October 3, 2007 - The Glorious and Sometimes Not-So-Glorious Panorama of Florida’s Rich African American History and Heritage

by Dr. Larry Eugene Rivers and Dr. Canter Brown, Jr.
Copyright 2007 by Larry Eugene Rivers and Canter Brown, Jr.


It comes as a surprise to most Floridians and visitors to the Sunshine State
that African Americans claim here a rich history and heritage predating that
of any other group in the United States. There are reasons grounded in
Florida and American history that help to explain that fact, but those reasons
do not change reality. With that in mind, please permit us to share with you
just what we mean.

No one knows when the first person of African descent stepped upon the
shores of today’s Florida, but the event likely occurred a short time following
Columbus’s epic discovery of the New World in 1492 for free men and slaves
from Africa labored on behalf of Spain and, subsequently, its conquistadores.
History does record that - on April 2, 1513, when Juan Ponce de Leon
surveyed the coastal strip near modern Melbourne Beach—two African free
men Juan Garrido and Juan Gonzalez de Leon shipped with him. This event
stands out as the moment of our “official discovery” by Europeans. Another
man exploring with Juan Ponce recorded the event. “And thinking that this
land was an island, they called it La Florida, because it was very pretty to
behold with many and refreshing trees, and it was flat, and even: and also
because they discovered it in the time of Flowery Easter [Pascua Florida].”

The reader might want to compare the roles played by Juan Garrido and Juan
Gonzalez de Leon in the discovery of La Florida with the story that their
textbooks told them. Most who recollect the matter will tell you that the first
Africans came to Virginia, not Florida, and that they landed in the 1610s at
Jamestown from a Dutch trading ship rather than a century earlier and far to
the south. Somehow just as most textbooks have omitted much African
American history and attributed to others many of the accomplishments and
legacies of persons of African descent in America, so, too, have they omitted
consideration of Florida within the context of early “American” history.

However, as our friend Mike Gannon, the distinguished University of Florida
historian, has enjoyed for years pointing out to audiences, “When Jamestown
was founded, St. Augustine already was up for urban renewal.” So, it was. For
308 years following Juan Ponce’s naming of La Florida, Spain to a greater
orlesser extent controlled the territory and colony, save for a period of two
decades following 1763 when English rule held sway. Here is a way to
understand the length and importance of that time period. This introduction
is being written in 2007. At this point the United States has exercised
authority in Florida for a mere 186 years. Not until the year 2109 will the era
of U.S. control equal the mark established by Spain.

Throughout that 308 years of Spanish rule in Florida, Africans and persons of
African descent participated in life, the economy, and, sometimes, the
government. During the early decades of the Sixteenth Century, for example,
men such as Estevan the Moor accompanied explorers such as Panfilo de
Narvaez, often exercising significant responsibility. When Pedro Menendez de
Aviles founded St. Augustine in 1565, black Augustinos soon followed. Even
when held in slavery, these black Floridians enjoyed more opportunity than
we are accustomed to according to persons held in bondage. Some managed
to buy their own freedom and that of loved ones. Some even managed to
build comfortable lives and enter higher levels of local society.

A Crossroads in Florida’s History

A crucial turning point for black Floridians came about 1670, when English
planters principally from the Caribbean sugar island of Barbados founded
Carolina and its city of Charles Town. The Spanish had considered Carolina to
lie within La Florida,and the presence of an English colony so close to St.
Augustine loomed as a distinct threat. In order to undermine Carolina, Spain
in 1693 offered sanctuary and freedom to any English slave who made it to
St. Augustine and was willing to accept the Roman Catholic faith.

Meanwhile, Spain began enrolling free and enslaved black Floridians in its
local militia forces. When South Carolina governor James Moore invaded
Florida in 1702, for instance, black militiamen fought him and helped compel
his unexpected speedy return to the future Palmetto State.

Not too many years later, in 1738, Spain gave official sanction to the creation
of the first black town in North America. Named Gracia Real de Santa Teresa
de Mose, it lay a few miles north of St. Augustine and, in fact, guarded access
to that presidio from the north. Its captain Francisco Menendez later gained
fame when he led Spanish troops, many of them black, against Georgia
Governor James Oglethorpe, who occupied Fort Mose in 1740. Within two
years black Spanish militiamen had invaded Georgia in retribution for the
1740 attack.

