The search for our ancestors is itself an act of resistance against historical erasure.
Free Black women and Indigenous women are the foremothers of generations of African Americans. Yet they remain largely absent from the official story of American freedom. Their lives, contributions and descendants have been systematically erased—from colonial records and legal classifications to public memory itself.
That erasure began in the earliest colonial records. The 1620 Virginia census recorded “four Indians in the service of several planters,” alongside 15 Negro men and 17 Negro women, reducing people to categories that obscured their identities, families and histories. Over the centuries, laws, court decisions and public institutions repeatedly reinforced that disappearance.
This process continues today. The weakening of voting rights protections has enabled new rounds of racial gerrymandering across Southern states, while book bans, censorship and attacks on Black history seek to narrow whose stories are preserved and whose are forgotten.
The 2025 dismissal of Carla Hayden—the first Black woman to serve as librarian of Congress—became another powerful symbol of the ongoing struggle over historical memory. Hayden once headed the American Library Association which tracks banned and challenged books. Books by and about Black women topping the challenge lists: Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give (2017), Nikole Hannah-Jones’ groundbreaking The 1619 Project (2019) and Alice Walker’s modern classic, The Color Purple.
Descendants of Free Black and Indigenous women have always resisted erasure. In North Carolina and Virginia, they challenged the official record, defended their histories and preserved family knowledge across generations.
As the legal expert for academic libraries and archives, I am aware of countless photographs, interviews and documents that have been acquired, stewarded and made accessible to researchers and the public. I am also aware of how they can be used to erase the truth.
Almost 250 years ago, descendants of Jane Gibson Evans sued their masters in Virginia’s chancery courts. These “freedom suits” leveraged Virginia’s law of enslavement against itself. Jane Gibson Evans’ descendants were unique in seeking freedom by proving their direct lineage to an American Indian woman.
I, too, am her proud descendant.
We are still learning about the other Indian women who were not “free persons”—primarily those taken in war with the English in the Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-1677), the Yamasee War (1715–1717) and the Tuscarora War (1711–1715).
Jane Gibson Evans (born in 1660) would have been a teenager when Bacon’s Rebellion led to displacement and enslavement of Indians. That may explain why she married Morris Evans (born 1665), a free man of color.
Over the generations, her five sons and two daughters had Black, white and Indian descendants. The family would eventually be split by illegal enslavement, with some living as Free Persons of Color in North Carolina, leaving others enslaved in Virginia.
Back in Virginia, freedom suits were brought by descendants of the daughters of Jane Gibson Evans. Thomas Gibson (also known as Mingo Jackson) actually won his freedom in a 1793 jury trial, pronouncing Gibson/Jackson a “free man and not a slave.”
Gibson’s case is striking because it provides insight to the genealogist, the academic historian, the lawyer and the archivist. As someone with training and experience in all of those fields, I endeavored to untangle inconsistencies between the legal reasoning of the court case and the conclusions presented by many online analysts.
Genealogists and historians are primarily concerned with proving individual relationships to the common ancestors, Jane Gibson Evans and her mother, Jane Gibson. Both Janes lived near the famous Shirley Plantation in Virginia, with the elder Jane practicing the healing arts.
The best celebration of 250 years of American freedom … could be a visit to a cool, air-conditioned archive.
Decades later, one of the witnesses for Mingo Gibson identified her work brewing a cure for dropsy (edema) suffered by the master of the plantation.
The process of analyzing the legal documents in the Mingo Gibson’s freedom lawsuit led me to the unexpected discovery that I am also the descendant of the free-born Indian woman Jane Gibson and her daughter, Jane Gibson Evans.
As a generational African American born shortly after the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia, I had already erased the Native American women from my own family history—without anyone ever asking me to.
Neither my undergraduate degree in American history from Harvard University nor my graduate degree in anthropology from Duke University prepared me to understand the lived experience of our Black and Indian ancestors, resisting a systematic legal erasure that started before Harvard was founded in 1636.
Jane Gibson Evans’ descendants were classified under no fewer than nine racial categories, starting with “all other free persons” in the first U.S. census (1790) and culminating in 2020 with the fragmented designations of Black, American Indian, white and “some other race.”
Combing through the 18th century legal records, disentangling anachronistic racial assumptions, there is evidence of everyday resistance still practiced today. That includes women’s work of healthcare—from midwifery, to tending relatives “troubled with the epileptic fits.” (Fatal in 1793; controlled with medication in 2026.)
Perhaps the most powerful is naming: women who could preserve the culture that was, in the words of storyteller Peri Frances, “matrilineal but patriarchal,” by naming their sons after their own fathers, uniting both families. Long after their actual names were forgotten, the names of Jane Gibson Evans’ sons have been reused, uniting those separated by time, geography, enslavement, tribal blood quantum and the Black/white binary.
I now realize that I was overlooking the signs of lived experience all along. Oral history interviews with my elders, family photographs and documents reveal lived experience clearly, when viewed with my own emotional openness, legal training and supporting hundreds of information seekers during my decades as a librarian.
Just a few professional academic historians write about the intersectionality of Black and Indigenous people.
Harvard University faculty member Tiya Miles has published on the subject for decades. Her noble 2023 book, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, is an accessible fictionalization of searching for Black and Indigenous ancestors among the Cherokee tribe.
George Washington University history professor Warren Milteer, Jr. writes extensively about this in his 2021 book, Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South, including North Carolina and Virginia’s smaller state and federally-recognized tribes.
The best celebration of 250 years of American freedom—after the fireworks and celebrations by a newly blue-painted Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are over—could be a visit to a cool, air-conditioned archive. In the quiet, anyone can search the records for the full story, of the enslaved and freeborn, Indian and African. Anyone can defy censorship and erasure with an open mind and a pencil, no fees required.
It is essential for Black women, and men, to engage with the archivists and talk to each other about the undeniable power of true history in our families and communities.
It is equally important for library and archives professionals to support the search for the hidden figures and untangle the legal issues which impede preserving the descendants’ right to data sovereignty. By engaging equally, these everyday acts of resistance will introduce us to our ancestors, and to ourselves.
You may also like:
FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, Ms. magazine’s sweeping series marking America’s 250th anniversary through a feminist lens, including Founding Feminists, which reexamines the nation’s history through the women who shaped it; Feminist Lessons, which explores the defining victories, setbacks and organizing strategies of each decade since the 1970s; and the ongoing Democracy’s Feminist Future section, which looks ahead to the challenges and possibilities facing the next generation.
