The Seminole Wars...No the Gullah Wars. A war oblivious to African Americans

[IllmaticDelta]

I don't think this statement from your article is true:

"... Black dialect is really Southern White American English with Africanisms. It formed the same way West African pidgins, Jamaican Patois and Creoles formed. Famous African American writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Paul Dunbar wrote many of their works in this dialect... ."

Matt Schaffer who is a researcher and writer discussed that Southern White American English ("Southern Accent") is actually a dialect that evolved from the slaves, specifically the Mande people (Mandingos, Mende, etc.). Here is a blurb from an article written by Schaffer.

"...My first insight into the possibility of significant Mandinka content in the Southern accent occurred in one memorable conversation in Ziguinchor during 1972 with Buli Drame, the Mandinka from Suna Karantaba who guided me to the four villages I emphasized in studying Pakao. We proceeded to converse in French and he asked where I was from. After I told him, he slowly repeated after me, "St. Simons Island," pronouncing the words with such a strong Southern drawl that a chill ran up my spine. After years at college and graduate school away from the South, my own Southern accent had mostly disappeared. Yet Buli pronounced these and [End Page 351] other English words with a strong, seemingly perfect Southern accent, certainly an accent of the Georgia coast where Africanisms of The Gullah Dialect and Drums and Shadows both suggest a strong Mande influx and influence. One can debate how much a coastal Georgia accent resembles variable accents elsewhere in the South, but the accents of Charleston and coastal South Carolina and Georgia, spoken by both slaves and elite whites, were established before much of the inner deep South was settled... ."

Project MUSE - Bound to Africa: the Mandinka Legacy in the New World

are you talking the accent or the dialect?

 

[HarlemHottie]

Gullah Martial Arts style, Kicking and Knocking which is very similar to Afro-Brazilian capoeira.

Yooooooo... my grandparents (all SC and NC) danced like this at the Savoy and my brother's generation invented breaking, don't they look 'related'?! "Connect the dots," indeed.


I wanted to comment on AA's being the most Euro of the diaspora. What (stupid) people don't realize is that, aside from the various maroon communities, the south was one big concentration camp. Them white folks was on our ass heavy. Literally all we were allowed to do was entertain them. You can still see it today, they call the slave patrols whenever we look like we just living life, doing us: at a bbq, at the Starbucks, etc. So our ancestors had to disguise their activities. Not like Brazil's capoeira. No, these crakkas wouldn't have allowed that, they stayed vigilant. So of course our version of dance/ martial arts looks entirely frivolous. They barely let us do that. Just look at these latter-day colonizers who tried to stop the African drummers here in Harlem. They still scared.


Also, there was another large maroon community in the US, Great Dismal Swamp.

The Great Dismal Swamp spans an area of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina between the James River near Norfolk, Virginia, and the Albemarle Sound near Edenton, North Carolina.[1] The swamp is estimated to have originally been over 1 million acres...

At the beginning of the 18th century, maroons came to live in the Great Dismal Swamp.[3][13] Most settled on mesic islands, the high and dry parts of the swamp. Inhabitants included slaves who had purchased their freedom as well as escaped slaves.[14] Other escaped slaves used the swamp as a route on the Underground Railroad as they made their way further north.[13] Some slaves lived there in semi-free conditions, but how much independence slaves actually enjoyed there has been a topic of much debate. Nearby whites often left enslaved maroons alone so long as they paid a quota in logs or shingles,[14] and businesses may have ignored the fugitive status of escaped slaves who provided work in exchange for trade goods.[11]

