Landed Blackness: Post-emancipation marronage and Black autonomy

How Freedmen’s communal landholding practices resisted institutional racism and shaped maroon intellectual heritage and political autonomy  

By Darold Cuba, PhD candidate in History. 

This post is part of Exploring Legacies of Enslavement: a research series, highlighting ongoing research on the legacies of enslavement. 

In this blog, Darold Cuba argues that post–emancipation African American settlements were intentional political projects rather than simply responses to exclusion. Drawing on Johnhenry “Hank” Gonzalez’s theory of post-emancipation marronage, it shows how “freedom colonies” used landholding, kinship networks, and community governance to build autonomous Black communities within Jim Crow America and sustain anticolonial traditions of self-determination. It frames these “landed Blackness” as formations of United States Post-Emancipation Marronage (USPostEM) — a territorially grounded project of Black autonomy in which landownership, kinship, and institution-building form the basis of an internal counter-sovereign political order within the American republic. 

Theoretical and historical foundations  

To understand how these communities emerged and why they mattered, we take a closer look at the historical and theoretical ideas that shaped them. 

In Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti, Johnhenry “Hank” Gonzalez reframes freedom after emancipation as a sustained, territorially grounded project of autonomous life (Gonzalez, 2019). Rural smallholders and unauthorized autonomous compounds were not peripheral by-products of Haiti’s revolution but its structural core — shaping social, political, and economic life in enduring ways. 

Drawing on this lineage, landed Blackness offers a compelling framework for understanding post-Civil War African American settlements in the United States — historically known as freedom colonies, Black towns, or freedmen’s settlements.

Formerly enslaved people deliberately acquired land, built community institutions, and established multi-generational homesteads that served as structures of autonomy and resistance within a society still shaped by white supremacy. These communities were not accidental or merely adaptive; they were strategic, territorial projects of collective self-determination — political orders embedded within, yet distinct from, the broader American state. 

Freedom settlements as political order 
 

In the aftermath of the Civil War, formerly enslaved people faced violent white extremism: Jim Crow, Black Codes, restricted access to land, and horrific racist efforts to re-entangle them in coercive labor regimes (Du Bois, 1935; Foner, 1988). In response, many founded independent rural settlements where they could live on land they owned or collectively held (Sitton & Conrad, 2005). These settlements were intentional territorial spaces — places of refuge, self-governance, and kinship continuity. In Texas alone, researchers have documented more than 550 freedom colonies established by the early 20th century (Roberts, The Texas Freedom Colonies Project). Anchored by shared institutions such as churches, schools, cemeteries and family kinship networks, many grew into interconnected hubs of sovereign autonomy. 

Six case studies, intertwined through an expansive prosopographical family kinship network of interrelated clans, illustrate this phenomenon. 

These include the founding families at the center of River Road aka “Graysville,” Maryland (the Clippers, Warrens, Dorseys, Matthews, and Grays); Piney Swamp, Virginia (the Carters, Lees, Carys, Lemons, and Greenes) Hillside, North Carolina (the Bairds, Vances, Brooks, Weavers, and Rays); Shankleville, Deep East Texas (the Shankles, McBrides, Perkins, Whites, and Odoms); Elam Springs, East Texas (the Cubas, Currys, Browns, Boyds, and Chalks); and Blackdom, New Mexico (the Boyers, Clippers, Eubanks, Proffits, and Herrons). All of these families have intermarried over the past two centuries, producing extended kinship networks across the globe. 

These were dynamic social worlds where land, labor, law, and belonging were negotiated on communities’ own terms. Land ownership was not simply an economic asset; it was a locus of political agency. Governance took shape through community councils, stewardship of common land, and collective cultural lives. 

This activity — building institutions, governing internal affairs, and asserting territorial permanence — reflects internal political ordering. 

Post-emancipation marronage and spatial autonomy 

Gonzalez’s work on Haiti expands the concept of marronage beyond the strict legal condition of slavery to encompass sustained practices of autonomy after emancipation. In Haiti, rural agrarian autonomy — grounded in unauthorized settlement and smallholder landholding — was not a temporary condition but a structural force shaping society long after the revolution’s battles ended. Traditional scholarship often associates marronage with flight from slavery; Gonzalez reframes it as a broader logic of resistance, a way of securing economic independence and political autonomy through the occupation and defense of rural spaces outside direct state control (Gonzalez, 2019). 

Applied to the U.S., post-emancipation marronage reveals that freedom colonies and freedmen’s towns were more than refuges from racist violence and white extremist exclusion; they were constructive political spaces. These settlements embodied a logic of internal counter-sovereignty — territorial orders that asserted political life through land, community institution building, and collective governance. Freedom was not conferred by constitutional amendment alone; it was performed, negotiated, and reproduced on the ground by formerly enslaved people and their descendants. 