The combined effect of the Spanish slave sanctuary policy and the founding
of Fort Mose, coupled with other factors, was to create within the colony of La
Florida a refuge for blacks seeking freedom. From the earliest days of
Spanish exploration and rule, slaves individually and in small groups had
broken away from owners’ control to live in freedom in the interior. The term
maroon often is used to identify them. Maroon communities existed in Florida
from the 1500s until the 1830s. Two of the most wellknown sites were the
Negro Fort on the Apalachicola River, established by British military officers in
1815 and destroyed by U.S. Army forces in 1816, and Angola, situated at the
confluence of the Braden River with the Manatee River at present-day
Bradenton.

That settlement existed as early as 1812 and continued to exist until
destroyed by Lower Creek Indian raiders, likely at the behest of General
Andrew Jackson, in the spring of 1821. The use of the term maroon may
confuse some readers who have heard the term Black Seminole spoken. The
Seminoles, or what would become the Seminole nation, began filtering into La
Florida from Georgia in the mid-1700s. By that time maroons had lived in
the peninsula for much of the past two centuries. Technically speaking Black
Seminoles were individuals considered to be held in slavery by Seminole
Indians.

The point should be made that slavery to these persons differed markedly
from the “Old South” slavery about which we are well acquainted. Most
anthropologists simply describe the relationship as one similar to vassalage;
that is, it embodied a relationship with obligations and responsibilities
running both ways. Black Seminoles usually lived in their own villages, of
which there were many over time. The village of Abraham, located in modern
Sumter County, represents the best-known example. It was called Peliklakaha
(various spellings are used for it) and had existed for perhaps two decades
when destroyed in 1836 by South Carolina volunteers fighting in the Second
Seminole War. Eventually, all maroons and Black Seminoles came to be known
to many as Black Seminoles.

The Spanish era in La Florida was interrupted, as mentioned above, by two
decades of English rule. This situation grew out of the Seven Years War or, as
it was known in the English colonies of North America, the French and Indian
War. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 gifted La Florida to England in return for
restoration of Spanish rule at Havana, Cuba, after a brief English occupation.
Most black Floridanos chose relocation to Cuba and other Spanish
possessions, although some Black Seminoles and maroons remained in place.
On their part, the English attempted to remake the eastern section of Florida
into a replica of South Carolina. Large land grants spawned large plantations
worked by gangs of bondsmen held in relatively harsh slavery.

Florida’s Majority Population Shifts

The English plantation initiative barely had been launched in Florida when the
American Revolution disrupted the region, although some of the plantations
would survive well into the American era. Florida remained loyal to the crown
during the conflict. Little fighting beyond raiding touched the colony, but
thousands of “Tory” or Loyalist refugees crowded into its settled areas. The
majority of those who arrived were slaves. By the war’s final years, Florida’s
majority population was of African birth or descent. The peace, though, again
brought change. The British government relocated owners with their slaves to
possessions such as the Ba hama Islands. The Treaty of Paris of 1783
meanwhile mandated that England return Florida to the victor’s ally, Spain.

Thus, what history refers to as the Second Spanish Period opened in 1784,
with Spain eager to find acceptable methods for making the colony self
sufficient if not prosperous. The government also immediately re-
implemented the slave sanctuary policy, but diplomatic pressure applied by
U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson resulted in an official revocation of
the policy in 1790. Now, the Spanish authorities allowed sanctuary
informally. Florida remained a beacon of freedom to increasing numbers of
slaves held in the southern United States, numbers that by the 1790s were
growing because of the invention early in the decade of the cotton gin at
Cumberland Island, Georgia.

For blacks who returned to Florida or else fled to the colony, opportunity in
various forms flourished as time passed. Merchants and traders such as Juan
Bautista Collins grew well to do. Artisans of every sort found customers. Black
cowhunters and cowmen, who had tended Florida herds as early as the
1500s, returned to the ranges.

Some even grew affluent and influential in the flexible social climate. As one
example of many that could be cited, an African-born woman Anna
Madgigaine Jai (Anna Kinglsey) came to control bustling plantations, first at
today’s Orange Park and later at Fort Georgia Island near Jacksonville. In the
process she aided development of the modern citrus grove. She managed, as
well, to hold on to much of her property into the American era and died
comfortably in Florida following the Civil War’s end.

The black military tradition also returned to La Florida during the Second
Spanish Period. In fact, by 1795 Spain had ordered to the colony a former
Haitian revolutionary general Jorge Biassou, sometimes called Georges
Biassou, to command imperial forces. Biassou lived in state at St. Augustine,
while defending the colony for five years. Upon his death a former Georgia
slave named Prince Witten, who had fled to Florida with his wife Judy soon
after the sanctuary policy was re-established, stepped into the vacuum to
provide renewed black military leadership. Witten and black militiamen
subsequently earned respect and acclaim for defending Florida during the
American seizure attempt of 1812-1814 known as the Patriot War.