Herbert Aptheker stated already in 1939, in "Maroons Within the Present Limits of the United States", that likely "about two thousand Negroes, fugitives, or the descendants of fugitives" lived in the Great Dismal Swamp, trading with white people outside the swamp.[15] Results of a study published in 2007, "The Political Economy of Exile in the Great Dismal Swamp", say that thousands of people lived in the swamp between 1630 and 1865, Native Americans, maroons and enslaved laborers on the canal.[16] A 2011 study speculated that thousands may have lived in the swamp between the 1600s and 1860.[3] While the precise number of maroons who lived in the swamp at that time is unknown, it is believed to have been one of the largest maroon colonies in the United States. It is established that "several thousand" were living there by the 19th century.[17] However, fear of slave unrest and fugitive slaves living among maroon population caused concern amongst local whites. A militia with dogs went into the swamp in 1823 in an attempt to remove the maroons and destroy their community, but most people escaped.[18] In 1847, North Carolina passed a law specifically aimed at apprehending the maroons in the swamp.[1][11] However, unlike other maroon communities, where local militias often captured the residents and destroyed their homes, those in the Great Dismal Swamp mostly avoided capture or the discovery of their homes.[3]
...

Some maroons were born to escaped slaves and lived in the swamp for their entire lives despite the hardships of swamp life: dense underbrush, insects, venomous snakes, and bears. The difficult conditions also made the swamp an ideal hiding place, not just for escaped slaves but also for free blacks, slaves who worked on the swamp's canals, Native Americans, and outcast whites such as criminals.[2][13][21] Maroons are known to have often interacted with slaves and poor whites to obtain work, food, clothes, and money. Some fugitive slaves plundered nearby farms and plantations, stole from anchored boats, and robbed travelers on nearby roads;[18] those caught were tried for murder or theft.[12]

Great Dismal Swamp Maroons

Amazing thread, btw.

 

[Samori Toure]

Yooooooo... my grandparents (all SC and NC) danced like this at the Savoy and my brother's generation invented breaking, don't they look 'related'?! "Connect the dots," indeed.


I wanted to comment on AA's being the most Euro of the diaspora. What (stupid) people don't realize is that, aside from the various maroon communities, the south was one big concentration camp. Them white folks was on our ass heavy. Literally all we were allowed to do was entertain them. You can still see it today, they call the slave patrols whenever we look like we just living life, doing us: at a bbq, at the Starbucks, etc. So our ancestors had to disguise their activities. Not like Brazil's capoeira. No, these crakkas wouldn't have allowed that, they stayed vigilant. So of course our version of dance/ martial arts looks entirely frivolous. They barely let us do that. Just look at these latter-day colonizers who tried to stop the African drummers here in Harlem. They still scared.


Also, there was another large maroon community in the US, Great Dismal Swamp.




Amazing thread, btw.

I had planned on trying to get over to Virginia and North Carolina to visit that area around that swamp later this Summer. Things have gotten busy for me, but hopefully I will find a weekend to drive over there next month.

 

[BuckFilly]

just got hipped to John horse.....great thread

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Yooooooo... my grandparents (all SC and NC) danced like this at the Savoy and my brother's generation invented breaking, don't they look 'related'?! "Connect the dots," indeed.


I wanted to comment on AA's being the most Euro of the diaspora. What (stupid) people don't realize is that, aside from the various maroon communities, the south was one big concentration camp. Them white folks was on our ass heavy. Literally all we were allowed to do was entertain them. You can still see it today, they call the slave patrols whenever we look like we just living life, doing us: at a bbq, at the Starbucks, etc. So our ancestors had to disguise their activities. Not like Brazil's capoeira. No, these crakkas wouldn't have allowed that, they stayed vigilant. So of course our version of dance/ martial arts looks entirely frivolous. They barely let us do that. Just look at these latter-day colonizers who tried to stop the African drummers here in Harlem. They still scared.


Also, there was another large maroon community in the US, Great Dismal Swamp.




Amazing thread, btw.

I can tell you're going to be a potential member.

Good shyt and I love Harlem btw.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Also, there was another large maroon community in the US, Great Dismal Swamp.

there were afram maroons outside the dismal swamp areas of the south and even in the north east!

The first African slaves brought to the British colonies in Virginia in 1619 came on a Dutch ship. At the time, slaves were treated similarly to indentured servants, becoming free with the passage of a certain period of time. Others gained freedom by converting to Christianity, since the English of that time did not typically enslave Christians.[8] Slave labor was used in many efforts to drain and log the Great Dismal Swamp during the 18th and 19th centuries.[9] Escaped slaves living in freedom came to be known as maroons or outlyers.[1][9][10] The origin of the term "maroon" is uncertain, with competing theories linking it to Spanish, Arawak or Taino root words.[11] Maroonage, runaway slaves in isolated or hidden settlements,[10] existed in all the Southern states,[12] and swamp-based maroon communities existed in the Deep South, in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina.[2] Maroonage in the Upper South was largely limited to Virginia and the Great Dismal Swamp.

