Go Sound the Trumpet! Selections of Florida's African American History, David H. Jackson, Jr., and Canter Brown Jr., Editors. Cover Art Courtesy of the University of Tampa Press
Tales of Angola: Free Blacks, Red Stick Creeks, and International Intrigue in Spanish Southwest Florida, 1812-1821 Canter Brown, Jr. Copyright 2005, David H. Jackson, Jr., and Canter Brown, Jr., Editors. All Rights Reserved
The lives of maroons and the presence of maroon communities in Florida have commanded the attention of serious writers since the mid-1800s; yet, our knowledge of the subject remains, at best and in important respects, incomplete. To the good, beginning with Joshua Giddings, classic 1858 work The Exiles of Florida, the nation has enjoyed access to well-researched documentation regarding Florida, free blacks and their participation in events of critical importance.
In the twentieth century, Kenneth W. Porter followed up on Giddings' start with a series of scholarly essays that he eventually incorporated into The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People. Jane L. Landers subsequently turned an in-depth focus upon Florida, and the nation, first officially sanctioned free-black community, Fort Mose.
By 1990, James W. Covington had added a substantive essay on one of its successor black settlements, the Negro Fort.2 Meanwhile, the fact that black communities of significance other than Fort Mose or the Negro Fort had existed in Florida at various times had evidenced itself repeatedly in scholarly works, although at least one settlement of major importance had escaped identification.
Hints about the community known as Angola had surfaced as early as 1945 when Kenneth W. Porter shared "Notes on Seminole Negroes in the Bahamas" with readers of The Florida Historical Quarterly. A few months later John M. Goggin released additional information and offered new insight. The Bahamian Department of Archives published supplemental documentary evidence in 1980 regarding "Seminole Settlements at Red Bays, Andros." Harry A. Kersey, Jr., addressed the same subject in The Florida Anthropologist one year afterward.3
It required another decade before the link between the Bahamian exiles and their old Florida home could be established. Then, this author, building upon the earlier published work, suggested that a previously unknown free-black community had existed in southwest Florida that had served to keep alive colonial Florida's status as a refuge of freedom in the aftermath of Fort Mose's closure and the Negro Fort's destruction. Additionally, he offered details to the effect that this settlement, identified by neighboring Cuban fisherman with the name Angola, had existed as a focus for diplomatic and economic activities within the broader Atlantic world. Its presence, he argued, additionally had created reverberations that influenced the course of United States history and, to a lesser extent, that of the British and Spanish Empires.4 ...
