United we stand! Joint struggles of native American and African American in the Columbian era - Columbus and the New World Order 1492-1992

Monthly Review, July-August, 1992 by Jan R. Carew

Such united struggles of Africans and Native Americans were to continue in the Americas in the decades and centuries afterwards. "They were," as Patterson explains with respect to the cimarron communities, "the dialectical response, the desires and struggles, of the multitudes who did most of the real work in the Indies to improve the quality of their lives." Thus, such Black and Indian alliances are known to have existed in Southern Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, the Guianas, the Brazilian Northeast, and North America throughout the colonial period and beyond.

The general character of these little known alliances is probably best understood through an examination of what was undoubtedly the greatest of all these joint struggles, occurring in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States, the country that perhaps more than any other saw itself as the main inheritor of the Columbian spirit. The epic struggle waged by Seminole and Black insurgents in Florida between 1736 and 1853 can therefore be viewed as a continuation of one that had begun in the first four decades of the Columbian era when Africans and Native Americans had joined forces against the Spanish colonizers in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico.

The history of this Florida insurgency, around which there has been a conspiracy of silence, still lives, however, in oral accounts that scattered Black and Seminole descendants continue to retain in Florida, in Oklahoma, on the island of Andros in the Bahamas, and in the Mexican border state of Coahuila. It was in Coahuila that Juarez, the first Native American president of Mexico since the Conquest, gave land to a faction of the Seminole-Black Freedom Fighters.

In 1972, an aged descendant of Black-Seminole migrants to Andros told me..

I heard 'bout the battle of Swanee against Stonewall Jackson, my grandmother tell me 'bout it and her grandmother tell her 'bout it long before. Stories like that does come down to us with voices in the wind. She tell me how the Old Ones used to talk 'bout the look on them white soldiers' faces when they see Black fighters looking like they grow outta the swamp grass and the hammocks, coming at them with gun and cutlass. Jackson get hurt at Swanee, man, the ancestors brutalize him there. He run away, and never come back to face Blacks and Seminoles fighting shoulder-to- shoulder black flesh touching red and brown--that kind of thing does give the white man nightmare and day-fever all at the same time. But after them Black and Seminole fighters punish Jackson good and proper, he turn on the women and children that the Seminoles did leave behind, and any of them that look like they had African blood, he carry off to sell into slavery. Oh, God! That man Jackson was cruel, eh! He make slaves of them who was free already for two and three generation. He sell the grandchildren of former slaves to the grandchildren of former slave owners! My old face already beat against eighty-odd-years and my children and grandchildren all gone to far places looking for work and a better life. But when Jesus of Nazareth decide to send Mantop to carry me to the Great Beyond, wherever my blood-seed scatter, they will spread the word 'bout how Black and Seminole ancestors fight side by side at Swanee.[14]