the available evidence, however, even this assertion does not rise beyond the level of conjecture.
If the evidence is so weak, how and why did Hugo Leaming arrive at his startling conclusions? Leaming had complex personal reasons for reimagining the Tribe of Ishmael as a primarily African American Islamic community. Born into a white, middle-class Christian family from Virginia, Leaming decided later in life that he was actually triracial and, despite his upbringing, became a member of the Moorish Science Temple, the first African American Islamic group. In short, Hugo Leaming assumed the same racial and religious identity that he invented for the Tribe of Ishmael. While Leaming’s own dramatic metamorphosis helped shape his interpretation of the Ishmaelites, broader cultural and ideological currents also influenced his portrait.
Unlike Oscar McCulloch, who “discovered” the Tribe of Ishmael when Islam was widely seen in the West as a religion in decline, Leaming produced his study of the Tribe of Ishmael in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights era in the United States, when prominent African American Muslims such as Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali had become cultural icons. At the same time, Islamicists in other countries were attacking Western imperialism and their own corrupt governments. By the 1970s, far from being a symbol of decay, as it had been for Orientalists during the nineteenth century, Islam had now come to signify in the eyes of many—including Hugo Leaming—robust and popular resistance to colonialism, racism, and economic oppression.
It is also important to appreciate that Leaming was able to reimagine the Tribe of Ishmael as Muslim because earlier authors had already exploited contemporary tropes of Islam in their own portraits, beginning, of course, with the Islamic sounding names coined for the group. In this respect, the Tribe of Ishmael’s story sheds new light on what Vijay Prashad has evocatively referred to as “the undisciplined world of U.S. orientalism.”
25
Contrary to popular belief, Americans did not encounter Islam for the first time in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the roots of Islam in America date back centuries to the numerous Muslim slaves brought to these shores from Africa. Nor did it take Malcolm X or even the members of Al Qaeda for Islam to become part of America’s collective consciousness. Instead, Islam has been present in the popular American imagination for centuries. As I will argue throughout this book, each stage of the Tribe of Ishmael’s story corresponds to a different phase in this fascinating but largely unwritten history of American Orientalism.
26
One way of understanding Hugo Leaming’s radical reinterpretation of the Tribe of Ishmael, therefore, is that he literalized elements of their identity that had previously functioned on a symbolic level. Earlier writers like McCulloch and Estabrook had depicted the vast majority of the tribe’s members as white Upland Southerners of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. At the same time, however, McCulloch and Estabrook symbolically likened all of the Ishmaelites—white and nonwhite alike—to marginalized groups such as Gypsies, Native Americans, and Muslims. In his revisionist study of the Ishmaelites, Leaming flipped the actual ethnic and racial proportions of the tribe’s members so that African Americans now dominated numerically and culturally. Leaming also literalized the previously symbolic association of the Ishmaelites with Islam. Almost alchemically, he had transformed a collection of poor, overwhelmingly white, Upland Southern migrants into an African American Islamic community.
Despite its mythical quality, Leaming’s version of the Ishmaelites’ story illuminates a number of recurring themes in the history of African American Islam. The first is the powerful role that reinvention has played in the creation of new and distinctly American Islamic identities. In this respect, Leaming’s transformation of the Tribe of Ishmael into an Islamic community and Ben Ishmael into an “Islamic saint or Imam,” recalls the equally dramatic religious transformations of individuals such as Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. The second theme is best expressed by the Nation of Islam’s phrase “lost-found nation,” that is, the idea that the original Islamic identity of African Americans needs to be recovered and restored. Seen from this perspective, Leaming’s revisionist interpretation of the Tribe of Ishmael fits into a broader pattern of reclaiming the supposedly obscured Islamic roots of all African Americans.
Finally, Leaming’s identification of the Tribe of Ishmael as a “colored” community reflects a common American tendency to racialize Islam and, more specifically, to view it as a religion of nonwhites. To appreciate how deeply this racialization of Islam has penetrated the consciousness of many Americans, we need only recall Malcolm X’s great surprise upon encountering blond-haired, blue-eyed Muslims on his pilgrimage to Mecca or, more recently, how governmental profiling of terrorist suspects has relied on narrow and misleading assumptions of what Muslims are supposed to look like.”