Black Towns and (Legal) Marronage

Abstract

Since the U.S. antebellum era, enslaved and free Black people established places of their own to defend against White supremacist violence. These communities often formed on perilous landscapes, spaces considered undesirable, inaccessible, and uninhabitable by White planter classes. This form of fugitivity persisted after the postbellum era, and recurs in various forms in the present day, commonly through the formation of legally sanctioned Black communities. The rationales for contemporary incorporation of Black towns share similarities with their maroon predecessors—localized power and figurative escape from the whims of White governance. Using archival data, public databases, and secondary sources on Princeville, North Carolina, I argue that Black towns are not “towns” in the same way that White-founded towns exist in the United States, not only because of the persistent forms of violence leveled at them, but also because ontologically, Black towns do not develop from the same experiences and purposes as White towns. Despite their formal recognition by the state or other forms of legal status, Black towns often resemble their predecessors, maroon communities, which were extralegal spaces of freedom and alternative land relation formed in resistance to slavery in the West, beginning in the sixteenth century. The Town of Princeville established models of land and community relations that supersede capitalist development paradigms undergirding the municipality. This research builds on previous studies of contemporary plantation power relations, marronage, and Black place development and proposes alternative modes of place based on lessons from Princeville.

为了抵抗白人至上主义暴力, 早在美国内战之前, 奴隶黑人和自由黑人就建立了自己的空间。这些社区通常位于危险景观, 白人种植园主阶级认为这些社区不友好、无法接近、无法居住。内战之后, 这种逃离形式继续存在, 至今仍然以各种形式反复出现(例如, 合法的黑人社区)。当代黑人城镇与他们的逃奴前辈有相似之处：建立地方化权力、摆脱白人统治。根据美国北卡罗来纳州Princeville镇的档案数据、公开数据和二手资料, 我认为, 黑人城镇与白人城镇的不同之处在于：黑人城镇不仅持续面临着针对他们的暴力, 并且其发展历程和目标与白人城镇有着本体论上的差异。尽管黑人城镇获得国家正式承认或者其它形式的法律地位, 黑人城镇仍然类似于其前身—逃奴社区。逃奴社区是自16世纪西方反抗奴隶制过程中形成的自由的、具有替代土地关系的法外空间。Princeville镇建立了土地和社区关系模式, 取代了城市资本主义发展模式。本文促进了对当代种植园权力关系、逃奴和黑人地区发展的研究, 并根据Princeville经验提出了替代地方模式。

Desde tiempos anteriores a la Guerra de Secesión de los EE.UU., los negros, tanto esclavos como libres, establecieron ciertos espacios de su exclusivo control para defenderse contra la violencia supremacista blanca. Esas comunidades a menudo se asentaron en paisajes peligrosos, espacios reputados como indeseables, inaccesibles e inhabitables por las clases de plantadores blancos. Tal forma de escondite fugitivo persistió después de la posguerra y es recurrente en varias formas en la actualidad, comúnmente a través de la formación de comunidades negras legalmente constituidas. Las racionalidades que obran tras la incorporación contemporánea de pueblos negros comparten similitudes con sus predecesores cimarrones –poder localizado y escape figurado de los caprichos de la gobernanza blanca. Usando datos de archivos, bases de datos públicas y fuentes secundarias sobre Princeville, Carolina del Norte, arguyo que los pueblos negros no son “pueblos” del mismo modo como existen las ciudades fundadas por los blancos en los Estados Unidos, no solo por las formas persistentes de violencia ejercidas contra ellos, sino también porque ontológicamente los asentamientos negros equivalentes, los pueblos negros, no se desarrollan a partir de las mismas experiencias y propósitos que las ciudades blancas. A pesar de su reconocimiento formal por el estado o por otras formas de estatus legal, los pueblos negros a menudo se asemejan a sus predecesores, las comunidades cimarronas, que fueron espacios extralegales de libertad y relación alternativa con la tierra, formados en resistencia a la esclavitud en Occidente, desde el siglo XVI. El pueblo de Princeville estableció modelos de relaciones tierra-comunidad que superan los paradigmas de desarrollo capitalista subyacentes en la municipalidad. Esta investigación construye a partir de estudios anteriores sobre las relaciones de poder de las plantaciones contemporáneas, el cimarronaje y el desarrollo de lugar para los negros, y propone modos alternativos de lugar a partir de las lecciones de Princeville.

