The Black Seminoles A Work in Progress

The library is preparing The Black Seminoles, an exhibit of books, journal articles, and government publications from the library’s collections to be on display in the atrium from February 15 to March 30. The exhibit will also include copies of photographs, drawings, and maps selected from books about the black Seminoles by the late historian, Kenneth Wiggins Porter, and others. It will trace the history of these people and their struggle for freedom, dignity, and self-determination.

The black Seminoles, now called Seminole Maroons by ethnologists, are a group of people who live in Oklahoma, Texas, the Bahamas, and the Mexican state of Coahuila. Their ancestors were runaways from the plantations of South Carolina and Georgia in the eighteenth century who sought refuge in Spanish-controlled Florida. They lived among the Seminole Indians and were closely associated with them, but maintained a separate identity. After the Seminole War in 1842, they were removed with their Indian allies to Oklahoma. Never safe from slave hunters, some of them moved to Mexico where their descendants, known as Indios Mascogos, still live. After the Civil War, a group of them moved to Texas where in the 1870s and 1880s they served with the U.S. Army as the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts in the Indian wars on the Texas frontier. The ancestors of this Texas contingent live and celebrate their heritage in Brackettville and Del Rio, Texas.

Over time, the hundreds of Maroon communities which used to exist throughout the Americas were gradually absorbed into their surrounding communities. Now, only a handful survive; for example, the Saramaka of Suriname, the Windward and Leeward Maroons of Jamaica, the Palenqueros of Colombia, and the Garifuna of Central America. There is a growing body of knowledge about them and the ways in which they survived in unsettled places, ordered their social and economic lives, and blended elements from native Americans and whites to create new cultures.

We hope that the focus of this exhibit on the history of the Seminole Maroons will encourage students to study other contemporary Maroon communities and the ways in which their legacies help us understand the dynamics of the American multicultural landscape. We invite you to use our library and other libraries in CUNY to learn more.

Betty Jenkins
bljcc@cunyvm.cuny.edu