In our retirement we are have decided it is time to leave the bubble of Ithaca, New York and see what America is really about. We invite you to join us as we learn about people, places and the natural history we experience in our travels.
As much as DeSantis wants to erase Black History in Florida, we are fortunate that he cannot erase all that the internet offers. In 1990, the Florida Legislature created the Study Commission on African American History in Florida “to explore ways to increase public awareness of the contributions of African Americans to the state.” The commission created an in-depth document called the Florida Black HerItage Trail. While the language is somewhat dated, it seems like a pretty good reference. I read this document in addition to an article by the Fort Mose Historical Society and blackpast.org to learn the story of the first free Black community in North America.
The first Underground Railroad in America did not lead from south to north, but north to south. As early as 1687, enslaved people fled bondage from English-controlled South Carolina to seek life as free men and women in Spanish Florida. As Great Britain, France, and Spain competed for control of the New World and its wealth, they all in varying ways, came to rely on African labor to develop their overseas colonial possessions. Exploiting its proximity to plantations in the British colonies in North America and the West Indies, King Charles II of Spain issued the Edict of 1693 which stated that any male slave on an English plantation who escaped to Spanish Florida would be granted freedom provided he joined the militia and became a Catholic. This edict became one of the New World’s earliest emancipation proclamations.
The Spanish established the fortified town of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (on St. Augustine’s northernmost border) to accommodate the influx of escaped enslaved people. Fort Mose became the site of the first free black community in what is now the United States. By 1738 there were 100 Black living in Fort Mose; many were skilled workers, blacksmiths, carpenters, cattlemen, boatmen, and farmers. With accompanying women and children, they created a colony of freed people that ultimately attracted other fugitive slaves. Throughout the following decade, the Spanish continued to strengthen Fort Mose to provide an effective defense against English army advances.
When war broke out in 1740 between England and Spain, the people of St. Augustine and nearby Fort Mose found themselves involved in a conflict that stretched across three continents. The English sent thousands of soldiers and dozens of ships to destroy St. Augustine and bring back any runaways. They set up a blockade and bombarded the town for 27 consecutive days. Hopelessly outnumbered, the diverse population of blacks, Indians and whites pulled together. Fort Mose was one of the first places attacked. Lead by Captain Francisco Menendez, the men of the Fort Mose Militia briefly lost the Fort but eventually recaptured it, repelling the English invasion force.
Nonetheless, England eventually prevailed in the battle over control of North Florida. In 1763, the French and Indian War in the Americas ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The treaty turned the Florida colony over to the English and returned Cuba to the Spanish. The residents of Fort Mose sailed to Cuba with the Spanish, along with a few hundred remaining Indians. But, following England’s loss of its American colonies to the revolutionaries during the American Revolutionary War, Spain regained possession of Florida again in 1783. It had to relinquish La Florida to the newly created United States in 1821. Florida became a slave-holding state. Even as an American slave territory, many blacks continued to find freedom in Florida. While Seminole Indians owned slaves, permitting them to live in separate villages in exchange for one-third of their crops, they also welcomed many escaped, black bondsmen as members of their nation. Some runaway slaves joined the Seminole tribe and made numerous contributions in the doomed effort against the U.S. military during the Second Seminole War (1835-1842).
Over the years, the Fort Mose site was swallowed by marsh, and the important legacy of its community was largely forgotten. Late in the twentieth century, a highly dedicated team of archaeologists, historians, government leaders and committed citizens helped restore Fort Mose to its rightful place of honor. Today, Fort Mose is recognized as a significant local, national and international historic landmark.
We are in St. Augustine, Florida- the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the United States. In honor of Womens’ History Month, I would like to tell you about Diamond Lil- an adventurer, entrepreneur, physician and rebel.
Dr. Luella Day MacConnell ((1870-1927), was by all accounts, quite a character. Born in Baltimore, she became a practicing physician in Chicago. She developed “gold Fever” and moved to Dawson (in the Yukon Territory) and made her fortune in 1898. In about 1901, “Diamond Lil”, as she was known, arrived in St. Augustine. She bought land adjacent to the Matanzas Inlet north of the Mission de Nombre de Dios and created the Fountain of Youth tourist attraction. Until her death in 1927, in St. Augustine, she fabricated stories to amuse and appall the city’s residents.
The lack of confederate flags as we crossed the Mason-Dixon line was very noticeable to us. We have probably only seen 2 or 3 confederate flags while driving the rural roads and cities in the south through Virginia, Georgia, Alabama and Florida. I have seen that many in my hometown of Enfield, New York.