While racial conditions, policies, and circumstances during Spain’s second
period of rule in Florida differed greatly from the harsh conditions of the
English period, both eras saw black men, women, and children emerge as the
majority of Florida’s residents.

By 1814 about 57 percent of all Floridians claimed African birth or descent. At
that time portions of La Florida had begun to resemble African settlements.
Nowhere is this fact more evident to modern eyes than at Anna Kingsley’s Fort
Georgia Island plantation, where she designed living quarters for her slaves
and servants similar to the West African villages of her youth.

Over three centuries of Spanish authority crumbled, however, as the second
decade of the nineteenth century drew to its close. The First Seminole War of
1817-1818 disclosed American power and Spanish weakness. Fighting to get
the best deal that it could, Spain “sold” La Florida to the United States in
1819, although those who profited were Americans who claimed losses from
slave runaways to the colony. The United States Senate approved the resulting
Adams-Onis Treaty in January 1821.

The meaning of the change of flags for black Floridians quickly manifested
itself. Although the treaty guaranteed rights of citizenship to all free residents
of Florida regardless of color, Provisional Governor Andrew Jackson chose to
implement a registration process that denied maroons and Black Seminoles
any of the guarantees or protections they had been promised. A few months
earlier the governor’s Lower Creek allies had ransacked and destroyed the
maroon settlement Angola. Some of its residents were dragged back into
American slavery; some escaped into the heart of the peninsula; and others
found their way to the Florida Keys and, eventually, Andros Islands in the
Bahamas.

Descendants of this latter group remain at Andros today.

The Impact of Cotton

Florida Territory, as it came to be called after 1821, developed quickly into a
part of the expanding Old South “cotton kingdom.” Lands in “Middle Florida,”
the region that stretches from around the Apalachicola River on the west to
the Suwannee River on the east, proved ideal for cotton production. Into an
area previously populated by only a few small bands of Indians came planters
from most of the southern slave states, many bringing slaves with them. As
their capitol, Tallahassee rose in the heart of the Middle Florida region. These
investors and settlers eventually pushed statehood, a landmark achieved in
1845.

Fifteen years afterward, on the Civil War’s eve, Middle Florida contained only
one-third of the state’s white population. Still, it held two-thirds of Florida’s
slaves and most of its 5,152 slave owners. The building of a cotton plantation
economy in Middle Florida required the establishment of an environment that
minimized direct threats to gang slavery, and the territory’s planter leaders,
together with first territorial governor William Pope DuVal, a former Kentucky
congressman, quickly set about to accomplish that very goal.

This meant the removal of Indians, Black Seminoles, and maroons to a
reservation deep within the peninsula, one that cut them off from potential
British and Spanish allies. The Treaty of Moultrie Creek, signed by some chiefs
in 1823, seemed to accomplish this. When the relocation caused widespread
suffering, army officials responded by sending patrols under the command of
Captain Francis L. Dade to intimidate, if not terrorize, the sufferers. President
John Quincy Adams eventually stepped in to afford the Indians and blacks
more land suited to growing food. The Seminole chief Micanopy’s interpreter
and counselor Abraham stood out for his leadership and advice during this
period. Micanopy thereupon freed Abraham and named the black man his
“sensebearer” or principal counselor.

The limited protection afforded by President Adams faded overnight in early
March 1829 as Andrew Jackson assumed the presidency. He soon proposed
an Indian Removal Act aimed at the relocation of southeastern Indians to
reservations west of the Mississippi River. Jackson intended to compel the
movement of Florida’s Indians as an early priority, and it must be assumed
that he meant, as well, to return the Black Seminoles and maroons to slavery
in the process. It took several years for various treaties signed by some chiefs
to take form, but eventually a departure from Florida in 1835 or 1836 was
mandated.

Through these years defiant Indian and black leaders prepared to resist.
Abraham,for one, acted to alert slaves living on plantations and farms to the
north and east of the reservation—an area stretching roughly from modern
Gainesville eastward across the St. Johns River and then southeastward
toward today’s Daytona and New Smyrna Beaches—to prepare to join the
fighting to come. A Creek warrior named Osceola meanwhile joined forces
with a black leader called Harry, probably a survivor of Angola’s destruction,
to force the army to attack, an eventuality that would have forced pro-
emigration Seminoles to join the resistance. Both Osceola and Harry operated
from villages located in south Polk County along the winding Peace River, but
ranged widely to provoke incidents of violence. By late 1835 panic gripped
the frontier of white settlement.

