Stories of Flight and Freedom:  Grand Marronage & Freedom Colonies

Written by Becca Williams, SBT Copywriter

Cover art is a painting by artist Lisa Cain titled, "A Beautiful Day"

Last week, I wrote about self-liberated formerly enslaved folx who escaped and built homes, communities, and throughways in the Great Dismal Swamp – a phenomenon called marronage.  I spent some time thinking through what it means that these elements of hard-fought and hard-defended freedom rarely make it into our perception of history and truth.  Whiteness and White Supremacy has those who abide (and there are serious consequences for those who don’t) believing that freedom is a birthright, one that was originally forged through the Revolutionary War and the formation of the United States thereafter.  We know, however, that the formation of our country, our wealth, and the ability of White folx to maintain their freedom was entirely based on the denied of enslaved Black people.  Despite knowing this, many of us continue to build our lives and model our political systems without understanding that foundation. 

I wanted to first zoom in on the concept of marronage so we could better understand the nuance of freedom.  I thought a lot about what it means to seek freedom in a place that wants you suffering and will go to great lengths to see to that.  I wondered what freedom meant if there was an ever-present reality that one could be captured and enslaved once again.  I grew fascinated by the idea that, all across the US and the world, enslaved folx took the same actions over and over again to free themselves. I understood that had we taken the time to learn about this or to question the ways in which we were taught about this, that we would (hopefully) have come to the realization a little sooner that White Supremacy still dictates too much of our livelihoods, and that in order to divest from that system, our own Whiteness needs to be examined.

Throughout the research and writing for both last week’s and this week’s blog, I noticed how quick I was to “other” these formerly enslaved folx who built communities that applied centrifugal force to the constantly centered Whiteness.  My research felt White gaze-y and almost anthropological – my interest and fascination an outcropping of my detachment from the knowledge that White Supremacy – the very thing that benefits me – caused so much pain and damage and that still Black folx found and defended their freedom.  It made me wonder if I had ever fought for anything that hard. It made me think about the role I play as an outsider looking into these communities that have at their core a sense of Black agency, autonomy and choice, which ultimately doesn’t center me and rather seeks to create something entirely antithetical to Whiteness. 

This reminds me of the way in which Wanda talks about Whiteness when she quotes Tressie McMillan Cottom “Whiteness exists as a response to Blackness…[It] is a violet, socio-cultural regime legitimized by property to always make clear who is Black by fastidiously delineating who is ultimately white.”  It took me a long time to let this quote sink in when I first heard it, and I recommend that you take a few minutes now to re-read and absorb it.  Let’s focus on property, as Cottom describes it.  Whiteness is a violent system made possible by the acquisition and maintenance of property through mechanisms of enslavement by which humans are property, and through the laws, policies, and institutions that ensure that land and material wealth remain in White folx’s hands.

(Community members in a Freedom Colony in Bastrop County, Texas)

Maroons and other self-liberated Black folx like those who ran to the Union lines during the Civil War, utilized the Underground Railroad, and/or built their own free communities during Reconstruction, have a lot in common – namely their ownership, factually or legally, of a physical place and the means of production.  While the evidence is scant (although the gaps in the evidence are just as telling), the maroons in the Great Dismal Swamp may or may not have constructed vast neighborhoods or communities.  However, there were maroon communities all over the Atlantic world who did. 

By the late 1500s, there were large maroon communities in Panama and Brazil, and by the mid-17^th century there were maroon communities in Suriname.  Brazil held one of the largest maroon communities, called Palmares, or Quilombo [another word for maroon] dos Palmares, which was established in 1605.  Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, and trafficked more than 4 million enslaved folx into the country, almost 4 times the amount of enslaved folx trafficked to the United States.  Understanding how little scholarly attention is paid to the Great Dismal Swamp, I can guess that there were likely many more maroon communities in Brazil than what is currently estimated.  Palmares had over 200 houses, a main street, a church and other structures, and was mainly comprised of folx from Angola.  It was a constant threat to the Dutch and Portuguese colonists, who eventually destroyed it in 1694.  In fact, marronage and rebellions of enslaved folx became such a constant threat to enslavers that some began to take out insurance policies to protect their finances in the case of rebellion, raid, or the loss of a ship carrying trafficked folx from Africa.

The violent destruction and interruption of freedom is a constant theme here, running through our Dismal Swamp discussion and into global maroon communities.  The desire for freedom through marronage spread similarly throughout various groups of enslaved folx. Similarly, the desire of White enslavers and White communities to maintain control, forced labor, coercion, and to violently repress enslaved folx whom they thought should always comply spread similarly among the colonizers.  This vicious abhorrence of Black agency and success  endured long after enslavement ended. Think back to the Red Summer, Tulsa, Rosewood, Elaine, Arkansas, and the lynchings reported on by Ida B. Wells. 

