Here is the full transcript of Jane Landers’ talk titled “The Missing Century of Black History in the Americas” at TEDxNashville conference.
In this TEDx talk, Jane Landers, a professor of Latin American history, shared her extensive research on the overlooked aspects of African history in the Americas, particularly focusing on their roles beyond slavery. She highlighted the long-standing military tradition of Africans in the Spanish world and their participation in community defense across the Americas.
Landers discussed her work on Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, a free black town established for runaway slaves, emphasizing its importance in African-American history. She introduced significant historical figures like Captain Francisco Menéndez, an Atlantic Creole who played a pivotal role in the community and military engagements. Landers detailed her efforts in archaeological digs and historical research to uncover and preserve these neglected narratives.
She stressed the importance of digitalizing historical records to save deteriorating documents and make them accessible to a wider audience. Her mission, as presented in the talk, is to change the narrative of black history in the Americas by highlighting these previously unrecognized contributions and stories.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Well, I’m probably red at this point, or maybe you can’t see well enough, but thank you so much for being here and letting me be here. I’m so grateful to TEDx for inviting me. I’m a professor of Latin American history at Vanderbilt University, and I’ve been working on Latin America for more than 20 years since my degree was finished, and I grew up in Latin America. And my interests have always been about race and differences in race.
When I started my academic career, I began to work on that issue, and it’s been ever since. So to stay alive in academia, you have to publish or perish, so I do all those footnoted things that we need to do. But I’ve also always wanted to make some sort of a more public impact, and so I’ve worked a lot with public history, museum exhibits, archaeological excavations, film, and documentaries. I think nobody will read my footnoted things maybe, but maybe they’ll walk in a museum or see something.
The African Past in the Americas
So what I want to do today is talk about the narrative of the African past in the Americas and ask you to think about some new things I hope I’m going to bring to you today. So if I asked you to think about African history in the Americas, what are some images you might think about? Slavery, okay.
So I have some ideas up here that we are very familiar with, because in our own American history courses, usually we start with the narrative of antebellum slavery, and we have wonderful, powerful media images such as these that also reinforce the idea that everybody from Africa got off a ship, bedraggled, stayed, in 1619 Jamestown all the textbooks start, and then we study the narrative of slavery, and it’s certainly a powerful narrative, something that we want to pay a lot of attention to.
But having grown up in the Spanish world, I learned in earlier centuries of history for Africans, and that’s what I’m going to try to introduce today. So we need to remember this powerful story, but we also need to think about explorers, cowboys, mariners, militiamen, and all sorts of other lives that went on for centuries before we developed this capitalist system of chattel slavery that we’re more familiar with in the Anglo world, okay?
So one of the images that I wanted to put up, this horrible one for us to think about what we know. Think about what we’re going to try to learn.
Africa and the Iberian Peninsula
I’m taking you back now to the 13th century, but we could go back even earlier to when Africans first moved to the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, and the difference then between peoples was not based on skin color. It was based on your religious practice, and so Islam invaded Spain. We had almost 800 years of Islamic occupation in Spain, and the fight was between Christian and Muslim, not between black and white, and the church is one of those institutions that incorporated people in the Iberian world.
So here we have a very interesting image of a 13th century African, his white godparents, he’s being incorporated into the church, and this is going to make him part of the Christian community, not an other, okay?
And on the next slide that I had, I wanted to also think about the military traditions that came from the North African community into Spain, and the idea that Africans sometimes were enslaving Spanish Christians, as you can see in this 14th century image. I think that flips a few ideas for you.
The Legal System in the Iberian World
In the Iberian world, the legal system is Roman law, which separates slave and free, but it is a legal condition not associated with race, not perpetual, not chattel like you know in the English system, so this is quite different. And you enter slavery, but you can get out of it as well in many, many ways. So there were always free and enslaved Africans, but there were also enslaved Spaniards, enslaved Gypsies, enslaved Jews, enslaved Muslims, so it’s a very diverse system, and it’s legal, not racial.
Africans in the Exploration of the Americas
So if we have that background, when the Americas are discovered, Columbus does that in 1492, as you probably remember. Africans formed part of all the explorations and discoveries of the Americas, and it’s like finding hen’s teeth in these narratives, but they’re there, and if you know where to look and how to look, you can find them. So a list of some of the explorations of our own country, Africans in every one of these expeditions, leaving paper trails that we can track if you can do the Spanish paleography of the day.