Then, in late December Abraham convinced Micanopy to confront a column of
over 100 soldiers led by now-Major Francis L. Dade marching from Fort
Brooke at Tampa Bay to Fort King near present-day Ocala. The resulting Dade
Massacre—in which Dade and nearly all under his command were killed—
launched the Second Seminole War. At the same time hundreds, if not a
thousand or more, slaves fled their bondage and joined the fighting. This
constituted, we have argued, the largest slave rebellion in United States
history.

The Second Seminole War enveloped Florida for nearly seven years, causing
widespread destruction and resulting as time passed in the transfer of most
Florida Indians, Black Seminoles, and maroons to the west. Notably, black
leaders who departed usually had not been captured. Rather, they had agreed
to surrender only when their loved ones faced starvation and authorities
assured them of generous payments to begin life anew elsewhere than
Florida. Some, such as Abraham and John Cavallo (or John Horse) returned in
the latter stages of the conflict to serve as guides and interpreters. In that
capacity they furthered efforts aimed at negotiated surrenders and
resettlements.

A Beacon of Freedom No More

Thus, by 1842 Florida had ceased to serve as a beacon of freedom for
runaway slaves, and, as the cotton plantation belt of Middle Florida
expanded, it came to reflect more and more the harsh chattel slavery
conditions of the Old South cotton belt. In the peninsula and around the
Pensacola vicinity old Spanish traditions survived to greater or lesser extents,
and this allowed some flexibility for black Floridians living in those areas.

Still, by the late 1820s the territorial council had promulgated a severe slave
code, and matters thereafter evolved increasingly to the detriment of Florida
slaves and remaining free blacks. As such, it should not surprise the reader
to learn that Florida, after some hesitation and without the benefit of a
popular referendum, followed South Carolina and Mississippi in January 1861
to become the third state to secede from the Union following President
Abraham Lincoln’s election the previous November. By then close to half of
the state’s 140,000 residents were slaves.

The Civil War virtually destroyed Florida’s prewar economy even though no
large battles took place in the state. Yet, the Middle Florida plantation belt
where most slaves lived remained mostly untouched by the conflict. That
does not mean that slaves sympathized with the institution of slavery or that
they supported the Confederacy. In ways large and small slaves acted to
undermine the institution, although they did so with a humanity that remains
remarkable. With so many white men away in the army, white families lived
unprotected. Despite the vulnerability of plantation and farm families, slaves
illustrated their generosity of spirit by refraining from any major assault upon
those whites who remained behind. One thousand or more black Floridians
did make their way into Union lines and enlisted in the army and navy. They
subsequently evidenced their courage and determination to end slavery in
fighting along a front that stretched from South Carolina back to the
Sunshine State.

Black Life in Florida after the Civil War

Emancipation during the Civil War and at its end opened an era in Florida’s
history that witnessed accomplishments nothing short of extraordinary. From
an economic foundation at rock bottom, Florida’s African American residents
over the next two generations established themselves solidly in towns and
the countryside. Most black Floridians remained farmers, and in that vocation
many excelled.

For example, Congressman Josiah Walls, operated a plantation in Alachua
County that most observers, black or white, rated at the top of the state’s
agricultural enterprises in the 1880’s. In central and south Florida, black
growers helped to develop the citrus industry. On farms located on the
outskirts of the state’s growing towns and cities, black truck farmers
nurtured crops of vegetables and other foods that fed city dwellers and
tourists alike as Florida moved toward the status of the most urban of the
southern states.

Black contractors, carpenters, merchants, and businessmen literally built
many of Florida’s towns and cities. Men such as John E. Onley in Jacksonville
and John Hall in Tampa left as their legacies structures and facilities that
lasted into the modern era.

Meanwhile, merchant Frank P. Gadson in the 1880s pioneered the concept of
the department store in Florida with his Ocala Bazaar. Sylvanus H. Hart moved
from contracting into banking. A hundred or more additional examples could
be cited. African Americans quickly entered the professions as well. Dr.
Alexander H. Darnes of St. Augustine had graduated from medical school by
1880 and soon opened his practice at Jacksonville. Dr. William J. Gunn
followed within two years in Tallahassee.

University-trained dentists such as George H. Hart came in their wake. By
1907 Dr. Effie Carrie Mitchell (later Mitchell-Hampton) had pioneered the
medical profession for black women with her Ocala practice. She joined
dozens of male colleagues. Attorneys actually had preceded doctors in the
state. Henry S. Harmon, a Union army veteran, was admitted to the Alachua
County bar in 1869. As others followed, some failed to sustain practices but
other early lawyers such as John Wallace managed profitable careers lasting
well into the twentieth century.

