The First Black Towns

As the nation turns its attention to the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s worth noting that decades before the United States was even formed, African Americans lived free in a town of their own — at least for a while.

Sometime between March and November of 1738, Spanish settlers in Florida formed a town named Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, two miles to the north of St. Augustine. Initially, it consisted of 38 men, all fugitive slaves, “most of them married,” who had fled to Florida for sanctuary and freedom from enslavement in the Carolinas and Georgia. It came to be known as Fort Mose. Read More

Songhai an early West African Empire

West Africa’s Niger River provided bigger and better harvests than the Nile. According to Major Felix Dubois, a pioneering French scholar on the Songhai Empire: ‘What the Nile has done in Egypt, the Niger has accomplished for the Sudan (i.e. West Africa). In the course of a year we witness the same striking and opposed pictures. The cultivation is as facile as that of Egypt, and is due to the same regular rise and fall of the river. But the Niger shows an even greater munificence in its gifts than does its brother of Eastern Africa.’
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How an 18th Century portrait inspired a new film

The painting, which dates from 1779, shows two young women dressed in the finest clothes of the age.However, one is an aristocratic white-skinned girl in a pink dress and the other is a mixed-race girl, who is placed in equal importance to the first, which would have been a rarity for the time.
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Nanny Of The Maroons: Jamaica’s Warrior Queen

Queen Nanny or Nanny (c. 1685 – unknown, circa 1755), Jamaican National Hero, was a well-known leader of the Jamaican Maroons in the eighteenth century. Much of what is known about Nanny comes from oral history as little textual evidence exists. ”. ..

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