Digital Scholarship and Initiatives

In this letter to the editor, Katz comments on an event in Lumberton prior to the much-publicized Robesonian hostage-taking. In April 1987, Junior Cummings directed a march, attended by blacks and Indians, on the Robeson County courthouse in protest of the killing of his brother, Jimmy Earl Cummings, by sheriff’s deputy Kevin Stone (for related information, see The Lumbee Indians: an annotated bibliography, item 1201).Katz uses this event to comment on examples of black-Indian alliances in general and of previous Lumbee activism (the Lowry Band era and the Ku Klux Klan routing of 1958). Katz concludes his letter by stating, “Behind the hostage-taking, marches and challenges to the legal system in Robeson County moves a quiet reforging of a historic friendship. We will no doubt be hearing more from Lumberton and from this ancient alliance.”