As South Carolina’s enslaved African population swelled in the 1730s, particularly in Charleston, word began circulating about the opportunity for liberty in St. Augustine. All the enslaved would have to do was survive a journey of hundreds of miles of swamp, marsh, and sometimes-hostile Natives along the coast to reach Spanish Florida. But liberty would come in limited form. “Spanish bureaucrats attempted to count these people and to limit their physical mobility through increasingly restrictive racial legislation,” explains historian Jane Landers. “Officials prohibited blacks from living unsupervised, or, worse, among the Indians. Curfews and pass systems developed, as did proposals to force unemployed blacks into fixed labor situations.”
African migrants had to adopt the Spanish Catholic religion to gain entrance to St. Augustine. They were accepted as laborers and received wages, but only the lower rates paid to St. Augustine’s Native residents.
While the migrants’ living conditions were not as grueling here as in the Carolina plantations, where they had been treated as property, their situation in Spanish Florida might have been only slavery in a slightly more elegant font. They were still subject to European rule, and they were not in control of their destiny as long as they lived in the Spanish domain. This was but one of the earliest indicators that freedom for African Americans, no matter how promising, would never be complete, no matter where and when they moved throughout the North American landscape.
That tenuous freedom persisted after the Civil War. In 1887 the town of Eatonville was founded, just one hundred miles south of St. Augustine, outside Orlando. It was the first town to be “organized, governed and incorporated” by Black people. It existed in “relatively idyllic isolation” until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision imposed “forced integration.” For African Americans, fleeing the plantation would rarely if ever mean finding safe harbor from white surveillance.
In the 1970s, civil rights activist Floyd McKissick gave the Black sanctuary experiment a shot when he founded Soul City. He planned to build a Black city—an urban oasis in the middle of rural North Carolina—from scratch. Soul City was to serve as a sanctuary from the racism that had taken the lives of Black leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers—taking out the hopes and morale of many Black families in the process. Breaking ground in 1973, Soul City was the closest and most recent corollary to Fort Mose. But the trajectory to freedom was different: Soul City sought to draw African Americans to North Carolina, the general territory from which enslaved Africans had been escaping for Fort Mose some 240 years earlier.
Republicans of the 1970s were similar to the Florida Spaniards of the 1730s. President Richard Nixon’s administration provided the initial funding and support for the building of Soul City. At the time, Nixon was looking to entice more African Americans into the Republican fold through the embrace of “Black capitalism,” which he considered the only appropriate form for the popular new movement for Black Power. But slavery was capitalism. And it was capitalism that had lured rural and Southern Black workers to factories in cities, especially in the North and West in the mid-twentieth century, only to abandon many of those factories and cities by the century’s end in search of cheaper, less-regulated, less-unionized shores. Nixon promised Black capitalism would be a solvent to the woes that racial capitalism created for Black people who were willing to break from the plantation of antiracist activism. But Nixon’s motives were not genuine. It was a political ploy to siphon votes while hijacking the idea of Black Power for disempowering ends.
Similarly, in the 1730s the generosity that the Spanish Floridians extended to Africans who had escaped enslavement was less than authentic. They positioned Fort Mose close to the northern Florida border as a defensive buffer between St. Augustine and the potential encroachment of British enslavers in the Carolinas and the newly formed colony of Georgia in 1733.
Georgia’s proximity allowed British militias to base-camp closer to the Florida settlements. Spanish authorities needed Black laborers to fortify Spain’s economic investments throughout Florida, and they armed and weaponized formerly enslaved Black militias to fend off British invaders.
When Spain gave up Florida in 1763, it resettled some of its Black subjects in Matanzas, Cuba, where, as Landers writes, “Spanish support was never sufficient,” and the former Fort Mose inhabitants “suffered terrible privations.” When Spain took Florida back in 1784, it “made no effort to reestablish either Indian missions or the free black town of Mose.”
Similarly, for Soul City, when Nixon resigned under charges of corruption in 1974, the federal government bailed on Soul City, allowing it to collapse before it had a chance to flourish. The “Soul Tech” job training and business incubator center that was supposed to be the anchor institution of Soul City became a county jail—a symbol of the type of cities into which Black souls would be herded in the coming decades.
When Black conservatives urge their neighbors to flee the plantation, it’s not clear what or where they want Black people to flee to. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have offered somewhere safe. Certainly, African Americans have been creating sanctuaries in the United States throughout history, since the genesis of Fort Mose, but the United States has yet to honor any of them.
BEFORE REVOLUTION
Morgan Parker
Just crops. Just nooses. Wild
nerve. Soon as a hurricane gets
a name, it has breath, New lungs.
No use in looking back, only cost.
And so Man spat on the land, made her
take his name. Kingdom, Destiny, no other gods.
Before Jack Johnson. Before Malcolm. Before Nat Turner.
Before Bill Cosby. Before Cornel West.
Before Sly. Before Garvey. Before Stokely.
And Man say let freedom be a woman. Had to have her so
they took her. Just like a man
to name war lust
Before Colin Powell. Before Kanye West. Before Roc-a-
Fella. Before their heads were
cash, we were. Before Wall Street was a public
slave market on Wall Street. Feet and lemons
in the open. Before a flood, wickedness is
just another way to be almighty.
And there was
full moon, and there was half moon,
and there was new moon, solstice, harvest, waiting,
wading. Most of war
is waiting,
aftermath.
The Rapture was coming, all right.