Key Words:

• Black geographies
• environment
• legal geographies
• marronage
• plantation power

关键词：:

• 黑人地理
• 环境
• 法律地理
• 逃奴
• 种植园权力。

Palabras clave::

• cimarronaje
• geografías legales
• geografías negras
• medio ambiente
• poder de la plantación

There is a scene in the documentary Freedom Hill in which residents of the Town of Princeville, North Carolina, celebrate one of their elders, who had recently turned 106 years old. The mayor leads a parade of 106 vehicles down one of the town’s major thoroughfares, where residents stand along the street holding 106 birthday cards (Cox 2022). As they arrive at the park where grills are prepared to feed the whole community, the elder sits on a throne with 106 balloons, where she is gifted 106 pieces of her favorite hard candy and $1,006 collected by the community. The milestone is a jubilant occasion, a triumph seemingly not just for the elder, but for the community itself, as a symbol of longevity, continued resilience, and connectedness. The celebratory sirens of the parade give way to more distressing sirens of the next scene, twenty-two years earlier, in which the town is submerged under nearly twenty feet of water.

The story of Princeville, often referenced as the first Black municipality chartered in the United States, is a story of how, over 157 years, a community sustained its relationships to each other and to some of the most difficult physical terrain for human habitation. This relationship endured to honor both the freedom dreams of their enslaved ancestors who first settled in the floodplains in 1865, and the land that remains integral to their vision and experience of freedom. Princeville is also a continuation of a centuries-long saga of Black communities fighting for freedom and autonomy against a White colonial/planter regime.

Princeville was part of a trend of postbellum and post-Reconstruction Black towns forming across the nation—from Rentiesville, Oklahoma, to Blackdom, New Mexico. Black towns evade easy definition because the trajectories of local Black geographies stem from different histories and purposes that often map illegibly onto legally codified White settler logics, such as the municipality. For this study, I reference Black towns as places that are founded by Black people, and that establish Black-controlled leadership, in the case of unincorporated communities, or legal governance, in the case of state-incorporated municipalities. Driven by the threat of White violence and the lure of a better future, free Black people migrated to numerous places across the United States to manifest their visions of liberation. Crockett (1979) argued that Black town building was one response to White supremacy that could fulfill, for some Black people, the goal of permanent secession from local White political rule, and for others the goal of more temporary removal for self-governance and wealth-building in anticipation of eventual integration. Whatever the intent, independent Black towns proliferated in waves across the country throughout the twentieth century and efforts for Black local place persist in the current day (R. M. Smith and Waldner 2018).

Although much of the history of Black towns focuses on communities settled on new lands far from Southern plantations (Crockett 1979; Painter 1992), many Black towns like Princeville formed adjacent or directly on the lands to which Black residents were once bound in slavery (Mobley 1981, 1986). The proximity of those towns to the extant White planter class produced a complex set of power relations that shaped the futures of both Black and White towns, and particularly Black relations to land and the environment.

I argue that Black towns are not “towns” in the same way that White-founded towns exist in the United States, not only because of the persistent forms of violence leveled at them, but also because Black towns do not develop from the same experiences and purposes as White towns. Despite occasional formal recognition by the state or other forms of legal status, Black towns often parallel their predecessors, maroon communities, which were extralegal spaces of freedom and alternative land relations formed in resistance to slavery in the West, beginning in the sixteenth century (Bledsoe 2017; Winston 2021). Thus, although the legal end of slavery and establishment of Black citizenship in the United States coincided with the creation and continuation of Black places then seeking formal political recognition and local sovereignty, the lived realities reinforced White political dominance and extraction, further motivating reliance on pre-emancipation practices of marronage that continue to the current day. Scholarly definitions of marronage vary widely, some firmly attached to geographies outside of colonial control (e.g., Diouf 2014) and others more concerned with specific practices and goals (e.g., N. Roberts 2015). I consider marronage as an Afro-diasporic spatial freedom practice that rejects structures of unfreedom (particularly slavery) that have been imposed on Afro-diasporic peoples across at least the last four centuries. Integral to these practices is the interdependence of Afro-diasporic communities and the landscapes they inhabit. Much as maroon communities relied on the various, difficult-to-navigate landscapes to which they escaped slavery for sustenance, shelter, and security over extended periods of time, so, too, are Black towns like Princeville committed to the sustained longevity of their perilous landscapes, even amid modes of degradation imposed through practices of environmental racism.

