The Black Radical Tradition is a culture of liberation pervading many domains

Evidence

As a culture of liberation, the tradition crossed the familiar bounds of social and historical narrative. Just as in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to take one instance, African marronage infected Native American and African settlements in Florida to produce the Black Seminoles who fought against the United States for three decades, the tradition has effused in myriad forms and locations. For some sense of the diversity, one might examine how the tradition insinuated itself quite unexpectedly into the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe when she authored A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), and particularly Dred, a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856); into the Blacks who volunteered during the Civil War, and those in the American military who sent letters of outrage from the Philippines during the Spanish-American War; into Pentecostalism in the early twentieth century; into the blues composed by Rainey and all the women named Smith; and into the filmic work of Oscar Micheaux during the silent film era. Reviewing this list, I suspect the Black Radical Tradition extends into cultural and political terrains far beyond my competence to relate. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 89

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the tradition’s scope as a broad ‘culture of liberation’ reaching into literature, military, religion, music, and film.
• XREF: The Black Seminoles episode connects to the reader’s interest in independence wars and community self-defense motifs.