Christopher Arris Oakley

In January of 1958, several hundred armed Lumbee Indians broke up a KKK rally near the town of Maxton in Robeson County, NC. The “Maxton Riot,” as it came to be called, generated massive media attention both locally and nationally. In general, reporters, columnists, and editorialists praised the Lumbees for standing up to White racism and Klan terrorism, even though it meant using extralegal violence. And yet, despite the overall positive tone, the media coverage of the Indian-Klan clash illustrated the media’s ignorance of southern Indian history and culture. Reporters and pundits wrote that angry “Redskins” yelling “war-whoops” “scalped” the “pale-face” in North Carolina. Making reference to Geronimo, Custer, and other historical figures from the nineteenth century, journalists wrote stories that read like pulpy western novels and Hollywood movies of the 1940s and 1950s. But the Lumbees of North Carolina, like other contemporary Indians in the South, did not conform to these stereotypes and generalizations of Native American culture. Although the journalists and other commentators most likely assumed that they were celebrating the Lumbee victory, their use of racist language and imagery symbolized the struggle of many contemporary Indian peoples in the modern South to be recognized for who they really were, and not for who others thought that they were, or wanted them to be.

Christopher Arris Oakley received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Tennessee in 2002. From 2003–2005, he was Visiting Professor of History at High Point University. In 2005, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of History at East Carolina University. Oakley has published scholarly articles in The North Carolina Historical Review, Mississippi Quarterly, and The Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians. He has also presented papers at a number of professional conferences, including the Southern Historical Conference, the Western Historical Conference, and the Ethnohistory Conference. In 2005, University of Nebraska Press published Oakley's first book, Keeping the Circle: American Indian Identity in Eastern North Carolina 1885–2004, as part of its Indians of the Southeast series. In Keeping the Circle, Oakley “presents an overview of the modern history and identity of the Native peoples in twentieth-century North Carolina, including the Lumbees, the Tuscaroras, the Waccamaw Sioux, the Occaneechis, the Meherrins, the Haliwa-Saponis, and the Coharies.”

For more information, visit http://author.ecu.edu/cs-cas/history/Oakley.cfm.