I argue that the end of legal slavery did not end the practice of marronage, but rather forced it to evolve to respond to the ongoing challenges of freedom facing communities across the African diaspora. In the United States, the law continues in practice to exclude Black people from its protections, even as it includes them by letter, via predatory inclusion (Seamster and Charron-Chénier 2017; Taylor 2019). In the ensuing 157 years since legal emancipation, Black Americans have taken flight from persistent conditions of unfreedom and exploitation, often by attempting to create autonomous spaces for themselves, including the wide range of places that can be called Black towns. The Black town emerges sometimes directly from maroon communities, and at other times as new places built post-1865. Regardless of their origins, though, their commonalities with marronage still exist via practices of flight, mutual aid and safety, and interdependence with landscapes and ecosystems.

Using archives, media, and legal documents, I observe the interrelated—but not wholly dependent—practices of plantation power and marronage in the Town of Princeville through the Black town’s relation to land, governance, and development, all of which have been intimately connected to the interests of the region’s White planter class from the community’s initial formation as Freedom Hill in 1865 to its push for basic infrastructure in the 1970s. The relationship between enduring plantation power and marronage demonstrates not just the fundamental contradictions of a Black municipality under plantation power, but also the possibilities of marronage as a spatial practice of freedom.

The materials available to me on Princeville are silent about marronage. Consequently, I have no insights as to how residents during the historic events covered by this research thought of themselves in connection to histories of maroon communities. My conceptual framing of the town’s experience is predicated on cumulative observations of the town’s documented struggles for freedom within the strictures of the municipal structure, the practices and experiences emerging from those struggles, and their thematic relation to previous iterations of Black flight and placemaking as marronage during slavery. In so doing, I place Princeville and similar Black towns in extant conversations about the transient nature and contemporary relevance of marronage by several scholars of geography and adjacent disciplines.

This research is motivated by what I view as the importance of throughlines and legacies of Black place tradition that might not be recorded, but that we can nevertheless understand as influential practices of freedom replicated across time and space. Marronage and its demonstrations not just as a freedom practice, but as a set of alternative ecological relations is a usable past, one that did not die with slavery, the echoes of which can be witnessed in present-day flights for freedom. Further, linking the geographic practices of marronage with those of contemporary Black towns expands understandings of Black geographies beyond well-demonstrated experiences of environmental racism to more nuanced explorations of how Black people’s lives were made possible (and continue to be made possible) through relations to ecosystems deemed unfit for colonial forms of settlement and development.

White Town/Plantation

The relational dynamics of racialized geographies demonstrate that present-day racial segregation is not simply about spatial distance, social exclusion, or even just about resource disparities. Therefore, a White town is not merely a political unit enforcing exclusive racial association. Rather, a White town is fundamentally reliant on, and developed by, the transfer of resources from the Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities from which it distances itself (Woods 2017; Curley 2021; Purifoy and Seamster 2021). From sundown towns to White municipalities practicing racial underbounding, many White towns’ existence is predicated on extracted value disguised as innate to White space (Aiken 1987; Mills 1997; Joyner and Christman 2005; Loewen 2005). Far more than material hoarding, White towns rely on such resourcefulness as symbolic of their manifestation of bountiful, pristine spaces wherein land is tightly controlled both through complex legal delineation (Aiken 1987; Lichter et al. 2007) and through management of natures, from clearcutting of forest landscapes and drained swamps to the creation of manicured, often homogenous planted ecosystems (Merchant 2003). The “pairing” of White and Black places and their relational laws and structures dates to the plantation itself and is inextricably linked to the extraction and conversion of natures into profit-seeking “resources” (Purifoy and Seamster 2021; Purifoy 2021b).

White towns and larger cities in the United States were similarly reliant on the productivity of plantations for the entirety of the era of chattel slavery, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Cotton alone rose from 14 percent of the U.S. economy at the turn of the nineteenth century to 61 percent of the economy by 1860, the eve of the U.S. Civil War, transforming the country “from a narrow coastal belt into a vast, powerful nation with the fastest growing economy in the world” (Baptist 2014, 114). Industrialization of the Western world and all its constitutive states and local polities was predicated on the tortuous innovations of slavery that led to mass production capacities. Slavery in these same towns and cities complemented the wealth-building of raw material from the rural plantations, through labor in factories, on railroads, and in homes (Baptist 2014), all of which were extracted increasingly from natural ecosystems.