Perhaps the best-known 19th black attorney from Florida was James Weldon
Johnson, later first executive director of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People and author of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,”
sometimes called the Negro National Anthem.

The Value of Education

As these professional advances suggest, a large segment of Florida’s
population of freedmen and freedwomen valued education. Primary and
secondary schools such as Jacksonville’s Stanton Institute, Tallahassee’s
Lincoln Academy, Gainesville’s Union Academy, and Ocala’s Howard Academy
earned plaudits for excellence at a time when equivalent white schools often
remained off limits. Higher education within the state also commanded
attention from African Americans. The African Methodists and the Baptists
were attempting by the 1870s to found colleges and universities. Although
their efforts met with obstacles and setbacks, Jacksonville’s Edward Waters
College and Miami’s Florida Memorial College stand today as their legacies.
Northern Methodists joined in the 1870s to found Jacksonville’s Cookman
Institute.

When it combined in the 1920s with noted educator Mary McLeod Bethune’s
Daytona School for girls, it became Bethune-Cookman College. Not to be
forgotten, black Floridians also fought for a publicly supported and
nonsectarian institution of higher learning for prospective teachers and
others. The State Normal and Industrial School for Negroes, established at
Tallahassee in 1887, evolved into the nation’s largest historically black
college or university, Florida A&M University.

The Push Toward Equal Rights

The advances made by the first two generations in freedom included active
and effective participation in politics. Probably 1,000 or more black men
served in one public office or another in Florida during the half century or so
that followed the end of the Civil War. Over 100 sat in the state legislature,
with two members lasting until 1889. By that time white Democrats
controlled state government, but black municipal officers continued to
contribute and to build their communities. By the early twentieth century at
least one black councilman remained in office in most of the major cities of
the state.

Two men—Albert Lewis Browning and Joseph A. Nottage—retained their seats
on the Palatka city council as late as 1924. It seems that advances by African
Americans in the face of white supremacist arguments—increasingly heard
beginning in the 1880s and extending more profoundly into the 1890s and
early 1900s as the era of Jim Crow racial discrimination locked down society
based upon the never achieved principal of “separate but equal”—spurred
hatred and fears within some segments of the white community. This may
help to explain, even if it does not excuse, waves of racial violence that
occasionally gripped the state from the 1880s until well into the modern era.
Florida led the nation on a per capital basis in lynchings during this period.
Entire communities at times faced destruction. The names of Ocoee,
Rosewood, and Groveland stand out in this regard. As late as 1945 a
governor of Florida would refuse even to investigate a lynching.

On the other hand, black Floridians helped to pioneer the modern civil rights
movement. Not only did James Weldon Johnson offer the NAACP its first
executive leadership, a number of the first chapters located in the South rose
at Jacksonville, Tampa, and Key West. Talented Florida attorneys such as
Judson D. Wetmore, Isaac L. Purcell, Charles H. Alston, Daniel W. Perkins, S. D.
McGill, and Francisco A. Rodriquez labored brilliantly in the cause of civil
rights and the defense of human life. In the post-World War Two era, Florida
along with Mississippi emerged as a center for testing and refining civil rights
initiatives. The Florida NAACP’s Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriette V.
Moore paid for this with their lives when Ku Klux Klan members bombed their
home on Christmas night 1951. Robert W. Saunders, Sr., of Tampa
courageously took up the reins of leadership following Moore’s demise, and
with Helen Saunders, Edward D. Davis, Frank Pinkston, Rutledge Pearson,
Charles W. Cherry, Charles Kenzie Steele, and many others eventually forced a
defiant state to begin yielding.

The Legacy of Florida’s Black Pioneers

This overview has omitted much, but it was not our intention to provide a
comprehensive history. Instead, we offer this only as a brief introduction to
an important and often-neglected subject. The fact remains, though, that
Florida simply could not have evolved as it did—it could not exist today as it
does—had African Americans and Africans in America not labored, dreamed,
created, and defended. This website offers excellent examples of local
significance concerning some of those men and women and some of their
dreams, aspirations, and creations. We applaud the efforts of the site’s
creators and sponsors who made this information available.

For our part, accept this essay, if you will, as the briefest taste test of one of
the richest and most- fulfilling meals that you ever will enjoy, the saga of
African Americans in Florida.


Copyright 2007 by Larry Eugene Rivers and Canter Brown, Jr.
All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.