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Monday, January 21, 2013

Where Was the 1st Underground Railroad?



Understanding the underground railroad history brings to light that Afro-Americans until today are Pawns in the game of economics. With that realization, it is also clear Afro-Americans wasn't just given Freedom, they had to stand and fight for it. The ultimate railroad to freedom is knowledge, the foundation for which the path is laid in which the children of the future shall travel. There is nowhere else to run, that freedom require knowledge of flight, navigation, space and self to regain and retain that right given at birth.

"Actually, the very first slaves in what is now the United States fled to their freedom by running south, not north.  ... How could this have been possible? The answer has to do with the early Colonial rivalry for territory, manpower and resources between Spain and England.
Unlike the English settlement at Charleston, the Spanish settlement in Florida included some free blacks and mulattoes. ... the Spanish governor, ... armed them to fight, forming a black militia at St. Augustine in 1683. In 1686, this militia formed part of a Spanish force that began to raid the Carolinians' territory. The presence of black soldiers among the Spanish forces must have astonished the Carolina slaves. And just a year later, the first documented group of black slaves -- eight men, two women and a nursing child -- managed to escape south from Charleston to St. Augustine, covering the 277 miles or so in a stolen [i prefer commandeered] canoe. The Spanish refused to return them to the English, and granted them their freedom. (Landers gives a riveting account of the black presence in Spanish Colonial Florida in her book, Black Society in Spanish Florida: Blacks in the New World.)
... the truth is also that Spain was seeking to weaken the colonies of their British rivals. By encouraging slaves to run away south to Florida, Spain was aiming at the heart of British power in the colonies.

... by 1738 that Spain founded the all-black fort and settlement of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, just two miles north of St. Augustine. It was known as Fort Mose. And for several decades it bravely stood as the first line of defense between the Spanish settlers and their enemies, the English colonists from the north." -The Root
 
Where Was the 1st Underground Railroad?