R. Terry said,
The theory that such families were descendants of Indians was invented during 
the Jim Crow Period to create a third caste.

>Your source(s), please.

In 1885 Hamilton McMillan of Robeson County, North Carolina's Democratic Party wrote and helped pass a law creating separate school districts for the former free persons of color of the county in an effort to win their votes in a county and state that were about equally divided between Republicans and Democrats. McMillan invented the name "Croatan Indians" and theorized that they had descended from a friendly tribe of Indians on the Roanoke River in eastern North Carolina who had mixed with the whites in Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony in 1587 and had settled in Robeson County during the colonial period. The law created three castes: white, Negro and Indian. To maintain the racial purity of these Indians who had supposedly mixed with (only) whites, marriage to Negroes (former slaves) was forbidden. Later, there would be three sets of water fountains, seating areas, rest rooms, etc. [Blu, Karen, The Lumbee Problem, 23, 62-3]. See also http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/introduction.htm (do an edit, find on this page: Lumbee)
This influenced Anthropologist James Moody of the Smithsonian to study other possible Indian groups in Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina in 1889. Moody visited the mixed-race community in Charles and Prince George's counties, Maryland, made up of members of the Proctor, Butler, Newman, Savoy, Swann, and Thompson families which came to be called "Piscataway Indians" or "Wesorts" [Porter, Quest for Identity, 99-100; Gilberts, Surviving Indian Groups of the Eastern United States]. These were all families clearly identified in the colonial court records as having descended from white women who had children by men of African descent, convicted of "Mulatto bastardy" and sold as servants. 

About the year 1900 the Smithsonian took photos of members of the "Indian" Bass and Weaver families of Norfolk County, Virginia. The former free-person-of-color community was recognized by the state as Nansemond Indians in 1984. The Bass family did descend from an Indian, but they were more African than Indian because the grandson of  John Bass and his Indian wife married the manumitted daughter of a white man and a "Negro" slave in 1729. The Weaver family descends from East Indians who blended into the free African American community of Lancaster County, Virginia, in the early 1700s. http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/photos_Indians.htm

In 1903 the former free-person-of-color community of Sussex County, Delaware (which had been granted permission to run their own separate schools after the Civil War) petitioned the legislature to change their name from "a certain class of Colored Persons" to the "Offspring of the Nanticoke Indians," and the legislature complied [State Laws of Delaware XXII, Chapter 470, 986 cited by Weslager, Delaware's Forgotten Folk, 117].

For more on Maryland and Delaware see http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/Intro_md.htm


The origin and genealogy of nearly every African American family that was free in Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland and Delaware during the colonial period is published on my site. http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/Virginia_NC.htm. The descendants of many of these families have come to be known as Indians. The site is based on my research of nearly every colonial court record at the archives for those states during the past 25 years. Full citation of sources for Virginia and North Carolina is at http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/sources.htm, and there is a shortened citation in brackets in the text.

Paul

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