One of the most interesting people that was on one of these expeditions, a man named Juan Garrido, was born in West Africa.
He was on the Portuguese coast of Africa, went to Portugal, then to Spain, and crossed to the Americas, where he is a conqueror of Espanola, where he joins Juan Ponce de León to go to Puerto Rico and help discover that, and then to discover Florida, and then he joins Cortez and goes off to the conquest of the Aztecs, so you see him here in these Aztec codices. There are several of these that depict him. He was a literate man, and he writes to the king of Spain at the end of his many adventures and says what he’s done and why he wants some compensation for it, and this was also a tradition.
The Dual Reality of African Explorers and Enslaved Africans
All of the explorers did it, and so did the African explorers, so we have written records for him as a miner, as an explorer, as a Christian, and so forth. But at the same time that he’s sort of rising up the military ladder, other Africans are being imported to Spanish locales as enslaved people, and rebellion is a common trope all the way through this history as well.
So in the first example that we have in our own, what became the United States, San Miguel de Gualdape, this 1526 revolt ruined that occupation of Georgia, what is today Georgia, so that blew up, and others are happening in other parts of the Americas. But while that’s going on, they don’t give up on including Africans in the exploration, and another famous explorer is Esteban de Dorantes, who went on all this long trip from a shipwreck on the Florida coast all the way across the continent, one of the first non-indigenous people to see all of that territory, to learn the indigenous languages and the healing practices, et cetera, another interesting character.
I’m introducing you to some new folks who are more familiar. I sometimes joke a lot of Equiano that you may have had to read in your classes spoke for 12 million people, the enslaved that came to the U.S., but there are all these other people speaking too, and we just have to save it and rescue this history.
One of the other folks, I started to work in Spanish Florida because that’s where I was going to school, and the records were very intact because the United States took Florida in 1821, and they were not dispersed or destroyed by wars and so on, so I had a great cache of material, and these are some of the characters that I started finding.
Juanillo was shipwrecked on the Florida coast. The Indians kept him alive for eight years, and when Pedro Menéndez de Avilés comes and explores Florida and claims it, he ransomed him back, which is what you do when you find a Christian among the infidels. Juanillo becomes a translator with the military forces because he knows the Indian life.
The next character was a very interesting one, a free militiamen and a store owner in St. Augustine. He leaves a very interesting record. One that was not so well regarded was a convict blacksmith that came into St. Augustine, exiled there from Cuba, Juan Merino.
Diverse Voices in the Legal System
Women show up in the records because in this system, this legal system, women have voice, children have voice, enslaved people have voice. They can write. They can go to the king with their protest, et cetera. Isabel was a baker and earned her living that way, so not everybody’s exotic, but they’re free and they’re earning property and keeping it.
Well, it all sort of changes when England hits Charleston, starts to establish Charleston in 1670 because they’re going to come up from the Caribbean, from the Bahamas and Barbados and Jamaica, and they’re going to bring the idea of chattel slavery, where someone is enslaved and becomes a perpetual piece of property at that point.
Resistance and Adaptation in the New World
Well, if you were in that system, I think you too would try to get out of it, and slaves started running and they learned of the other political system available just south across the St. Mary’s River, and slaves are guided there sometimes by Indians, and they come to the Spaniards and they say, “We want to be Christians. Please receive us,” as we saw in the earlier example that I showed you from Islamic Spain.
And they are received, and there are enough of them, finally, that the king of Spain finally has to issue a royal decree on this matter, and you can see that it’s pretty interesting. It incorporates women. It says, “Giving liberty to all the men as well as the women, so that by their example, my liberality, others will do the same,” and they did, and it’s like the first Underground Railroad. It’s southward, not to Canada. Okay. All right.
Military Tradition and Record Keeping
One of the reasons that people were welcomed is that they could provide extra defense for the communities around the Americas, and so there’s a long, long, long military tradition for Africans in the Spanish world. So sons follow fathers, follow grandfathers into the military. They design their own uniforms. They elect their own officers. They get paid. They serve. They sometimes die, and they leave lots of military records. So religious records of those baptisms forward, and military records are some of my best, and I never thought I’d be working in those kinds of materials.
Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose
All right. My focus was on a free black town of those runaways that came in in enough numbers that finally the Spaniards make a free town for them based on the Indian model of sort of satellite villages. And it’s called Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose. If you go to St. Augustine today, it’s like two miles north of the big Castillo there. And so that was my dissertation project. I started working on it. They sent me to Spain. I got a lot of documents.
We worked with archaeologists and engineers to come up with an image of what the fort or the settlement might have looked like, or the settlement might have looked like. And another one, another alternative view of it, a small place, but close to the main Spanish settlement, part of the defense network, and so on.
Life in Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose
And they supported themselves by being farmers, by being horsemen, by being cowboys, and so on, serving in the militia, in the Marines, and so on. And we have some nice images of what they were doing outside their little settlement in their own property. And they start getting incorporated into the church as you were supposed to do.
So we had people getting their children baptized, getting married. One of the neatest things about the records is that in these Catholic records, they paid close attention to what nation you were, and that meant, are you a Congo marrying a Karabali? It would be like somebody from Italy marrying a German, and then how do the children come up in that community? So this is something we don’t find as much attention to in Anglo records, so it’s something that we can contribute to the larger narrative.
Captain Francisco Menendez
All right. So one of the most important figures here was the captain of this locale who spoke for the others and entered, please, on their behalf, Captain Francisco Menendez, he is, once he’s baptized. So I don’t know what his name was in Africa. I don’t know what it was when the English enslaved him. I don’t know what it was when he fought with the Yamasee Indians for several years before coming to Florida. So he has multiple lives, multiple abilities, always a leader in his community. And we call people like this Atlantic Creoles, and it doesn’t mean from New Orleans, and it doesn’t mean a flavor of some food. It means someone that has linguistic dexterity, social agility, and cultural plasticity is sort of our term for it. So I consider myself a Creole, and many of you might also be, and he certainly had many lives to live.
The Battle of Bloody Mose
He becomes the captain of this place, and not too long after they established the place, two years later, the English have had enough of this running away from their plantations, and they launch a major invasion. Royal Navy comes up from Jamaica. Oglethorpe comes down from Georgia with Carolinian troops too, a big, huge siege for months. And Menendez was one of the heroes of this siege. And he defends his place, and they end up in the English records calling it the Battle of Bloody Mose because they took a licking there at Mose.
And then what’s Menendez going to do, as everybody else does, write the king and tell him, “You know, what I did. I did such-and-such. I was a hero at this battle. Please give me a better salary.” So he’s writing in Spanish to the king. So people felt that personal relationship to the monarch, and they could relate, and they could expect an answer.
Archaeological Discoveries and Public History
All right, well, people got interested in it. One of my dissertation committee was the most famous archaeologist, the Caribbean, Kathleen Deagan, and we began to think about a dig there. And we got some money from the Black Caucus of the state legislature to do this. I went back and did some more historical research, and then they did the two seasons of digs where you can see some of the team there that she was training.
And you can see some of the sort of small material objects that we found there, but they help also inform the narrative that’s on paper, if we know what people were making bone buttons, or they were making a little handmade St. Christopher’s medal. St. Christopher is the patron saint of travelers across the water, and so somebody was doing that. And these men served as sailors.
Menendez ends up a corsair, recaptured in the Atlantic, sent to the Bahamas as a slave by the English, and somehow gets back to Mose. And he’ll lead the community out into exile one more time in 1763 when the English take Florida, and they don’t want to stay there. And so they move south again, and this time it’s to Cuba. Okay?
Making History Public and Accessible
Well, one of the things we wanted to do once we got the research done was make it public, share it, change the narrative, and we made a big museum exhibit. And it started in Florida, then it went around the country, and it, last count, I think seven million people had seen it before we brought it home and then gave it to the community so that people could have it and learn from that.
And then we made a National Historic Landmark Registry. The state bought the property. They made a big visitors, or a little visitor center there. And you can go and see the map of all the things that I’ve just been talking about. Governor Bush finally inaugurated our visitor center, and that’s Kathy Deegan behind. So he took note of it as well, and all sorts of signage now directs people to this site. And the best thing for me is that the community has adopted it.