Jean Saint Malo in French (died June 19, 1784), also known as Juan San Malo in Spanish, was the leader of a group of runaway enslaved Africans, known as Maroons, in Spanish Louisiana.

Saint Malo and his band escaped to a marshy area near Lake Borgne, with weapons obtained from free people of color and plantation Enslaved. The maroons lived in the swamps east of New Orleans and made their headquarters at Bas du Fleuve, located along Lake Borgne in present-day St. Bernard Parish.[1]

The Spanish colonial authorities had mostly suppressed the slave revolts by 1783, and more than a hundred of the runaways had been captured. Jean Saint Malo was condemned to death by hanging, on charges of murder. The execution was carried out by the alcalde Mario de Reggio on June 19, 1784, in front of St. Louis Cathedral (present-day Jackson Square, New Orleans).[2]

The Filipino community of Saint Malo, Louisiana, was named after him.

Coincidentally, June 19, the day of Juan San Malo's death, is also recognized by many African Americans as Juneteenth, the day that slavery officially ended in several Southern states, about eighty years later – although there is no connection.

Jean Saint Malo - Wikipedia

The exhibit is in the 17,000-square-foot Slavery and Freedom gallery, in a section about free communities of color. “Traditionally, we’ve studied the institution of slavery, not enslavement as it was lived,” she says. “Once you start looking at our history through an African-American lens, it really changes the focus. Maroons become much more significant.”

The largest community of American maroons was in the Great Dismal Swamp, but there were others in the swamps outside New Orleans, in Alabama and elsewhere in the Carolinas, and in Florida. All these sites are being investigated by archaeologists.

“The other maroon societies had more fluidity,” says Bercaw. “People would slip off down the waterways, but usually maintain some contact. The Dismal Swamp maroons found a way to remove themselves completely from the United States, in the recesses of its geography.”

Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom | History | Smithsonian

The second migratory path followed by the runaways contrasted sharply with the urban migration. It led into the most remote, isolated backcountry, dense forests, bayous, swamps, or Indian territories. There, the fugitives formed maroon communities - organized enclaves of runaways-that developed in the earliest days and continued through abolition. As early as 1690, farmers in Harlem, New York, were complaining about the inhabitants of a maroon colony who were attacking the settlers.

The first known free black community in North America was a settlement of fugitive Africans called Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose. Located near St. Augustine in Spanish Florida, it operated from 1739 to 1763.

Some runaways established camps in Elliott's Cut, between the Ashepoo and Pon Pon rivers in South Carolina; and in the Indian nations of Alabama and Mississippi. In the eighteenth century, others had taken refuge in Spanish Florida with the Seminole Indians. Black and native Seminoles joined forces against the U.S. army during two wars in 1812 and 1835. In 1822, the sub-agent for the Florida Indians wrote:



It will be difficult (says he) to form a prudent determination with respect to the ‘maroon negroes' (Exiles), who live among the Indians . . . . They fear being again made slaves, under the American Government, and will omit nothing to increase or keep alive mistrust among the Indians, whom they in fact govern. If it should become necessary to use force with them, it is to be feared that the Indians will take their part. It will, however, be necessary to remove from the Floridas this group of freebooters, among whom runaway Negroes will always find a refuge. It will, perhaps, be possible to have them received at St. Domingo, or to furnish them means of withdrawing from the United States!

During the 1790s, runaways in Virginia and the Carolinas hid in woods and swamps during the day, and emerged at night to commit "various depredations" on farms and plantations. By the nineteenth century, several thousands lived in the Great Dismal Swamp on the border between Virginia and North Carolina. Slaveholders often ran advertisements mentioning that the fugitives were heading there:



Bonaparte ran away last Christmas without cause or provocation. He is about six feet high and rather slim yet very strong, twenty-eight years old, not of very dark complexion, full eyes, large mouth, fine set of teeth, speaks fluently. I have received information that he is lurking about the Dismal Swamp. ( Southern Argus, April 16, 1852.)


