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In August 1908, a white mob attacked Springfield, Illinois’s Black community, destroying homes and businesses and lynching two Black men. National outrage over the violence helped spur the movement that created the NAACP the following year.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
 Teacher and Dominicker students at Mt. Zion School, c. 1905-1910. | |
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 1950 (census) | 60[1][2] |
| Regions with significant populations | |
 United States  FloridaNear Ponce de Leon in Holmes County, within the Florida Panhandle. | |
| Languages | |
| Southern American English | |
| Religion | |
| Christianity (Protestantism) | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| African-Americans, Alabama Cajans, Beaver Creek Indians, Brandywine people, Brass Ankles, Carmelites, Chestnut Ridge people, Free Black people, Lumbee, Pee Dee Lumbee, Melungeons, Redbones | |
| Part of a series on ethnic |
| African Americans |
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The Dominickers were a small biracial ethnic group located within the Florida Panhandle, centered near the town of Ponce de Leon in Holmes County, Florida. Members of the group descended from a single interracial marriage during the Antebellum period, and were of generationally mixed African American and European American ancestry.[3][4][5] The group became well known locally, to the extent that Dominicker and Dominickers became regional terms for people of mixed race.[4][5] During the 20th century, academics classified them among 200 presumed "racial isolates" along groups such as the Redbones and Melungeons.[6]
The term "Dominickers" first originated as a pejorative. According to local accounts, the name derives from a divorce case in which a local man described his estranged wife as "black and white, like an old Dominicker chicken."[3][7][8] Over time, both "Dominicker" and "Dominickers" evolved into generalized racial terms within the region in reference to all people of mixed African and European ancestry.[4]
The Redbones of Southwest Louisiana, who the Dominickers were mapped as residing nearby to, were sometimes called Dominics.[9]
The Dominickers were mixed-race descendants of the widow of a pre-Civil War plantation owner and one of her Black slaves, named Thomas.[a] She married him during the first years of the Civil War, and they later had five children together. Said children married both Black and white spouses, and their descendants rose in number over time. They populated the backwoods and swamps, typically in poverty, having large families and small farms. They became populous enough to establish their own identity by the 1920s.[10][4][11][12]
The first known mention in print of the Dominickers was in a 1939 American Guide series on Florida.[10] Author Cathy Salustri states the descriptions of Dominickers in the guide may be insensitive to some readers, noting it described them as "treacherous" and "vindictive".[13] Researcher Calvin L. Beale noted sixty existed in 1950 Holmes County, who were only marked as white on the census.[14][1][15] Similarly, there was no category for a mixed-race person recognized by the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, thus social workers had to designate Dominicker children as either Black or white.[12][b] They chose based on the race of their mother, and the racial makeup of the neighborhood of their parents.[12]
Dominickers were not accepted as social equals by the white community, but they kept themselves apart from the main Black community as well. They formed a small middle layer of Holmes County society separate from both whites and Black people.[12][4]
Before integration, their children were required to attend a one-room, twenty student segregated school (as required by Florida's Jim Crow laws). They were not provided with busing, and thus had to walk several miles to school. A Dominicker graveyard adjoined the school.[4][12] Academic Ralph D. Howell suggested they looked Spanish or Cuban, noting some claimed Spanish origin, but stated some appeared to be Black.[4] This variation of appearance was noted to be possible even within one family.[11]
After desegregation, locals had varied opinions on if most Dominickers had assimilated into the main populations.[5] Dental researcher Hamilton B.G. Robinson states the Dominickers, Redbones, and Brass Ankles should be of interest to researchers of human genetics, similarly to the Brandywine people.[16][c]
...most white people of the area claim that these people are of mixed white and black blood, and thus have adopted the term dominicker to refer to them.
Out beyond Ponce de Leon, people of mixed black and white ancestry known as Dominickers still keep to a path separate from either race.
In adjacent back country live 'Dominickers,' part Negro and part white, whose history goes back to the early 1860's.
The Federal Writer's Project (FWP) writers identify Dominickers as descendants of the widow of a pre–Civil War plantation owner and one of her slaves who may have been her husband's mulatto half-brother.
The clan traced its origin to the first years of the Civil War when a plantation owner died and his wife married one of their slaves. Of their five children, three married whites and two married blacks. As the clan grew, its members began to intermarry, until, by the 1920s, it was large enough to have a well-established identity.
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Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
The Dominickers were a small biracial ethnic group located within the Florida Panhandle, centered near the town of Ponce de Leon in Holmes County, Florida. Members of the group descended from a single interracial marriage during the Antebellum period, and were of generationally mixed African American and European American ancestry. The group became well known locally, to the extent that Dominicker and Dominickers became regional terms for people of mixed race. During the 20th century, academics classified them among 200 presumed "racial isolates" along groups such as the Redbones and Melungeons.