And so on the 22nd, actually, that’s today, is that today? We’re missing it. They’re reenacting the battle as we speak, so I’m sorry. I am going down to do a talk. I told them I couldn’t because it was today I was doing this, but they have a great time there. And it’s an opportunity for all the community to come together and for these people to enact a different kind of narrative. So they’re not in shackles and so on. They’re actually leading the defense of the community.
And then Public History has picked it up. I don’t know if you saw the PBS special that Skip Gates has been doing in series, but “Many Rivers to Cross.” There was a little episode on Mose.
Expanding Historical Research and Saving Records
But I became aware that a lot of that history that was Florida, also connected to Cuba, also connected to Mexico, also connected to Santo Domingo, places in which all of these people moved through. And so I started going to Cuba as a grad to track the people there, and I’m going back again at the end of April with some new grad students of mine to try to do some more of that history.
So I started spreading the word about Mose in Cuba as well, and then I became aware that so many records there are not well kept. They try, but there’s no resources. And so things, as I’m speaking to you today, we’re losing this wonderful history. The documents are being eaten by bugs. Mold is destroying it. They’re getting tossed out, burned, whatever. So I’m constantly aware that we need to save these records.
Digital Preservation Efforts
And so I started getting little different grants to take teams of people down to identify them, locate them. First we started with big old clunky microphone cameras, and now we’re working with great little digital cameras. And that was back in Cuba in 1995 when I was still in grad school. No, I had just started here.
And then I finally got some money from the National Endowment, and I thought, well, the most African places are Cuba and Brazil. So I got partners in those places, and I do training of students there. We identify the records and so on. Some of the oldest from Havana date from the 1590s, and it gives you an idea of the kind of records that we get. These are baptismal records. My great grad students learn how to read paleography and read this and transcribe it. Here’s what some of the damage looks like. We can still make out pieces of it, but it’s pretty bad. That’s the Cuban records.
And then in Brazil, one of the things that I also want to do is bring people into the history and have them take ownership. So we train graduate students and undergraduate students in Rio de Janeiro to do these projects. They are given a little bit of money in these stipends, stay in school, professionalize themselves, and take on these careers.
And then the next wonderful agency that helps is the British Library has a great endangered archives program. So we went to Quibdo in the Colombian jungles where the FARC is. That’s another danger to the documents. There’s guerrilla fighting all around where we are. In fact, the guys started calling it guerrilla preservation. That’s what we were doing. We were training these students, and now they know their history and they’re professionalized as well in Quibdo and some of their records. That’s how they keep records, I’m sorry.
Digitizing the Oldest Records in the U.S.
And most recently, one of the neat things was the Catholic Church where I first started working when I was a graduate school in St. Augustine. All those years I was reading terrible old microfilm from the Library of Congress and so on. I could hardly read it. Finally, the church has allowed us to digitalize the records of Spanish St. Augustine, which are the oldest we have for the country, also 1590s they start.
And so I took my former graduate students, now they’re all graduated and they’re off being professors elsewhere, but then I obliged them to keep the cult alive and train their own students and keep spreading the word and training new students. So this new group did the St. Augustine records, which were about to get finished now at 1590, the oldest we have in this country. So there’s my team, and that’s where they were working in the convent there.
It’s wonderful to say that, but there’s so much more that we still need to do around the whole world. And it doesn’t just have to be African history, but that’s what I’m committed to. So hopefully by getting the chance to talk with you all today, somebody else will want to do this as well. And I’ll be glad to share models or write letters of recommendation, give you any advice I could on this.
Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies
Vanderbilt University has been wonderful about when I bring all this stuff back, it’s a major effort to also keep it digitally in a library. On multiple servers, you have to have it so that it won’t collapse and so on. And we’ve created a little website that anybody can go on. I think that this is also democratizing knowledge, because some of the poor kids that I work with in Colombia or that I work with in Cuba will never, ever have the money to travel to go do research of their own, but they can get to a computer. They can find any of these records, and some of them are helping transcribe them for us and so on.
So Vanderbilt keeps this site, it’s called Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies, and take a look at it. It’s currently being updated all the time as we add new stuff to it. So that’s my mission, to change the narrative and save the history and make it public. Thank you.