The Missing Century of Black History in the Americas: Jane Landers at TEDxNashville

well I'm probably read at this point there 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 twenty 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 and 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 and archaeological excavations and film and documentaries and I think nobody will read my footnoted things maybe but maybe they'll walk in a museum or see something 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 just 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 it 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 on 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 and cowboys and learners and 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 now think about what we're going to try to learn I'm taking you back now to the thirteenth 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 and 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 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 they were always free and enslaved Africans but they were also enslaved Spaniards enslaved gypsies and slaves Jews and slave Muslims so it's a very diverse system and it's legal not racial so if we have that background when the Americas are discovered in Columbus does that in 1492 as you probably remember Africans form 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 Gotti though 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 Leon to go to Puerto Rico and help discover that and then to discover Florida and then he joins Cortes 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 has done and why he wants some compensation for it and this was also a tradition 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 so 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 some Miguel del Guadalupe this 1526 revolt ruined that occupation of Georgia what is today Georgia so that 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 and the explorations and another famous explorers as they run they dote on this 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 in the Healy practices etc another interesting character so I'm introducing you to some new folks we're more familiar I sometimes joke a lot of equiano's that you may have had to read in your classes spoke for 12 million people the enslave that came to the US but there are all these other people speaking to and we just have to save it and rescue this history one of the other folks I started to work in the 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 fighting Juanito was shipwrecked on the Florida coast the Indians kept him alive for eight years and when Pedro menéndez the Ovilus comes and explores Florida and claims it he ran something back which is what you do when you find a Christian among the infidels so Juanito 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 and Saint 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 Medina women show up in the records because in this system this legal system women have voice children have voice and slave people have voice they can write they can go to the king with their protest etc 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 well if you were in that system I think you two 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. Marys River and slaves are guided there are some times 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 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 its southward not to Canada okay alright 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 fall our fathers follow grandfathers into the military they designed 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 alright my focus was on a free black town of those Runaways that came in and 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 graziotti al they sent that they do so they more say 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 might have looked a lot or the settlement might have looked like and another one that another alternative view of it a small place but close to the the main Spanish settlement part of the defense network and so on 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 was that men are you a Congo marrying a kadhai Valley 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 all right so one of the most important figures here was the captain of this locale who spoke for the others and entered pleas 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 yama sea Indians for several years before coming to Florida so he has multiple eyes multiple abilities always a leader in his community and we called 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 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 launched a major invasion Royal Navy comes up from Jamaica Oh gelth ork comes down from Georgia with Carolinian troops - a big huge siege for a month 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 mosai because they took a licking there at MOSI and then what's Menendez gonna do as everybody else does right the King tell them 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 all right well people got interested in it one of my dissertation committee was the most famous archaeologist the Caribbean Kathleen vegan and we began to think about a dig there and we got some money from the the Black Caucus at 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 helped 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 mozi 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 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 at last count I think 7 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 I think we're missing it they're real they're reenacting the battle as we speak so I'm sorry I am going down to do a talk I told him I couldn't because it was today I was doing this but they have a great time there and it's a 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 on mosai 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 move through and so I start going to Cuba's 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 that history so I started spreading the word about mosai 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 and so I started getting little different grants to take teams of people down to identify them locate them first we start with big old clunky microfilm 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 Hertz and so on some of the oldest from Havana date from the 1590s and you can gives you an idea of the kind of records that we get these are baptismal records my great-grand students learn how to read paleography and read this and transcribe it here's what some of the damage looks like this is you know we can still make our pieces of it but it's 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 keep though in 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 guerilla preservation that's what we were doing because but we were training these students and now they know their history and they're professionalized as well and keep though and some of their records that's how they keep records I'm sorry but 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 and 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 mice 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 we're about to get finished now in 1590 the oldest we have in this country so there's my team and that's where they were working in the convent there and there's it's wonderful save it 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 Vanderbilt University has been wonderful about when I bring all this stuff back it's a a major effort to also keep it on endure I 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 this is also democratizing knowledge because some of the poor kids that I work with in Columbia 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 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 and so that's my mission to change the narrative and save the history and make it public thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 362,729

Rating: 4.6566072 out of 5

Keywords: ted, tedx talk, Americas (Region), ted talks, English, ted x, tedx, United States Of America (Country), Vanderbilt University (Organization), Nashville, tedx talks, TEDx, ted talk, TEDxNashville, Africans

Id: EmLI6tuq22Y

Length: 21min 39sec (1299 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 29 2014