We did see many more American flags than in the past, which I was fine with until I realized that for some people, the confederate flag is now subsumed within the American Flag. I saw a lot of American flags with Trump flags and yard signs. I imagined that in the past that might have been a confederate flag. I will say that up North there are also American flags with Black Lives Matter and Pride flags. It is not clear what the American flag really stands for to the person flying it unless they give some other clues. For me, flying the American Flag and saying the Pledge of Allegiance has been performative, without a lot of meaning. As a nation we truely need to address what “liberty and justice for all” really means and embrace healing change. Only then can we stand unified “as one nation” and “indivisible”.
I listened to a podcast on NPR from 2020 that said: “We heard a lot from people who shared this worry the U.S. flag has been weaponized, deliberately redefined as a more conservative symbol owned by some Americans more than others.” It went on to quote, Ben Eagleson, a mechanic from Onley, Illinois: “We had a Black Lives Matter rally in our town and there were a lot of people driving by with American flags on the back of their pickup trucks as a counter-protest,” “It was like those of us supporting Black Lives Matter were somehow un-American or something.” Eagleson, who is white, said he took his American flag down for a time, but it’s flying again now on a pole outside him home. “I’d let something that had always been for me a positive symbol take on a negative meaning and I guess I just decided to reclaim it,” he said. Food for thought…
We went kayaking yesterday among the mangrove islands in the Indian River Lagoon. The islands are a favorite nesting spot for the Brown Pelican. I think if I were a bird, I might be a Brown Pelican. I can relate to their extreme clumsiness. Unlike other more graceful water birds, Pelican make a clumsy splash landing in the water as they dive head first for fish. I have read that they also sometimes crash land in their flimsy stick nests in the mangroves that often need to be rebuilt.
Click here to see a video of a Brown Pelican splash landing.
I was really looking forward to the Mullet Run that people talk about here in Florida, but it turns out it was not what I thought. Besides the iconic haircut of the 1980’s (turns out it is back in style) mullet are fish. I bet you knew that….
In a Montgomery, Alabama coffee shop, we ran into Greg Griffin, Jr. who is running for Circuit Court Judge. We had quite a long conversation with him and are inspired with how he returned to the south to fight for change. His father, Greg Griffin, Sr. is also a Circuit Court Judge. Here is an article about the both of them. I wish I lived in Montgomery so I could vote for him. Here is his campaign site if you care to make a donation.
We enjoyed driving less traveled roads through Georgia today. We stopped for gas in Cuthbert, Georgia (population 3,143), on the Jefferson Davis Highway. It is 100 miles from the gulf coast, 100 miles from the closest city (Montgomery, Al) and not near, it seems, anything at all. The City of Cuthbert, incorporated in 1831, is the county seat of Randolph County, which has a total population of 6,287 people. Most of the buildings, built on Cuthbert town square around 1890, are still there. One surprising thing about Cuthbert is that there are no obvious chain restaurants or motels, except for the ever present Dollar General. Is there a rural town in America that does not have a Dollar General?
According to Wikipedia, the county was developed for cotton plantations, the major commodity crop, and the rural area had a high proportion of enslaved Black workers. Today the Cuthbert population is still 80% Black. The main occupation now is food production as there is a large chicken processing plant owned by Tyson in Cuthbert. Poultry is now the largest sector of Georgia’s agricultural production since the Georgia cotton industry was decimated by the Boll Weevil. The insect first swept into GA in 1915 in dust clouds from the west. By the early 1920s, it had destroyed over 60 % of Georgia’s cotton crops.(New Georgia Encyclopedia)
The Cuthbert Water Tower, erected in 1895, has the distinction of being the only water tower in the middle of a federal highway. It is located in the middle of US Highway 82 (Jefferson Davis Highway) and defines the skyline of Cuthbert. For many years, people believed those who drank water from the tower would either stay or return to Cuthbert.
Cuthbert is the birthplace of boxer Larry Holmes, NFL player Rosey Grier and jazz and swing musician Fletcher Henderson Jr. (1897-1952). Another famous person who grew up in Cuthbert heard of is Winfred Rembert, a Black artist who used hand-tools and shoe dye on leather canvases. During a civil rights march in the 1960s, Rembert was arrested without being charged. He spent seven years on a chain gang and survived a lynching.You can watch a short documentary film about Rembert called All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert. His memoir, Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South, was published posthumously in September 2021 and won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
We are in Eufaula, 85 miles south east of Montgomery, in Barbour County, Alabama, still in the deep south on the Georgia border. Eufaula is where Governor George Wallace was born and raised. On January 14, 1963, George Wallace was sworn in as Alabama Governor (in the same spot that Jefferson Davis was sworn in as President of the Confederacy) spewing the infamous lines, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!” Wallace made sure to thank the “home folks” of his native Barbour County for giving “an anxious country boy” a chance.
