From Frank Sweets book Legal History of the Color Line:

During a debate on the Color line in South Carolina a Mr. Johnstone
proposed that the legal definition of "Black" would be one drop of
any African ancestry. During which, a George Dionysius Tillman gave
this speech.

If the Law is made as it now stands respectable families in Aiken,
Barnwell, Colleton, and Orangeberg will be denied the right to
intermarry among people with whom the are now associated and
identified. At least one hundred families would be affected to my
knowledge. They have sent good soldiers to the Confederate Army, and
are now landowners and taxpayers. Those men served creditably, and
it would be unjust and disgraceful to embarrass them in this way. It
is a scientific fact that there is not one full-blooded Caucasian on
the floor of this convention. Every member has in him certain
mixture of colored blood. The pure blooded white has needed and
received a certain infusion of darker blood to give him readiness and
purpose. It would be a cruel injustice and the source of endless
litigations, of scandal, horror, feud and bloodshed to undertake to
annul or forbid marriage for a remote, perhaps obsolete trace of
Negro blood. The doors would be open to scandal, malice and freed to
statements on the witness stand that the father or grandfather or
grandmother had said that A or B had Negro blood in their veins. Any
man who is half a man would be ready to blow up half the world with
dynamite to prevent or avenge attacks upon the honor of his mother in
the legitimacy or purity of the blood of his father.

Another generation would pass in time and finally White Americans
with mixed ancestry in both Native American and Black would forget
their heritage.

LIKE THE PEOPLE WHO INVENTED THE JIM CROWE LAWS.

Sometimes we get hung up on labels. Redbone, Melungeon, Portuguese,
Croatoan and even White and Black. I myself only label myself as a
Mestee, a mixed blood person of mostly White Ancestry and Culture but
I am mixed more than the average Anglo American. That is a DNA
Scientific Fact. I came to the Redbones looking for answers into
mine and my daughters ancestry and also to help the community. By
studying similar groups I am understanding my own ancestry and also
helping out cousins.

I am not sure if my family in Louisiana were ever called Redbone but
they were FPC on the census back in North Carolina. Never the less,
I am not hung up on the label part. I know who I am. Alvie Walts, a
Mestee with his own unique history. Others came from Orangeberg SC
and other parts of South Carolina. Who were they? That is the
million dollar question. They were not Black, not Native American
and not White they were "Other Free" and of complex genetic ancestry.

Society today does not see us this way still due to the One Drop Rule
stigma. Example, I have a African-American friend I have known for
ten years. He is a Prince Hall Freemason which is the African
American branch of masonry. I have never wanted to be a Mason but he
likes it. I showed him my DNA results. He was shocked at first and
could only say "Wow" People just don't understand that color is only
due to a couple of genes out of millions. Anyway, he thought about
it for second and said "Hey, you could join the Prince Hall
Freemasons" I kinda laughed but then noticed the look on his face he
was dead serious. Sadly, this confirmed to me, that the One Drop
Rule is still, even today, alive and well in America.

Alvie

I think what we are is much more interesting that simply black or white or red. We were a new people born of the union of Europe and the Americas. We don't remember Europe, we don't remember being Indians, and we don't remember Africa.

If America was the garden of Eden, as I've heard some preach, we were its first weeds.