Slave resistance through flight seeded lasting Black maroon communities

Evidence

The invention of the Negro was proceeding apace with the growth of slave labor. Somewhat paradoxically, the more that Africans and their descendants assimilated cultural materials from colonial society, the less human they became in the minds of the colonists. Just as instructive, the rebels among these Africans and “negroes” were described as “runaways,” a term that has endured in the historiography of the period. It should be remembered, however, that it was from the efforts of men and women such as these that the Black settlements of Virginia’s piedmont and the Afro-Creek “Exiles of Florida” (the Seminoles) would consist. In similar fashion, the maroon peoples of the Caribbean and South America would be formed. They were as well, at the end of the eighteenth century, among the estimated 55,000 who fled to the British forces and the loyalist settlements when the colonists pursued the logic of the fear of their own enslavement to the point of revolution. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 599

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Robinson’s core thesis of an autonomous Black radical tradition carried by enslaved flight and marronage — the rise-phase causal mechanics the reader seeks.
• QUESTION: When and where does the word ‘runaway’ give way in the record to terms acknowledging organized maroon political community?