Both Jamaica and Suriname are home to some of the world’s largest present day maroon communities.  Maroon communities developed in Jamaica when an English fleet of colonizers arrived with the intent to uproot the Spanish occupation and set up sugarcane plantations of their own.  Many Spanish colonists who didn’t have much in the way of defenses fled to Cuba, leaving enslaved folx behind who then armed themselves and headed for the isolated and mountainous interior where they hunted, cultivated crops, and formed permanent settlements.  These communities fought two guerilla wars, against the English who eventually signed a treaty with the various maroon groups that offered them land sovereignty and trade routes in exchange for the maroons capturing and returning enslaved folx who ran away to seek freedom.   Once again, freedom was negotiated and carved out of systemic brutality. 

(Photo of the Ndyuka maroon community in Suriname.) 

Surinamese maroons experienced similar attempts by Dutch colonizers to brutally dismantle their well-outfitted communities.  In 1760, the Dutch colonizers recognized the independence of these maroon communities via a treaty that provided land sovereignty, recognition of their matrilineal kinship structure thus enabling the maroon communities to live in the vast interior of the country.  These maroon communities, of which recent estimates say are divided into six separate and distinct groups, are among the first peoples in the hemisphere to gain independence, and remain one of the largest concentrated groups of maroons with around 65,000 current day inhabitants.  However, the Surinamese maroon communities face many current struggles.  Not only do they rely on coastal markets for manufactured goods and products, many work in exploitative extractive industries such as gold mining, and experience poverty and malnutrition, in addition to a lack of educational and medical resources.  In 1986, the Surinamese national government massacred at least 39 inhabitants of the maroon Moiwana village.  It’s been reported that in the early 1990s, the national government dropped napalm on maroon communities and made numerous attempts to rescind the maroon community’s land rights, thus forcing many Surinamese maroons into neighboring French Guiana. 

Shifting back to the States, there were other maroon and free communities aside from the Great Dismal Swamp. The idea of “Free Colonies”, or “Freedmen’s Colonies” emerged after the Civil War ended in 1865, when many Black folx turned inward to create their own autonomous living environments far from the regulation and limited freedom they experienced during Reconstruction.  In 1790, there were nearly 60,000 free formerly enslaved folx in the US (some of whom resided in Dismal), and by 1860 that number grew to about 500,000 – that we know of. 

While maroon communities tended to reside in rural and treacherous outskirts of towns and cities, some of these free communities flourished in city centers.  Philadelphia had one of the largest free Black communities in the nation – between 1790 and 1800, the city’s free Black population grew by 76%. These communities organized fraternal orders, antislavery societies, and national conventions for abolition. They developed educational institutions, and formed the Black press through the initiation of the Freedmen’s Journal. Further, descendants of self-liberated Black folx still live on Roanoke Island, which became a sought-after destination after Union forces occupied the island in 1862 and enslaved folx began fleeing for Union lines after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

One of the most expansive efforts to preserve and maintain free communities comes in the form of Dr. Andrea Roberts’ organization, the Texas Freedom Colony Project.  The above video has some great information on the work being done. There are over 557 established historic Black settlements in Texas, now referred to as Freedom Colonies.  Freedom Colonies are intentional communities comprised of multiple Black landowners and developed predominantly during the era of Reconstruction (1865-1877). They benefited from some assistance from the Freedmen’s Bureau, a post-Civil War institution meant to help transition the country back to order by starting banks, schools, and helping establish labor contracts for freed people.  As I touched on in this blog’s opening, these communities were about Black agency – they weren’t rooted in a reaction to Whiteness.  After the Civil War, the presence of Black codes, or Black laws, limited the freedom of Black communities by denying access to many facets of civil life, including prohibiting Black folx from purchasing publicly available lands and punishing those who did not work for White folx. 

As a result of these codes, many of Texas’ Freedom Colonies were developed on disaster-prone land or were obtained via adverse possession (meaning:  they stayed on the land long enough to make it productive, then legally declared it as their own).  By 1870, Black folx owned about 2% of land in Texas; by 1910 they owned a third – a number that has since significantly dropped.  Something that sticks out for me in Dr. Roberts’ work with the Texas Freedom Colonies is her description of how the notion of “place” changes when we look beyond census and municipal data.  There could be thousands, even millions of folx who resided in these Freedom Colonies yet who aren’t “counted” because they don’t live there full time.  Because this differs from our perception of what community living should be, many of these towns are unrecognized – her team has been able to identify around 335 of the (likely more than) 557 communities, and are relying on crowdsourcing to help in identifying the remaining places.  Please listen to this podcast for more information on the Texas Freedom Colonies Project. 

There is much more information out there about maroon and free communities, and I highly recommend taking a look while also reflecting on your positionality and learning more about how Black folx fought for their freedom from the moment enslavement began.  I’ll end with a beautiful quote from Moses Grandy, resident of Dismal in the 19th century, describing his sense of freedom, “I felt to myself so light, that I almost thought I could fly, and in my sleep I was always dreaming of flying over woods and rivers."

Additional Resources:

This article has great information on the struggle for land recognition among the Surinamese maroon communities.

Check out this podcast for more information on Black codes and the Freedmen’s Bureau.

These two articles speak more in-depth about the Negro Fort of Florida, and it’s ultimate destruction by White folx.

Read this article for more information on the formation of Africa Town, Alabama, after the shipwreck of the Clotilda.

This map details the Texas Freedom Colonies that have so far been identified.  Each dot on the atlas takes you to a folder with numerous documents, maps, and photos.