The social-environmental extractions of the plantation, held in place by centuries of laws designed both to define Blackness outside of humanness to define entire ecosystems and Black persons as commodified property gave way to the sites of still legal, spatialized exploitation via the Black Codes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hartman 1997), which gave way to Jim Crow segregation laws (Woodward 1955), applied in various forms nationwide, eventually transforming into the “colorblind racism” that tacitly reinforces barriers through laws crafted to target unnamed non-White racial groups (Bonilla-Silva 2006). In each era, Black places have been saddled with the paradox of dispossession despite the proximity to, and indeed building of, vast White wealth (Oliver and Shapiro 2006).

I argue, after Woods (2017) and McKittrick (2013), that the plantation as a political, social, and economic structure is neither dead nor waning. Although the White town is not the same as the plantation, it replicates plantation modes of operation through the current model of capitalist, ecologically extractive development economics, which can be observed in the relational structures and practices enforced in parallel Black and White towns in the South (McKittrick 2013; Purifoy and Seamster 2021). Understanding the disparate conditions of Black towns thus requires making the plantation perceptible (again), by making legible the operations of the “white” town, village, or city, because as Seamster (2015) articulated, “whiteness is invisible and unchallenged not because it is unimportant but because it is dominant” (1056).

Similarly, Woods’s work on 200 years of iterative plantation power structures in the Mississippi Delta highlights the political economy of White racial domination of Indigenous and Black peoples even in the face of significant opposition, revolt, and attempts at secession and independence. He warns against postmodern assertions of the death of the planter class and its requisite socioeconomic relations to Black and Indigenous peoples, despite social and economic welfare policies ostensibly designed to reduce inequity (Woods 2017). So long as the plantation persists, I argue that so, too, do the ethics and strategies of marronage.

Black Town/Marronage

Within the arenas of Black geographies, Black ecologies, planning, and architecture, scholars have increasingly taken up the histories of marronage to better understand Black spatial practices, ecosystem relations, and placemaking as a mode of freedom and a different means of living in relation to dominant spatial practices of racial capitalism (N. Roberts 2015; Diouf 2014; Bledsoe 2017; Roane 2018; A. R. Roberts 2019; Wright 2020; Winston 2021). These scholars have raised the specter of marronage in our current era and engaged in critical inquiry about the ways marronage is relevant to Afro-diasporic spatial thought and practice.

Rather than approach these historic and contemporary Black places solely through the lens of violence and extraction, this emergent scholarship is interested in how freedom has been and continues to be manifested in space (N. Roberts 2015) despite the destructive practices and legacies of colonialism and slavery that still dominate our present world (Bledsoe 2017; Wright 2020; Winston 2021). In other words, what liberatory possibilities does scholarship miss when its attention to Black place is focused solely through the lens of underdevelopment and extraction rooted in the spatial imagination of racial capitalism?

The myriad Afro-diasporic landscapes that can be associated with marronage from the mountainous regions of Jamaica to the quilombos of Brazil to the Great Dismal Swamp in the United States means necessarily that strict definition of maroon communities and marronage is elusive. Whereas Diouf (2014) contended that maroon communities no longer exist because they were spaces fully outside of colonial control, and thus distinct from Black freetowns established both before and after emancipation, Bledsoe (2017) demonstrated the persistence of marronage as a basis for securing land rights for Afro-Brazilians who lived in various, well-documented quilombos during the era of chattel slavery. A. R. Roberts (2019) documented more than 500 “freedom colonies” in the state of Texas, some of which were maroon communities prior to emancipation. Winston (2021) argued for the continuation of marronage via a set of characteristics that persist in a range of historic communities across the African diaspora, including a few in the United States, in Montgomery County, Maryland. I argue that the endurance of the plantation regime via racial capitalism means that marronage as a practice continues in Black-founded places seeking autonomy, even if unacknowledged explicitly by the communities engaged in the practice.

