Highlights of Black and African American Cultural Heritage

Free and enslaved Black people arrived in St. Augustine alongside the Spanish in 1565, more than half a century before  enslaved peoples arrived in Jamestown (Virginia) in 1619 . Enslaved Blacks lived in St. Augustine for 300 years from 1565 until liberation during the Civil War.

This StoryMap explores the deep roots and complex history of the Black experience in St. Augustine from the earliest colonial settlements to the Modern Civil Rights Movement. Through it all, St. Augustine’s Black communities have helped shape the history of  America's Oldest City .

How we write about difficult history is just as important as the stories we tell. Our choice of words, or omission of them, speaks volumes about the complex history of race and slavery in America. For the purposes of this project, our team has adopted a methodology for the language of slavery that is in line with current best practices as defined by major museums, style guides, and historical organizations. Please see the section below on The Language(s) of Race and Slavery for more information about the choice of language in this StoryMap.

For the city's first three centuries, most Black residents of St. Augustine were enslaved. Whether free or enslaved, specific information about black individuals in St. Augustine in the 1500s and 1600s is sporadic. The Spanish government owned the most enslaved workers, whom they referred to as "crown slaves" or "royal slaves" (esclavo del rey), though Spanish individuals did as well. In 1580, for example, the governor's wife reported four enslaved girls in her household.

"Crown slaves have constructed a platform for artillery and built a building for a forge. They have made repairs on the fort. They have also cut lumber, constructed living quarters for themselves, made matches to use with ammunition, and cleared the forest for sowing."

-- Report by Juan Cevadilla to King of Spain, 1583 December 20, Archives of the Indies, Seville Spain, Santo Domingo 231.  

Enslaved persons owned by the Spanish crown worked on defense projects and other government projects and some were also hired out to private persons. Thirty "crown slaves" arrived in St. Augustine in 1582 from Cuba after working on the construction of the fort in Havana. They were sent to relieve the soldiers in St. Augustine of carrying timber for the constant rebuilding of forts. Additionally, they cleared land or farmed.

Many of the enslaved Black population were skilled craftsmen who built and repaired St. Augustine's earliest defensive works. They and others provided the heavy labor needed to build and defend the city. It was usually enslaved Black men who worked as loggers and sawyers to cut and shape wood for fortifications and government buildings.

Around 1672, Spanish royal slaves were transferred from Mexico to St. Augustine to work on the building of the masonry fortress, Castillo de San Marcos, which still stands. Enslaved Black men and Indians from Florida's missions quarried the  coquina shell stone  for the walls of the fortress.

Some of the stone blocks were huge: two feet long and four feet thick. It took at least six men to raise these blocks out of the ground and onto an oxcart. Free Black stone masons and other skilled builders also arrived in St. Augustine for the fort project. 

When the fortification was completed in 1695, the Black workers began building the City's first seawall.

Other enslaved men were rowers on boats or sawyers who cut trees for forts and homes. Commercial crops were not grown in Florida at the time, so large gangs of field hands were not needed.  Free and enslaved Black cattle herders and cowhands , who had learned to handle cattle in Mexico, worked on the ranches north and west of St. Augustine.

In early St. Augustine, enslaved women often worked as household servants. In 1598, Florida Governor Mendez Canzo reported that an enslaved Black woman served as the nurse for the city's six-bed hospital, bragging that it had six beds and clean sheets. Free Black women worked as domestic servants, as well.

Throughout St. Augustine's history, Black men served as troops to defend the city. In 1683, Florida governor Juan Márquez Cabrera formed a Black and mixed-race militia. By then, Black men in St. Augustine had already been included for more than a century in defense units composed mainly of White men.

Pirates and invaders from rival naions who attacked St. Augustine were more interested in capturing Blacks and Indians than in killing or wounding them. The invaders seized Blacks, free or enslaved, and sold them as slaves in English ports.