Maroons have been described as "some of the most hate-filled and angry slaves." Before fleeing, they had often committed acts of violence against their owners, overseers or other whites. Many vowed never to return to bondage. Joe, who murdered a slave owner in South Carolina, fled deep into the woods. He recruited others to join him and became the leader of a band of fugitives. He was then given the nickname Forest, as he had made the deep woods his refuge. A group of slave owners petitioned the State Senate in 1824, saying in part:

"[Joe] was so cunning and artful as to elude pursuit and so daring and bold ... as to put every thing at defiance.... Embolden [sic] by his successes and his seeming good fortune he plunged deeper and deeper into Crime until neither fear nor danger could deter him first from threatening and then from executing a train of mischief we believe without parallel in this Country."

Forest remained at large and was caught only when a former companion betrayed him and revealed his location. The maroon leader was shot in the forest where he had successfully lived free for more than two years.

The maroons or "outlyers," as contemporaries called them, maintained their cohesion for years, sometimes for more than a generation. They made forays into populated farming sections for food, clothing, livestock, and trading items. Sometimes they bartered with free blacks, plantation slaves, and nonslaveholding whites, and in a few instances white outlaws joined them, although this was rare.

It is estimated that at least fifty maroon communities were active in the South between 1672 and 1864.

AAME : image

 

[HarlemHottie]

I shared this thread with my man and he brought up an interesting point. Were the people who built Black Wall St John Horse's descendants??? If so, it might explain why the US government took such extraordinary measures against them.

Also, I was thinking about Henrique Dias' story down in Brazil, how he saved them Portuguese crakkas from the Dutch and then, once the fight was over, the Portuguese were even more oppressive to blacks and natives. I think it's a technique. Consider this: everytime AA's fight in a war (valiantly and with honor), cacs respond by oppressing us even more. Look at what happened after WW2, they were hanging returning black servicemen in their damn uniforms. The pattern seems to be: white folks bout to get they ass kicked, we save the day, and then, to keep us from recognizing our power, they turn right around and oppress us even worse than before. You could also look at it from the angle of, they just spent a lot of money in whichever war and so they need to hurry up and make it back. Therefore, they press the hell out of their labor force.


@Akan, If you get down there, could you please take some pics? I'm curious about how they was living/ the conditions.
@IllmaticDelta A maroon community in Harlem!?!? I'ma hafta look into that.

@Diasporan Royalty I see you're the admin of #AAgang. I would like to formally submit my application for consideration. I goes tf in.

 

[Samori Toure]

I shared this thread with my man and he brought up an interesting point. Were the people who built Black Wall St John Horse's descendants??? If so, it might explain why the US government took such extraordinary measures against them.

Also, I was thinking about Henrique Dias' story down in Brazil, how he saved them Portuguese crakkas from the Dutch and then, once the fight was over, the Portuguese were even more oppressive to blacks and natives. I think it's a technique. Consider this: everytime AA's fight in a war (valiantly and with honor), cacs respond by oppressing us even more. Look at what happened after WW2, they were hanging returning black servicemen in their damn uniforms. The pattern seems to be: white folks bout to get they ass kicked, we save the day, and then, to keep us from recognizing our power, they turn right around and oppress us even worse than before. You could also look at it from the angle of, they just spent a lot of money in whichever war and so they need to hurry up and make it back. Therefore, they press the hell out of their labor force.


@Akan, If you get down there, could you please take some pics? I'm curious about how they was living/ the conditions.
@IllmaticDelta A maroon community in Harlem!?!? I'ma hafta look into that.

@Diasporan Royalty I see you're the admin of #AAgang. I would like to formally submit my application for consideration. I goes tf in.

I will definitely take pictures and post them if I can get over there. Work is crazy lately so a drive over there will be kind of tough, but I definitely want to get over there since I read this article earlier this year by Dr. Sayer written for Smithsonian magazine. There was also a short video produced by Smithsonian.


Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom | History | Smithsonian
Researchers recover narratives lost in the ‘Great Dismal Swamp’

Btw, the Gullah community is much larger than people think. Most Gullah dispersed into the rest of the country for the same reason that other people dispersed into the rest of the USA.

African American Heritage - Charleston SC
GULLAH -- THE story of virtually every African American...and should be a must-viewing for all ages and races.

 

[HarlemHottie]

I will definitely take pictures and post them if I can get over there. Work is crazy lately so a drive over there will be kind of tough, but I definitely want to get over there since I read this article earlier this year by Dr. Sayer written for Smithsonian magazine. There was also a short video produced by Smithsonian.


Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom | History | Smithsonian
Researchers recover narratives lost in the ‘Great Dismal Swamp’

Btw, the Gullah community is much larger than people think. Most Gullah dispersed into the rest of the country for the same reason that other people dispersed into the rest of the USA.

African American Heritage - Charleston SC
GULLAH -- THE story of virtually every African American...and should be a must-viewing for all ages and races.

Thanks for the sources, I'll check them out later.


Yeah, there are Gullah everywhere. Harlem is like a colony of SC, so we got plenty here. My family is from the SC upcountry, like, where it touches NC, but when I saw Daughters of the Dust, I was like, that's what my great grandmother used to be doing! When you think about it, even the people who don't id as Gullah probably are descended from them cuz SC was peopled from the coast inward. Where else would upcountry slaves have come from but the coast? Like I said, my family maintains traditions I didn't even know were Gullah. I'm in my 30's but I regularly cook all our traditional foods (except okra, can't get with the sliminess, but it's ok in succotash). I make a good pot of greens at least once a week, got some some neck bones on deck for the end of this week.

 

[Samori Toure]

Thanks for the sources, I'll check them out later.


Yeah, there are Gullah everywhere. Harlem is like a colony of SC, so we got plenty here. My family is from the SC upcountry, like, where it touches NC, but when I saw Daughters of the Dust, I was like, that's what my great grandmother used to be doing! When you think about it, even the people who don't id as Gullah probably are descended from them cuz SC was peopled from the coast inward. Where else would upcountry slaves have come from but the coast? Like I said, my family maintains traditions I didn't even know were Gullah. I'm in my 30's but I regularly cook all our traditional foods (except okra, can't get with the sliminess, but it's ok in succotash). I make a good pot of greens at least once a week, got some some neck bones on deck for the end of this week.

No problem.

Like I wrote earlier the Gullah was as far North as Onslow County N.C., and many moved into Tennessee which is where my family ended up after the Civil War. I am pretty sure they were Gullah, because when I was a kid visiting my grandmothers home in Tennessee we ate rice almost everyday and we did a lot of other things the Gullah did. DNA testing shows that my maternal ancestry is Mende and our genetic communities are African American South Carolina and North Carolina Northern Coastal Communities.

 

[im_sleep]

I realize that I am late on this thread, but better late than never. I don't know if you ever found the answer to your question, but if not here is the answer: the Gullah people land ranged from as far north as Jacksonville, North Carolina (Onslow County) to Jacksonville, Florida in the South. There are communities of Gullah in North Carolina that still live by the ocean, but many (not all) Gullah that lived in North Carolina moved inland. Just a short story here, but the Gullah people were brought to the Eastern portion of North Carolina to grow rice, just like they were brought to South Carolina. It needs to be remembered that North Carolina and South Carolina were just called Carolina until it was split in around 1712. Additionally it has to be remembered that North Carolina included the region of what we now call Tennessee, because the border of North Carolina was from the ocean on the east to the Mississippi river on the west.

My folks are from west Tennessee and we trace our family back to North Carolina. In fact many African Americans in Tennessee trace their ancestry back to the Gullah people in North Carolina and if you ask them they will tell you that being called Gullah wasn't offensive; but if you called them a Geeche then you had to fight them, because to be called a Geechee was considered an insult for some reason. For what it is worth I think that most African Americans in the South may have some kind of connection to the Gullah people, because many of our older relatives were difficult to understand. Looking back on it, we used to just say that our relatives were country as Hell because they used all of that broken English. However, after hearing the Gullah people speaking it is pretty clear that our ancestors were probably using Gullah, which in many respects sounds like broken English.