Beyond exclusion to political language 

Histories that frame these settlements primarily as responses to exclusion risk flattening their political intentionality. Undoubtedly, freedom colonies provided reprieve from racist violence and economic marginalization. Yet the marronage framework, inspired by Gonzalez, insists we also recognize these sites as productive political formations. Landholding, settlement patterning, and community institution building were not survival strategies alone; they were active expressions of grounded political thought and collective agency. 

Through this lens, freedom colonies are intellectual and political formations. They represent landed Blackness — a set of practices that anchored autonomous politics in land ownership and networked kinship, generating a coherent counter-sovereign ethos within the American republic. By centering this perspective, we uncover a tradition of political thought deeply rooted in land, community, and autonomy — one obscured by narratives focused solely on systemic exclusion. 
 

Legacy and why it matters today  

Adapting Gonzalez’s concept of post-emancipation marronage to the U.S. context opens new pathways for inquiry into land, law, memory, and citizenship. It invites comparative work linking Atlantic maroon traditions with U.S. Black land projects, and interdisciplinary research into how territory and political life co-constitute one another. This reframing has practical implications: documenting, preserving, and revitalizing freedom colony landscapes — from cemeteries that anchor collective memory to former homesteads — becomes a way of recognizing Black political heritage. 

By situating landed Black autonomous political life at the center of enslavement’s afterlives, scholars can trace a lineage of freedom that connects the rural orderings of the Haitian Revolution with the multifaceted histories of freedom colonies, freedmen’s towns, and beyond. Materially inscribed in land and socially embodied in community life, this legacy testifies to Black people’s enduring project of freedom within a republic that never fully recognized their claims. 

Ultimately, seeing freedom colonies through the lens of post-emancipation marronage changes how we understand Black political life after slavery. These communities were not marginal or reactive—they were foundational experiments in autonomy, governance, and belonging. Recognising them as such – landed Blackness - reframes how we think about land, citizenship, and freedom today. 

Author 

Darold Cuba is an intellectual historian of political thought specializing in US post emancipation marronage, Black autonomy, and freedmen land sovereignty. He is the founding director of MarronageOrg, a digital humanities research lab dedicated to preserving global marronage legacies, and a founder of Oxbridge Africas (OA), a media equity and narrative parity initiative solving for the anti-Black racism in Western societies’ storytelling traditions, a member of the Clinton Foundation’s CGIU 2024 cohort (of which he was the male commencement speaker). His work builds on the concept of “post-emancipation marronage” introduced by historian Johnhenry “Hank” Gonzalez (his PhD supervisor at Cambridge).

Cuba’s research explores landed Blackness as a framework for understanding this post emancipation maroon community building in the USA’s various post-emancipation eras, highlighting how freedom colony founding families forged independent communities in the face of settler colonizer extermination genocide campaigns of systemic white supremacy, institutionalized racism and the resulting Jim Crow apartheid. An interdisciplinary scholar integrating oral history, intellectual thought, and political theory, Cuba holds graduate degrees from Harvard (MPA in Int’l Dev & Relations) and Columbia (MA in Oral History), is completing his History PhD at St. John’s, Cambridge and is an incoming Executive MBA candidate at Oxford Said Business School.  

A cultural heritage preservationist, social entrepreneur and former investigative journalist, he brings a cross-disciplinary approach to historical research and intersectional systempreneurship. 

Recommended reading 

 
This recommended reading list brings together open access journalism, digital research projects and key scholarly texts. 

Books and key texts 
Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.  
Combahee River Collective. The Combahee River Collective Statement. 1977. 
Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. 
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1963. 
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Harvard University Press, 1988. 
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Pantheon, 1980. 
González, Johnhenry “Hank”. Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti. Yale University Press, 2019.  
Said, E. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. 1978. 
Sitton, Thad, & Conrad, James. Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow. University of Texas Press, 2005.  

Further resources 
Bailey, D. (2025, August 4). Protecting Moses African Cemetery: Residents return to court to safeguard the remains of Bethesda’s historic Black community. AFRO American Newspapers. 
A detailed article on the history of the Moses African Cemetery, the community’s fight for preservation, and ongoing issues around development on the site. 

Roberts, A. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project 
This educational and social justice initiative preserves historic African American settlements through mapping, archival research, oral histories, and community‑led resilience strategies. 

Michael Strahan discovers his familial roots and history of Shankleville (ABC News)
The continuing significance of freedom colonies is illustrated in this ABC News feature, in which television presenter and former NFL Hall of Famer Michael Strahan explores his family’s connections to Shankleville, one of the communities discussed in this blog.