Black Seminole Perspective Featured in History and Cultural Series

The Historic Virginia Key Beach Park Trust will kick off its History and Cultural Lunch Series Friday, Nov. 19,  12 noon to 2 p.m.,  4020 Virginia Beach Drive, Virginia Key with a presentation on Florida’s Black Seminoles by historian Dr. Anthony E. Dixon.

Dixon is the former historian and curator for the Historic Virginia Key Beach Park, which is on the National Register of HIstoric Places.

 “Black Seminoles” is used today to describe the descendants of free blacks and slaves who fled from coastal rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia into Spanish Florida in the 17th century. Eventually, some traveled down the U.S. peninsula to the reach the last  barrier island of Key Biscayne (past Virginia Key) to board ships bound for the Bahamas and freedom.


 Historian Joan Gill Blank recalls this journey in her book, Key Biscayne: A History of Miami’s Tropical Island and the Cape Florida LIghthouse:

 It is estimated that just before the lighthouse was built at the southern end of Key Biscayne, in the early 1820s, that three hundred brave men and women, with their children, left Cape Florida to take asylum in the Bahamas ....The escapes did not all occur at once. Five years before the lighthouse was illuminated, one traveler reports seeing sixty Indian and sixty runaways and “27 sails of Bahamian wreckers” preparing to leave uninhabited Cape Florida.”

The lecture series is made possible by a grant from the Florida Humanities Council to explore the diverse cultural heritage of Floridians, concentrating on Native Americans, African-Americans, South Americans and the Caribbean. 

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