North Carolina | Gullah/Geechee Nation
History of Rice Plantations In ENC
The Split - One Colony Becomes Two

A couple of other things that I will point out that you probably already know is that the Gullah people that live in Georgia by the Ogeeche River are the ones that are called Geechee. I don't know how or why they started being referred to as Geechee rather than Gullah, but like I said if you called an older Black person a Geechee then it was an insult. Finally, the Gullah people are a mixture of African tribes, but their biggest influence are the Mende people of Sierra Leone. The Gullah are also Mandingo, Temne and other groups especially from the rice/grain coast in west Africa (Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia), but are also Central Africans from Angola and Congo. But the linguist Dr. Lorenzo Dow noted that many words in Gullah were Mende. There were also a large number of Gullah that were practicing Muslims, which was observed by many writers over the years and it retained it prominence with the Gullah along the coastal regions and sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia through the 1930s, which oddly enough might be when and where the Nation of Islam roots first took hold. Finally, the tradition of the "ring shout" practiced by the Gullah appears to be associated with Islam and the "shawt" representing the tawaf the counter clockwise walk around Kaaba.




Lorenzo Dow Turner (1890-1972) | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed
Religion

Anyway this was a great thread and I hope that more African Americans will review the history of our people.

Great post.

This is exactly why many of us have brought up before on here how silly it is to treat Gullah/Geechie’s as a totally separate group from AA’s as is sometimes done.

 

[im_sleep]

Yooooooo... my grandparents (all SC and NC) danced like this at the Savoy and my brother's generation invented breaking, don't they look 'related'?! "Connect the dots," indeed.


I wanted to comment on AA's being the most Euro of the diaspora. What (stupid) people don't realize is that, aside from the various maroon communities, the south was one big concentration camp. Them white folks was on our ass heavy. Literally all we were allowed to do was entertain them. You can still see it today, they call the slave patrols whenever we look like we just living life, doing us: at a bbq, at the Starbucks, etc. So our ancestors had to disguise their activities. Not like Brazil's capoeira. No, these crakkas wouldn't have allowed that, they stayed vigilant. So of course our version of dance/ martial arts looks entirely frivolous. They barely let us do that. Just look at these latter-day colonizers who tried to stop the African drummers here in Harlem. They still scared.


Also, there was another large maroon community in the US, Great Dismal Swamp.




Amazing thread, btw.

I absolutely believe that the type of swing dancing you had in Harlem back in the day, break dancing, etc. are not a coincidence at all but are definitely linked to dance/musical styles typical of that part of the South(VA, NC, SC, GA, FL), particularly the Gullah/Geechie corridor.

 

[Samori Toure]

I absolutely believe that the type of swing dancing you had in Harlem back in the day, break dancing, etc. are not a coincidence at all but are definitely linked to dance/musical styles typical of that part of the South(VA, NC, SC, GA, FL), particularly the Gullah/Geechie corridor.

The music too. Everything from Blues, Gospel, Country is from the plantations in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Northern Florida. Thomas Jefferson even mentioned the slaves on his plantation playing something called a "banjar" (banjo) that they brought with them from the hinterlands of Africa.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I shared this thread with my man and he brought up an interesting point. Were the people who built Black Wall St John Horse's descendants??? If so, it might explain why the US government took such extraordinary measures against them.

The one in Oklahoma? There were black seminoles + other black people from the midwest/south in the area for sure but I don't think his direct descendants were there. I remember reading that his direct descendants are in mexico and texas.

 

[HarlemHottie]

@Diasporan Royalty

Im NOT saying you cant comment. Im basically saying why YOU as a Somali are getting bent outta shape for West Africans who can't even properly defend this. You been doing that this entire thread. I understand the generalization of Africans im this thread is wrong BUT this is a topic West Africans especially Nigerians need to stop ducking their hands in the sand with.

Because east Africans be having house slaves too, that's why. Same set up. (sorry, I can't post over there yet)