Turks of South Carolina

Visit of Muhittin Güven

In 1963, Muhittin Güven, a native of Istanbul and member of Turkey’s Justice Party in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, former Minister of Housing, and chairman of the Istanbul Architecture Association, visited Sumter County as part of the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Leader Exchange Program.^[13] His itinerary, arranged in consultation with the Governmental Affairs Institute in Washington, D.C., included a visit to the Turks of Sumter, whom The Sumter Item described as a "Turkish-American descendant community".^[13]

During the visit, Güven and his interpreter, Kenan Taşpınar, met with Julius Benenhaley, a leader within the community, along with several other members for historical purposes. The meeting took place at Long Branch Baptist Church, located near Shaw Air Force Base.^[14] According to contemporary publications, the discussion included references to “the Old Country”.^[14]

Writing in The New Yorker in 1969, journalist Calvin Trillin reported that a representative of the Sumter County Chamber of Commerce remarked that they took a photograph of Güven and Benenhaley and believed “they could have passed for brothers.”^[15] According to the same account, Güven and Taşpınar commented that members of the Sumter Turkish community resembled people from various parts of the Mediterranean.^[15] Trillin reported that “Guven thought [the] Turks might have originally been Maltese,” while Taşpınar believed they “could have been North Africans who were part of the Ottoman Empire.”^[15] According to Trillin, Benenhaley himself expressed pride in the community’s traditions of Turkish ancestry, stating, “I’m proud of my Turkish blood…That’s why I was proud to meet that man who came all the way from Turkey.”^[15]

Conflation with Free Moors

Early examples of the community's misrepresentation date to at least the 19th century. The tax collector of Sumter sent an inquiry to the South Carolina Committee on the Colored Population, dated December 7, 1858, as to whether the "descendants of Egyptians and Indians" residing in Sumter should be taxed under the bracket of "Free Blacks, mulattoes and mestizos, or as whites."^{[19][better source needed]} In the early 20th century, some believed that they were of primarily Native American background, with some admixture of Turkish.^[20] They have been mistakenly connected to a family of "Free Moors" who resided in Charleston (see Moors Sundry Act of 1790).

The Turk-Indian controversy

In the early 21st century, a small group within the Sumter Turkish community, including a brother and sister, rejected the label “Sumter Turks” and instead identified as Cheraw, citing descent from the Oxendine family.^[21][22] The surname Oxendine is widely recognized as one of the core family names historically associated with the Lumbee.^[23]

The Sumter Cheraw maintained that the Turks of South Carolina descended from Native Americans invited to Dalzell, South Carolina by Thomas Sumter following Joseph Benenhaley's service in the American Revolutionary War, and that the community later became known as “Turks” due to Benenhaley’s purported Turkish ancestry.^[21][24][25] In 2013, the Sumter Tribe of Cheraw Indians was granted state-recognition by the South Carolina Commission for Minority Affairs after submitting several petitions during the preceding decade, one of which had previously been denied.^[10][26] Research subsequently conducted by Glen Browder at the office of the South Carolina Commission for Minority Affairs in Columbia, South Carolina concluded that the Turks of Sumter and the historic American Indian group in Sumter represented two distinct communities with separate progenitors, though some Native American ancestry may have entered the Turkish community through the Oxendine family, or other families, whose members intermarried into the Turkish population during the nineteenth century and adopted Turkish identity.^[27]

Browder interviewed members of Turkish families in Sumter while researching the origins of the community. When asked about the ethnic background of the Sumter Turks, one respondent stated that he did not believe the Turkish people were Native American, though he acknowledged that Native Americans had married into the community and that, through intermarriage, some individuals possessed Native American ancestry.^[28] He explained:

In my opinion a very small percentage consider themselves Indian, and they are primarily of the younger generation (under fifty). Most of the older generation know their history. They know that the early Oxendines were Lumbee Indians from North Carolina and that Lumbee Oxendines married into the Benenhaleys—that is a fact. But their intermarriage only added another element of ethnic diversity to the community—just like the first intermarriages by the whites and others.”^[28]

Surnames

In the 1950s, Ann King Gregorie reported that surnames common among the Sumter Turks included Benenhaley, Oxendine, Scott, Hood, Buckner, Lowery, Chavis, and Ray.^[29] Subsequent genealogical and census research has indicated that approximately a dozen individuals bearing the surname Oxendine, most of them women, married into the Turkish community, along with a smaller number of individuals associated with Native American ancestry, including persons with the surnames Scott, Buckner, Lowrey, and Deas during the nineteenth century. Writing in the mid-1970s, scholar Wesley D. White reported on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution that the Oxendines and others had merged into the Turkish community and suggested they were likely contributors to what he termed speculated “Indian ancestry” within the group, although he noted that they held “no tradition whatever of Indian ancestry” and traced their origins to "founders of the community from Turkey" and called themselves "Turks" or "white Turk-Americans".^[30]

Marriages patterns

The Turkish community of Sumter has traditionally been described as “cautious about outside society,” with relatively few outsiders historically accepted into the group.^[31] Unwritten social customs governed community life, and the Turks of Sumter practiced endogamy, similar to other ethnic groups, including various Arab tribes of the Middle East.^[31][32] The relatively small size of the community contributed to the repeated appearance of the same family surnames across generations. This pattern of intermarriage shaped the group’s reputation among outsiders while reinforcing shared ethnic traits and a sense of Turkish identity.^[31] In recent decades, however, assimilation into broader society has reduced this social stigma, and many descendants of the community now marry outside the traditional group.^[31]

Language

Due to the historic isolation of their community, older Sumter Turks traditionally speak a dialect of Southern American English that has been compared by its speakers to Cajun English or New Orleans English and is reportedly difficult for outsiders to understand.^[33]