Which Newt Knight is this?

Newton Knight or Joseph Newton Knight?

by Vikki Bynum

Steve Tatum  recently sent me the above photograph in which he identified the bearded old man as his ancestor, Joseph Newton “Newt” Knight of Tennessee. This Newt Knight, readers may remember from my earlier post, married Rebecca Jenkins, a Native American woman, and never lived in Mississippi, He had no apparent connection to Newt Knight of Mississippi, leader of the “Knight Company,” the notorious Civil War guerrilla band that fought against the Confederacy in the infamous Free State of Jones.

The problem is that the old man in this photo has also been identified as Mississippi’s Newt Knight! I first encountered a poorly-produced photocopy of this photograph around 1992 while searching through folders contained in the genealogy files of the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. I chose not to use the picture in my book, The Free State of Jones, because its quality was so poor and because there was no donor listed from whom to seek permission.

I next saw the photograph in The State of Jones (Doubleday 2009), where authors John Stauffer and Sally Jenkins identified its subjects as Mississippi’s Newt Knight and John Howard Knight, son of former slave George Ann Knight and, allegedly, Newt Knight. I should add that while several Knight researchers agree that this is a picture of Mississippi’s Newt Knight, there is disagreement over the identity of the boy standing behind the old man. Yvonne Bivins believes that John Howard Knight, born in 1875, would have been much older than the boy pictured here at the time the photo was taken. More likely,  she believes, that boy is a grandson of Newt Knight.

But now we have an unrelated branch of Knights claiming that this is in fact their ancestor. How did this happen? Could it be that the photo was reproduced on the internet, and then discovered by a member of the Joseph Newton Knight family who understandably assumed it was their Newt Knight, standing with one of his Native American descendants? I honestly don’t know. As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, historians are often at the mercy of their donors when it comes to identifying subjects of photographs.

Steve Tatum notes that the Tennessee Newt Knight strongly resembles the old man in the picture, and so he does. But so also does the Mississippi Newt Knight, whose photo is below that of Joseph Newton Knight, bear a strong a resemblance to the same man. I wonder if any readers have an original copy of the photo of the older Newt Knight with the young boy standing behind him, or additional photos of the boy that might in turn verify whether he was a member of either the Tennessee or Mississippi Knight family.

In any case, this is yet another lesson of the difficulty of identifying photo subjects, particularly with the ease of exchange and reproduction made possible by the Internet.

Rebecca Jenkins and Joseph Newton Knight of Tennessee, courtesy of Steve Tatum

Another Multiethnic Knight Family: This one from Tennessee

When Steve Tatum recently contacted me about his Knight ancestors (see here), I assumed we would quickly locate a link between his branch and that of Jones County. There were two key similarities: the appearance of the name “Newton,” as in Joseph Newton Knight, and the intermarriage of this Knight with Rebecca Jenkins, a woman of mixed ethnic ancestry.

The photo that Steve sent certainly gave me pause; it wasn’t Jones County’s Newt and Rachel, but it was eerily suggestive of them:

Rebecca Jenkins and Joseph Newton Knight

In fact, however, Yvonne Bivins and I have searched our records and found no links between this Tennessee couple and the multiracial Knights of Jones County, Mississippi (specifically Newton and Rachel Knight). Nevertheless, the similarities are intriguing, and I am posting Steve’s information on his family in hopes that Knight family historians from near and far might recognize a link to their own ancestry and volunteer more information about these particular Knights.

The following are Steve’s own words about his ancestors:

All I know is that when my grandmother, Bradie (Knight) went to Red Boiling Springs (Macon County), Tennessee, she made mention of a relation to her father (Walter Houston Knight). The name she mentioned was “Newt” Knight. I thought that was an odd name until I understood later that it was short for “Newton”; this was long before any research or information was available on the Internet.

“Newt” & Rebecca Knight were the parents of Walter Houston Knight who was my paternal grandmother’s father. I remember standing by my great grandfather (Walter’s) bedside when I was a young boy, we called him “Pappy” Knight. (Walter H. Knight was born in 1880, married to Pennsylvania Piper (Knight) b. 6 Apr 1874 -d. 26 Dec 1939.

My grandmother was so dark skinned with her olive complexion, that we used to question her a lot about it and she would always say that her family was always called “Black Dutch.” I always suspected that she had either Native American or African American ancestry or a combination of the two. Which would all make sense if she is indeed from the Joseph Newton Knight line. She always made mention of her first true love being a “Gypsy” boy, which would have been taboo in a traditional southern “white” family in those days.

This mix of races could also be the very reason that it is difficult to find any written records as well. I know that many would attempt to conceal any interracial mix in the early days, particularly in the “old south” unless it was to their advantage to be connected with those of a different race, This still stands true today with some of the older folks there.

I know in some cases, for example, African-Americans marrying a Native American would mean they automatically became “free persons of color”, so there was probably much of that going on between the Blacks, Cherokee, Choctaw, etc.

Walter Houston Knight, photo courtesy of Steve Tatum

If any of  you recognize this line and have additional information or insights to offer, please consider adding a comment!

Vikki