Racial isolates in the United States, also variously known as tri-racial isolates, biracial isolates, or American isolates, is a term used by anthropologists to classify approximately two hundred distinct mixed-race communities, traditionally speculated to be of African-American, European-American, and Native American ancestry, located along the Atlantic Seaboard and throughout the American Southeast. The veracity of Native American ancestry claimed among some racial isolate communities has been questioned in recent years with advances in genealogical and genetic research. Historically, some members of isolate communities, particularly those in Appalachia, claimed Portuguese or Spanish, sometimes collectively termed as "Moorish", ancestry to explain their appearances. Groups that have been described as racial isolates include the Melungeons, Carmelites, Delaware Moors, Brandywine people, Lumbee, Brass Ankles, Chestnut Ridge people, Dominickers, and Alabama Cajans, among others. Some descendants of the Lumbee, comprising the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, have been federally recognized as a Native American tribe through Congressional legislation first advanced through executive order and later into law by President Donald Trump. Other descendants of racial isolate communities have been state-recognized as Native American tribes by certain state governments, including the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware and the Nanticoke Indian Association of Delaware, the Wassamasaw Tribe of Varnertown Indians in South Carolina, the Piscataway-Conoy Tribe of Maryland and Piscataway Indian Nation and Tayac Territory in Maryland, the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians in Alabama, and the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation and Ramapough Mountain Indians in New Jersey.
With about 4% of the world's population, the United States is the third most populous country (after India and China), and the most populous in the Americas and the Western Hemisphere. Its estimated population was 341,784,857 on July 1, 2025, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The country's population grew by 1.8 million, or 0.5%, between 2024 and 2025, due to a decline in net international migration. The previous year, the Census Bureau had reported a population increase of 0.98% between 2023 and 2024, near the global population growth rate of 1.03%. These figures include the 50 states and the federal capital, Washington, D.C., but exclude the 3.6 million residents of five unincorporated U.S. territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands) as well as several minor uninhabited island possessions. By several metrics, including racial and ethnic background, religious affiliation, and percentage of rural and urban divide, the state of Illinois is the most representative of the larger demography of the United States. The United States population almost quadrupled during the 20th century, with an average growth rate of about 1.3% a year, from about 76 million in 1900 to 281 million in 2000. It is estimated to have reached the 200 million mark in 1967, and the 300 million mark on October 17, 2006. Foreign-born immigration caused the U.S. population to continue its rapid increase, with this population doubling from almost 20 million in 1990 to over 45 million in 2015, representing one-third of the population increase. The U.S. Census Bureau reported in late 2024 that recent immigration to the United States had more than offset the country's lower birth rates: "Net international migration's influence on population trends has increased over the last few years. Since 2021, it accounted for the majority of the nation's growth—a departure from the last two decades, when natural increase was the main factor." This in turn led to an increase in the U.S. population in each of the years 2022, 2023, and 2024 (+0.58%, +0.83%, and +0.98% respectively). Net international migration slowed to a record low in 2025, however, and so did U.S. population growth during that year (+0.5%). Population growth is fastest among minorities as a whole, and according to a 2020 U.S. Census Bureau analysis, 50% of U.S. children under the age of 18 are members of ethnic minority groups. As of 2020, white Americans numbered 235,411,507 or 71% of the population, including people who identified as white in combination with another race. People who identified as white alone (including Hispanic whites) numbered 204,277,273 or 61.6% of the population, while non-Latino whites made up 57.8% of the country's population. Latino Americans accounted for 51.1% of the country's total population growth between 2010 and 2020. The Hispanic or Latino population increased from 50.5 million in 2010 to 62.1 million in 2020, a 23% increase and a numerical increase of more than 11.6 million. Immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants are expected to provide most of the U.S. population gains in the decades ahead. Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the United States, with a growth rate of 35%. However, multiracial Asian Americans make up the fastest-growing subgroup, with a growth rate of 55%, reflecting the increase of mixed-race marriages in the United States. According to provisional data, births to White American mothers in 2026 remained around 50% of the U.S. total. Since 2020, fertility rates among Black American and Asian American mothers have continued to decline, and the rates for both have dropped well below the national average. This has led to a slow decline in the total U.S. fertility rate. Nonetheless, the United States continues to report one of the highest fertility rates among high-income countries.
Redbone is a term historically used in much of the Southern United States to denote a multiracial individual or culture. In Louisiana, the term Redbones refers to specific geographically and ethnically distinct groups. Among African-Americans the term has been separately utilized as an aspect of colorism in reference for light-skinned people, particularly African American women with red undertones.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
![Dominickers and other nearby population isolates, 1950.[9]](viewer.php?source=wikipedia&q=File%3ADominicker%20map%20with%20other%20isolates%20included.svg&result=0#selected-result)