In 1670 English colonists established the colony of South Carolina and the town of Charleston (Charles Towne) about 300 miles from St. Augustine. Almost immediately, unfree laborers began to escape from British Carolina to Florida with the hope of finding freedom with the Spanish.

The first documented enslaved Black workers escaped in 1687, although there had been earlier attempts. Eight men, two women, and an infant fled in a canoe and came ashore in Spanish Florida on Amelia Island at an Indian mission. Carolinian officials demanded the return of the freedom seekers, who were sent to St. Augustine, where they were baptized as Catholics in the parish church but were not freed.

"...giving liberty at all.... the men as well as the women... so that by their example and by my liberality others will do the same."

--Royal Edict by Spain's King Charles II, 1693 November 7, Archives of the Indies, Seville, Spain

The king of Spain decreed a sanctuary policy for foreign-enslaved people in 1693, which Florida's governor applied inconsistently. Over the next 70 years (until 1763, when Florida was transferred to Great Britain) enslaved Blacks (and Whites) from British colonies  ran to Spanish Florida  in the hope of finding freedom. Some who reached Florida were freed, some were freed after a period of required servitude, and some were returned to South Carolina. The offer of possible freedom was made to only enslaved persons from English colonies who converted to Catholicism, not to those who had always been living in Spanish Florida.

Fifty years after the first freedom seekers had arrived, Florida governor Manuel de Montiano established a village in 1738 where they could live. Its full name was Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose. Governor Montiano wrote to his superior:

"Twenty-three negroes of both sexes and children came here fleeing Carolina. I am struggling with all the freemen to establish them in Moze half a league here to the north, so that they may there form a settlement, and cultivate those lands. The free negroes are 38 in all; and it is not impossible they may form a good village."

Great Britain acquired Florida by treaty as a spoil of war in 1763. The Black, Indian, and White residents residents of St. Augustine all left for other Spanish colonies in Cuba and Mexico, and British colonists moved in. Spain's sanctuary policy for Black freedom seekers from British colonies in the Carolinas became null.

British investors quickly drew up plans—some were outrageous—to create large plantations in their new colony.. Unlike the previous Spanish period, hundreds of enslaved African-born workers were brought in to clear land and to plant and harvest cash crops, especially rice and indigo. Most of this took place far from St. Augustine, but there were a few plantations within today's city limits.

James Grant, the first governor of  British East Florida  from 1763-1771, created a 300-acre experimental farm north of St. Augustine's city gate.

"My Negroes live in palmetto huts for the time in the course of the winter without putting me to any expense but the first cost of the boards and a few nails. The Negroes after doing their tasks will find scantling and clapboards and will build their houses themselves without any assistance."

-- East Florida Gov. James Grant to the Earl of Egmont, 1769 September 11, James Grant Papers at Balindalloch Castle Muniments

During the  American Revolutionary War (1775-1783)  British Loyalists from the rebelling colonies of South Carolina and Georgia escaped to British Florida and brought enslaved peoples with them. Many of the enslaved escaped during the journey. Almost half of the refugees from warring colonies were enslaved Blacks. 

Most of St. Augustine's British-period residents—Black and White—left for other British territories when Florida was returned to Spain in 1784 after the Revolutionary War. Still many Blacks remained and became workers on the farms and some large plantations that were created outside of St. Augustine.

After the Spanish resumed control of Florida in 1784, freedom seekers from British colonies in North America  once again sought freedom  in St. Augustine.  Narratives  from those who found freedom in Spanish Florida record the harrowing experiences they had trying to get there. Among those who made it to St. Augustine were  Prince Witten  and his family, freedom seekers from Georgia. Prince finally reached St Augustine in 1786, after several failed attempts to escape enslavement. He was a skilled carpenter and thrived in St. Augustine, eventually serving as a captain of the Florida Black militia.

Under pressure from the United States, Spain rescinded its century-old sanctuary policy and offer of freedom in 1790.

In 1821, when the  United States acquired Florida from Spain , Witten—along with most, but not all, Black St. Augustinians—relocated to Cuba.