It is here in Barbour County, Alabama that Jefferson Cowie, in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (2022) chronicles “the unholy union , more than two hundred years strong, between racism and rabid loathing of government” (New York Times Book Review). I have always associated “freedom” with the fight of the oppressed for a better, more just world. Freedom is also a word used by those looking to dominate. This book helped me understand the hatred of white supremacists toward the Federal government that Trump used to enflame his followers to act during the January 6th, 2021 insurrection. I was first alerted to this book because Cowie is scheduled to speak at Ithaca College on Thursday, March 28th, at 5pm in the Park School Auditorium.
According to the book’s introduction, Freedom’s Dominion is ” a story of rough continuity, recurring conflict, and ideological regeneration across time in one place. In Barbour County, freedom served as an ideological scaffolding that supported most every form of domination discussed in this book- Indian land dispossession and removal, mob political violence, lynching, convict labor, Jim Crow, resistance to school integration, and the fight against voting rights… Those defending racism, land appropriation, and enslavement portrayed themselves, and even understood their own actions, as part of a long history of freedom.”
I have to say, since I skimmed this book before I arrives in Eufaula, I expected to find a back water place ravaged by history. This is not at all what we found. Eufaula is home to the second largest historic district in the state, with more than 700 historic and architecturally significant structures. There are quite a number of antebellum mansions and the downtown is quite well preserved and attractive. There is money here. According to the Eufaula Chamber of Commerce pamphlet , when the Union Troops rode in to Eufaula at the end of the Civil War, some town aristocrats wined and dined the Union General, who decided to spare the town and there was no death and destruction for the White gentry as occurred in many other southern towns. Somehow, this just makes the violent, racist history of the town seem worse.
Reconstruction in America: A Truth That Needs Telling, Equal Justice Initiative
Except for the fact that it was spared at the end of the Civil War, and so many grand historic structures remain, Eufaula and Barbour County are not so different than any other southern counties, and I dare say some northern counties, too. This point was driven home when we saw the sheer number of counties that had documented lynchings when we went to the lynching museum in Montgomery.
Montgomery, Alabama has to reconcile the fact that it is both the “Cradle of the Confederacy” and the “Birth Place of the Civil Rights Movement”. It raises the question of whose dreams are being fulfilled with it’s nickname “Capitol of Dreams”? To be fair, you can visit The First White House of the Confederacy (two blocks from the Dexter Ave. Baptist Church where Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was pastor), but I have seen no confederate flags in the city. There are plenty of plaques in the city recognizing the large role the city played in the slave trade and also marking civil rights milestones. Montgomery is the home of the Legacy Museum . It seems the city has done a pretty good job of recognizing all aspects of its past, however I did not see any plaques acknowledging what they did to the Creeks, the indigenous people living there when White settlers arrived.
Montgomery is a pretty city with a lot of downtown revitalization happening. It was one of the first cities in the nation to implement SmartCode Zoning, focusing on walkable neighborhoods. Montgomery is a majority Black city (61% of population) and, we were told it has an increasing Korean population due to the large Hyundai plant located there. Once home to the First White House of the Confederacy, Montgomery grew to become the center of the Civil Rights Movement, notably the Montgomery Bus Boycotts.
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was pastor of The Dexter Avenur Baptist Church from 1954- 1960. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was organized here. The church stands right next to the State Capitol.Rosa Partk’s protest happened on December, 1st, 1955 on the day oi my birth.
If I had to choose one stop on the National Civil Rights Trail, the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama is at the top of the list. We have visited a number of Civil Rights Trail sites over the years and this is one of the most powerful. The museum takes you on a journey over 400 years from enslavement to racial terrorism to codified segregation and finally the mass incarceration of today. Photos and videos are not allowed so I am reporting mostly from memory. When you first enter the museum, you experience huge ocean waves as you cross the ocean as part of the middle passage. You hear many first hand narratives-from ghosts of enslaved people waiting for auction, to a father holding his young daughter in his arms before he is dragged away from her to be sold down the river, (half of enslaved families were broken up) to people who were incarcerated as teenagers serving life without parole. You see jars of dirt holding the DNA of a fraction of the 4,400 people lynched over a 73 year period in this country.
“When we have the courage to learn the truth we open up doors that permit justice, that permit reckoning, that permit healing. This museum is dedicated to creating a society where the children of our children are no longer burdened by the legacy of slavery.”
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, standing on a hill overlooking Montgomery is a sacred, reflective space memorializing more than 800 people who were lynched. The names and dates of people who were lynched in each county are etched onto a hanging steel monument. The sheer number of counties is overwhelming, and they are not just in the South. They have gifted each county stones that can be publicly displayed in their county. Jefferson County. Alabama had 63 documented lynchings. They are planning a display in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham.
Perspectives on the Road 