The Seminole-African Alliance | Mickey Z.

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Photo credit: Mickey Z.

Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

July 26, 2014

“We're gonna fight racism with solidarity.”

- Fred Hampton

The Native American Indian people that comprised the Seminole Nation grew out of the Creek Nation in Florida. Multilingual and diverse, the Seminoles (from a word meaning “runaway”) became infamous for intermingling with runaway slaves from Georgia and the Carolinas… slaves that built prosperous, free, self-governing communities since 1738.

Historian William Loren Katz explains explains the genesis of this alliance: “Africans began to instruct Seminoles in methods of rice cultivation they had learned in Senegambia and Sierra Leone. Then the two peoples forged an agricultural and military alliance that challenged slave-hunters and then U.S. troops. Some African families lived in separate villages, others married Seminoles, and the two peoples with a common foe shaped joint diplomatic and military initiatives. Africans, with the most to lose, rose to Seminole leadership as warriors, interpreters, and military advisors.”

“The two races, the negro and the Indian, are rapidly approximating; they are identical in interests and feelings,” said U.S. Major General Sidney Thomas Jesup, at the time. “Should the Indians remain in this territory the negroes among them will form a rallying point for runaway negroes from the adjacent states; and if they remove, the fastness of the country will be immediately occupied by negroes.”

The first foreign invasion launched by the fledgling U.S. government was the 1816 assault on the Seminole Nation -- an assault met with fierce resistance. After Spain sold Florida to the U.S. in 1819, America’s full military might was put to work reclaiming the land from both former slaves and their indigenous co-inhabitants.

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