My Notes
African American History did not start with the first slaves arriving here in 1619. The first Africans arrived here as free men and women or as indentured servants. We should continue to research our history so that we can put forward a comprehensive true history of the African Diaspora.
Researchers dig under Bradenton to find 'Angola'
Time and Gen. Andrew Jackson could not wipe away a pioneering black settlement.
November 22, 2007|By Audra D.S. Burch, McClatchy Newspapers
BRADENTON -- For 10 years, they fought, hid and prayed for freedom here by the river, those 750 fugitive slaves, free blacks and black Seminoles who drifted west from the middle of Florida to form the largest community of its kind in the early 19th-century South.
Then in 1821, their settlement -- which they had named Angola after its kindred region in West Africa -- was burned and looted and destroyed, probably by order of Gen. Andrew Jackson.
For the past five years, documentary producer Vickie Oldham has searched for the forgotten story of this self-sufficient village, which survived war, invasion and the threat of capture long enough to form one of the most extraordinary chapters of Florida history.
Now, Oldham and a team of scientists and historians think they have found the bones of the Angola story lying beneath a several-mile stretch where the Manatee and Braden rivers meet, secrets suspended under a tranquil mobile-home park, under the ruins of a plantation owner's castle, under a playground near a mineral spring.
They call the project -- as much spiritual journey as science -- "Looking for Angola."
"I am looking for my own history. I am looking for the elders who came here centuries ago," said Oldham, 49, a free spirit driven by the possibilities of the past. "Something about this story of survival and strength spoke to me. Everybody deserves to know this chapter in history."
Technology finds history
Now, finally, after years of research and excavations, after slow learning and cautious hope and a PBS documentary, radar technology is exhuming the truth.
The same sophisticated lasers that detected underground infrastructure damage near the World Trade Center site after Sept. 11 are starting to uncover Angola's historical residue.
For years, the settlement's reality has remained cloaked in a patchwork of historical documents and scholarly journals.
"There's evidence of a good deal of materials in a 3-acre area," said Uzi Baram, the archaeologist heading the project. "We now know the past is right under our feet."
So close -- four feet at the most -- that it can be scooped with shovels.
Earlier this year, Witten Technologies, an underground mapping company based in Tampa, and the Army Corps of Engineers performed an archaeological survey between the river and Manatee Mineral Spring in east Bradenton.
Witten's Radar Tomography system is essentially a John Deere lawn-mower chassis retrofitted with 17 radar antennas. Moving at 2 mph, the device produces 3-D images of underground material.
"Think of this as a CAT scan or MRI of the underground," said Andrew Lund, Witten's business-development manager. "We found hundreds of objects of interest, so the next step is for us to show the team where to start digging."
During two days in July, Witten workers scanned a field framed by old playground swings and trees dripping chandeliers of moss.
"We are essentially looking for an invisible community, trying to piece together a settlement that was quite ephemeral," said Baram, an associate professor of anthropology at New College of Florida in Sarasota. "They did not make a large imprint on the landscape by design, but we know something is there."
Oldham was 400 miles away sitting in her office at Fort Valley State University in Georgia, where she serves as a marketing director, waiting for updates by phone. These days had been 15 years in the making. She knew the results would be nuanced, not much more than shadows, but she had fretted that nothing would be found, that Angola would remain alive only in the minds of historians and archaeologists and anthropologists.
'Refuge of freedom'
"I was excited; I felt like we were about to become part of redefining history," Oldham said. "But I also felt this was urgent, that we had to find the physical evidence to bolster the historical stuff we already knew."
Canter Brown Jr., a history professor at Fort Valley, and other team members characterize the settlement as one of the most significant historical sites in Florida.
"It illustrates the role Florida played as a refuge of freedom for slaves and their courage to get and keep their freedom," said Brown, author of Florida's Peace River Frontier, which includes one of the earliest mentions of Angola.
Angola was one of about 50 documented maroon communities -- underground, autonomous villages of fugitive black slaves -- in the country during the early Colonial period.
Oldham first heard about it in 1992 while working on a documentary about the history of blacks in nearby Sarasota.
The Angola settlers migrated from Central and North Florida, some as survivors of the War of 1812 and other skirmishes. They settled as far north as Tampa Bay but concentrated mostly along the banks of the Manatee River, near what is now Interstate 75.
Scholars think Andrew Jackson, who had just been appointed provisional governor, ordered his allies, the Lower Creek Indians, to destroy all Seminole and black villages as revenge for their dogged resistance to his control.
Taken from the Orlando Sentinel
Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2013
African Diaspora
The African diaspora refers to the communities throughout the world that are descended from the historic movement of peoples from Africa — predominantly to the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, among other areas around the globe. The term has been historically applied in particular to the descendants of the West and Central Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas by way of the Atlantic slave trade, with the largest population in the USA (see African-American).,[1] among others.
With regard to all historic migrations (forced and voluntary), the African Union defined the African diaspora as
"[consisting] of people of African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union." Its constitutive act declares that it shall "invite and encourage the full participation of the African diaspora as an important part of our continent, in the building of the African Union."
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