With  emancipation  came  segregation . After the Civil War, many Black residents no longer lived among the White population of St. Augustine. They moved out of the property of former slaveholders and to their own homes. These free Blacks created their own neighborhood in Lincolnville —named after Abraham Lincoln—also known as Africa or Little Africa. Now on the National Register of Historic Places, the  Lincolnville Historic District  covers more than 45 blocks in southern St. Augustine along Maria Sanchez Creek, bounded by Cedar, Ribiera, Cerro, Washington, and DeSoto Streets. Lincolnville is the site of ongoing archaeological investigation by the City of St Augustine Archaeology Program under the terms of the Archaeological Preservation Ordinance. 

Click on the images on the right to explore a selection of notable locations in Lincolnville and St Augustine through historical photos and documents. Use the arrows on the photos to see multiple images at each stop.

In the middle of the 20th century, St. Augustine's Black residents were denied the vote, barred from Whites-only public accommodations, and their children forced to attend segregated second-class schools. St. Augustine was like many other towns and cities in the United States with its racial restrictions.

 Demonstrations in St. Augustine began in the 1960s  and focused on integrating public facilities - restaurants, churches, the library, Atlantic Ocean swimming beaches, and recreational facilities.

The demonstrations reached their high point in June of 1964. In the spring of 1964 outside protestors,  a few of them White , had arrived in St. Augustine, bringing attention to the "nation's oldest city" as the "nation's oldest segregated city." Some of the participants were well known names in the civil rights movement such as  Andrew Young  and  Hosea Williams . None was a bigger name than  Martin Luther King, Jr .

By the summer 1964, the marches had moved far beyond the tactic of pacing back and forth in front of segregated businesses by a handful of placard-carrying students. By May and June of 1964 hundreds of marchers filed out of Lincolnville churches, often in the evening, to march to the center of St. Augustine,  where White segregationists waited . The segregationists carried weapons of all sorts—bicycle chains, knives, crow bars, clubs—and spat on and screamed at the marchers. The attackers grabbed the reporters' equipment and notepads to prevent filming or to destroy notes made for newspaper articles. 

 The efforts to integrate the waters of St. Augustine in both pools and beaches were critical moments in the desegregation of the United States . Swim-ins into the Atlantic Ocean took place near the St. Augustine Beach pier, several miles north of the traditional "Black Beach" ( Butler Beach ). Attackers followed the demonstrators into the ocean waves. Purcell Conway, a civil rights activist who participated in the attempts to integrate St. Augustine Beach on "Bloody Sunday," recounts the events as they unfolded.

Congress passed the  Civil Rights Act on June 20, 1964 . The demonstrations in St. Augustine had contributed to the momentum for the Civil Rights Act to become the law of the land. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Martin Luther King and integration leaders moved on from St. Augustine to other places and projects.   

Check out the  ACCORD Freedom Trail  of all the historic civil rights markers in St Augustine.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture's  Talking About Race  portal provides resources to  anyone committed to equity —communities, educators, parents—for discussing racial identity, racism, and their impacts on everyday life in the United States. For the narrative and chronological arc of this story map, their resources on the  historical foundations of race  are particularly salient.

In this story map, we participate in the increasing (if not universal) shift in news outlets, academic journals, and style manuals to capitalize Black as an adjective for people of the African Diaspora, recognizing that " Black refers to not just a color but signifies a history and the racial identity of Black Americans. " We have also capitalized White as an adjective - as has been argued,  "To not name “White” as a race is, in fact, an anti-Black act which frames Whiteness as both neutral and the standard." 

The enslavement of Black people in the Americas is a large part of St. Augustine's history. When we quote directly from historical sources, we use their own words—for example, "slave" instead of "enslaved person"—in order to better depict the historical context. In other instances, we rely on the guidelines regarding the  language of slavery  put forth by the National Parks Service. This language emphasizes that slavery in the Americas was not a fundamental state of being, but rather a condition of circumstances for the millions of kidnapped Africans who were brought to this country and held against their will.