The Lumbee and the Battle of Hayes Pond

You are in the heart of Robeson County, home of the Lumbee, the largest Native American tribe in North Carolina and one of the largest east of the Mississippi. The Lumbee have lived here along the Lumber River for centuries, and their story is unlike any other tribe's in the country.

They are not assigned to a reservation. There is no bounded territory, no single origin language still spoken, and their exact ancestry has been debated by historians for over a hundred years. Some point to Siouan-speaking peoples. Others to survivors of the coastal Carolina tribes nearly destroyed by European contact. A few scholars have connected them to the settlers of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, though that claim is speculative and disputed. The Lumbee do not claim one answer. Their identity is rooted in this land and in their persistence through centuries of pressure.

North Carolina recognized them in eighteen eighty-five, one of the earliest state recognitions of any tribe. Congress acknowledged them as a tribe in nineteen fifty-six, but deliberately withheld the federal benefits that recognition normally carries. The Lumbee have been fighting full recognition ever since.

The moment the Lumbee entered national consciousness came on the night of January eighteenth, nineteen fifty-eight, in a cornfield near Maxton, just south of here. A Klan organizer named James Cole had been holding rallies against the Lumbee, burning crosses near Lumbee homes, accusing the tribe of mixing with white neighbors. He scheduled a nighttime rally at Hayes Pond and set up a single light to illuminate the gathering.

About fifty Klansmen showed up. So did more than five hundred Lumbee. Armed and organized, they encircled the field before the rally began. Someone cut the light. Gunfire broke out. The Klansmen fled into the dark. Cole was captured, humiliated, and photographed.

After that night, James Cole never held another public rally in Robeson County. The story made headlines across the country. The Lumbee had answered harassment not with a petition but with a show of force, and they had won without a single death on either side.