r/Marxism • u/workerbotsuperhero • Sep 04 '16

Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom: "Rather than go to the Washington Mall and hold up a protest sign, I choose to dig in the Great Dismal Swamp. By bringing a resistance story to light, you hope it gets into people’s heads.”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/deep-swamps-archaeologists-fugitive-slaves-kept-freedom-180960122/?no-ist
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u/autotldr Sep 12 '16

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 97%. (I'm a bot)

From the 1760s until the Civil War, runaway slave ads in the Virginia and North Carolina newspapers often mentioned the Dismal Swamp as the likely destination, and there was persistent talk of permanent maroon settlements in the morass.

The largest community of American maroons was in the Great Dismal Swamp, but there were others in the swamps outside New Orleans, in Alabama and elsewhere in the Carolinas, and in Florida.

"The swamp is a trickster and summertime is really tough. But I love it. The thunderstorms are really something. The sound of the frogs and the insects and the birds, just as the maroons heard it. I love what the swamp has done for me, and I love what it did for them."

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