Black Seminoles

Another angle for looking at the history of the disfranchisement of Black Indians is through the African Seminoles.  Runaway African captives from South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama were already establishing maroon colonies in Spanish Florida in the 18th century and allying with Creek Indians who were moving there, too.  Both groups grew in population in the early 19th century as slavery expanded and the US made war on the Upper Creek towns and they became known, together, as Seminoles.

Andrew Jackson began military attacks on the Seminoles of Spanish Florida in 1817, but when Spain ceded Florida to the United States, a few hundred Black Seminoles moved to the Bahamas.  Their community remained a major refuge for runaway slaves until the United States built a Coast Guard station on Key Biscayne to stop the escapes.

The remaining Seminoles, both Black and "red" moved to central and south Florida.  Their old nemesis, Andrew Jackson became president in 1829.  His policy was to demand their removal, along with the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws and Choctaws to an "Indian Territory" west of the Mississippi River.  The Seminoles fought removal, especially since the terms included their surrendering all Black members of the tribe into slavery.  By 1838, the US Army gave up on this and offered removal for everybody.  Many Seminoles accepted this offer rather than continue fighting.  Others remained behind, never defeated by the Army, and accounting for the Seminole reservations in Florida today.

When the Black Seminoles arrived in what is now Oklahoma, they discovered that the US government considered them to be part of the Creek tribe.  Now, instead of white slaveowners scheming to kidnap them into captivity, there were Creek Indian -- many of them racially white -- slaveholders scheming to do the same thing!  By settling on the Deep Fork of the Canadian River, far from the Creek Indian plantations, the Black Seminoles initially found some autonomy.  But the cold winters meant real hardship.  And their one-time Red Seminole allies were increasingly influenced by Creek slaveholders to assert ownership and enslave them.

In the winter of 1849 a large group of Black Seminoles, along with Native American relatives and some African Creeks, broke out of Indian Territory and headed for Mexico.  They found refuge there, and there are still Black Seminole communities in Coahuila.  Their agreement with the Mexican government required them to provide military service as scouts against the Comanches and Apaches.  By the 1870's, the US government was looking for the same kind of service.  Some of the Black Seminole scouts moved with their families to Brackettville, Texas to work with the US Army out of Fort Clark.

The Mexico-Texas families never received recognition as Indians from the US government.  The Seminoles of Oklahoma disfranchised their so-called "freedmen" in 2000, just when they received a $56 million payment from the US government for the loss of lands in Florida.  The tribal government decided that members were only those who could prove one-eighth "blood quantum" by their descent from people listed on the Dawes "by blood" Rolls of 1906.  And, as with the Creeks, any Seminole with any trace of African ancestry in 1906 had been enrolled on the "freedman" list instead.

So the Seminoles, a tribe that was by its very existence a Maroon band of Africans and Native Americans, has disavowed its Black members in the 21st century.  Greed?  Anti-Black racism?  Theories of biological "essentialism"?  It is certain that all of these explain the Seminoles denial of their own history.