Marronage is a practice that is inextricably tied to struggles over land relations, legal geographies, and place-sustaining infrastructures. Maroons lived in what colonists called “obscure places” (Diouf 2014, 19) at the borders or hinterlands of plantations that were difficult for European capture, both because of their physical characteristics and because of the communities’ collective resistance. King (2019) argued that “Black fugitivity, and what Katherine McKittrick has referred to as ‘black Atlantic livingness,’ created a crisis in representation for White cartography” (75–76). As an example, King noted that colonial surveyor William Gerard de Brahm’s “1757 Map of the Coast of South Carolina and Parts of Georgia” not only represented the extent of European conquest and settlement in the region, but was also an indicator of colonists’ struggle “to affectively represent Blackness and Indigeneity as states of geographic, cartographic, and onto-logical otherness that could be dominated and relegated to what [Denise] da Silva calls the exteriority of the ‘horizon of death’” (King 2019, 80). Marronage was thus a geographic practice that actively prevented both colonial capture and legal codification of land, as reflected on de Brahm’s map. Without such capture and legal designation, as a colonial place or private property, maroon communities had opportunities for other land and intercommunal relationships until the end of the U.S. Civil War. The terms on which these communities could exist, however, were quite precarious, as mobility outside the boundaries of the maroon geographies could mean imprisonment, reenslavement, or death (Diouf 2014).

As an ecological phenomenon, marronage was a freedom experiment that involved not only humans, but also the complex of flora, fauna, and other biota that harbored them. The swamps, lowlands, mountains, caves, and densely tangled forests into which the enslaved fled were themselves systems of interdependent life and protection (Wright 2020). Indeed, the Indigenous botanist Kimmerer (2013) described “compelling [scientific] evidence that … trees are talking to one another … via pheromones … wafted on the breeze, laden with meaning” (20), including warning signs against potential dangers such as insect attack, which benefit the entire forest. Such nonhuman agency and communications, which Kimmerer (2013, 20) described as “still far above our [human] heads,” and other dependencies maintained these “impenetrable” landscapes for centuries. When as Diouf (2014, 17) described, captured Africans ran into the woods from the very first slave ships, these landscapes were their best chance at survival. Their survival, however, hinged on practices that were the antithesis of European colonial land relations— mutuality rather than domination. To be sure, maroons in the hinterlands of plantation life used these fugitive landscapes to cultivate food and other life necessities, but they had to adapt a relationship to their ecosystems that kept them intact (see also Moulton 2022, for a parallel narrative in Jamaica). This meant everything from maintaining dense tree canopies so they could live in the treetops to ensuring that the forest floor ecologies remained lush and robust to hide their underground habitations (Diouf 2014, 98–99). Without easy access to medical facilities or other health care resources, maroons had to learn the medicinal properties of these landscapes, with benefits that extended to those still enslaved on nearby plantations and knowledges that carried on for generations after slavery (Covey 2007).

What is marronage without the institution of slavery? One central distinction is the law. From the inception of slavery, which was also the inception of marronage, White colonists and the planter class passed laws criminalizing maroon practices of all kinds, leading to raids and other violent attempts to destroy maroon landscapes (Diouf 2014). Even slavery abolitionists dismissed maroons as “lost souls,” condemned to living among the beasts, antithetical as they saw it to the promise of civilization and Western ideals of freedom as legal Black persons in the free states (Diouf 2014, 12). The legal abolition of slavery, then, was also arguably the abolition of maroon landscapes, their freedom experiments, and their unique ecological relations. The circumscribed laws of emancipation from chattel slavery created a new set of challenges and possibilities for Black communities seeking autonomy from White regimes. This legal emancipation also cooccurred with the rapid capture, privatization, and surveillance of landscapes across the United States, also through legislation such as the Homestead Act of 1862, in which “any [White] citizen or intended citizen who had not borne arms against the U.S. could acquire 160 acres of government surveyed land,” provided that they lived on and “improved” their plot through cultivation (Homestead Act 1862). The possibilities of flight to fugitive, unclaimed places were thus increasingly rare, and even undesirable, particularly after centuries of hiding and relative isolation.

Black-founded towns and other localities emerged as a legal, often visible means of flight from White-dominated state powers who, despite emancipation, sought to reinstate similar practices of slavery, particularly as many plantations evolved into contemporary towns and cities. These Black towns occupy a critical space in history, as they test the efficacy of the U.S. legal systems of property and place formation as modes of achieving Black freedom. The legal regime of the town was for many Black communities the promise of being allowed to thrive on their own terms, to possess the powers of local sovereignty to protect themselves against the violent encroachments of White supremacy that were always a threat to maroon communities. As I argue in what follows, though, the realities of that legal promise place Black towns in a familiar form of precarity, resulting in adaptations that rely less on the state and more on practices of community solidarity and mutual aid inherent in marronage.

