Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 108 / Number 3
ABSTRACT:
Assimilation by Marriage: White Women and Native American Men at Hampton Institute, 1878-1923
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By Katherine Ellinghaus, pp. 279–303
Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute was established just after the Civil War to educate African American children
of both sexes, and was opened to Native American students in 1878. The history of Hampton offers a unique vantage
point from which to examine mainstream opinions toward interracial marriage and relationships during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century. Although the possibility of miscegenation was often a source of anxiety to the school's
administration, certain racial combinations could be seen as assisting the process of assimilation aimed at the Native
American students. Marriages with whites were encouraged by Hampton staff, who believed that the marriage
partner of an ex-student could make all the difference to their subsequent success as an assimilated member
of mainstream American society. This dictum applied to the Native American men, whose relationships
with white women were treated with the same equanimity as the more common marriages between Native
American women to white men. This accepting environment is the explanation for the three relationships
of white, middle-class female staff with Native American men which occurred during the period in which
Hampton ran its Indian program. White middle-class women married those Native American men who
had taken advantage of the brief period in which policies regarding Native American education allowed
talented Native Americans the opportunity to receive a higher education. Often with tertiary qualifications
and respectable professions, these men could be considered potential husbands for white women, despite
the strong history of anxiety about relationships between white women and non-white men in Virginia, and
indeed, most of the south.
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