The Black “town” typically evokes a narrow set of local places in scholarship on the subject, mostly Black places with formal relationship to the state via municipal incorporation. In practice, however, “town” is also used to describe and name many unincorporated Black places (i.e., without state recognition). Regardless of formal state relations, Black towns must always contend with the state in some fashion while creating other possibilities for sustaining and governing themselves. Thus, although marronage existed as a form of disavowal or escape from the state during slavery, in the current day these “maroon geographies” often shift in status and engagement with the state at various points to maintain as much independence as possible, part of what Winston (2021) called “entanglements with structures of unfreedom” (10).

As one example, Tamina, Texas, is a maroon geography dating back to the 1830s—although its official records date it as being founded in 1871—which entered a legal relationship with the state of Texas in the mid-twentieth century when it secured rights to develop its own water utility (Purifoy and Seamster 2021). The encroachment of a series of White towns and small cities beginning in 1970, however, both upended Tamina’s only formal tie to the state—a neighboring White city worked with state officials to erode Tamina’s preexisting water rights—and threatened to eviscerate the community through state-sanctioned annexation powers. Although the community has existed as an unincorporated place for 185 years, it faces mounting pressures to consider state recognition via municipal incorporation to attempt greater security in the future.

Even when places like Tamina incorporate into state-recognized towns, however, their practices and institutions are often quite distinct from the White town, both because of the challenges articulated in the previous section and because the towns possess a different relationship to place, including relations to land, governance, and development. Black towns are thus not “towns” in the common parlance of the dominant regime of local government in the United States. Although they are compared unfavorably to White towns, often as “failed” or “dying,” I argue that they should be considered completely different types of local places, with distinct spatial relations, practices, and constraints. If a White town can be understood as a replication of plantation politics and ecological extraction via racial capitalism, then a Black town can be understood in part as a continuation of marronage, creating ever-evolving alternate possibilities for place, freedom, and ecological relations. Using the story of Freedom Hill/Princeville, the following sections outline three facets of Black town existence that demonstrate entanglements with unfreedom and practices of living that relate back to marronage—land relations, governance, and development. I refer to Freedom Hill as the community that existed prior to its municipal incorporation as the Town of Princeville in 1868, and then to Princeville thereafter.

Land Relations

Emancipation from slavery resulted in many newly free Black communities placed in landscapes not dissimilar from their maroon predecessors. A 2006 study of Southern cities and towns found that local White geographies are disproportionately located on landscapes more desirable for development than local Black geographies, a phenomenon the authors called “racialized topography” (Ueland and Warf 2006). Such undesirable lands posed significant barriers to economic development and cultivation exercised on more accessible landscapes and were often subject to other forms of extraction by industry or White place development (Wright 2020; Seamster and Purifoy 2021; Vasudevan 2021; Winston 2021). Freedom Hill was no exception. The land is located on the unwanted floodplain of two White planters that were occupied by Union troops immediately after the Civil War. Newly freed Black people from surrounding plantations sought refuge with the Freedmen’s Bureau, eventually forming a large encampment on the banks of the Tar River. Parcels of the confiscated lands were eventually sold to some of the Black families with two primary impacts—creating a tenuous means of land security for this community seeking to build its own independent place and satisfying White interests to segregate the Black community from White places and resources, while curbing the flow of Black labor outmigration to places north and west (Mobley 1986, 342).

As N. Roberts (2015, 79) argued, legal emancipation from slavery is not the same as freedom. Whereas the former offers a highly constrained set of rights and privileges, which are themselves contingent on the sociopolitical interests of Whiteness, the latter is for Black people to define for themselves, as they had done since their forced arrival on the shores of the European colonies. Having been consolidated into the sociolegal regime of the United States and other nation-states of the Western hemisphere, Black people’s possibilities of flight from the confines of state control could not bear exact resemblance to marronage. Nevertheless, emancipated they stretched the possibilities of their legal existence as far as imaginable to approximate their visions of freedom. Having legally sanctioned access to land undesired by the White planter class was a critical facet of Black communities’ flight from the immediate grasp of White rule and symbolized some of the refuge and possibility of self-determination that marronage offered their ancestors.

The first residents named the place Freedom Hill, demonstrative of their faith in a home where they could establish and maintain families and communities that had for centuries been fragmented, separated, and destroyed through the very legal system that could scarcely be trusted to guarantee their cohesion. Out of the White “refuse” of the floodplain (Winston 2021), Black families often created homeplaces—multihouse land plots where multiple generations lived as neighbors with property rights that typically accrued equally to the heirs of the original property owner (Language and Life Project 2006; Dyer and Bailey 2008) Describing it as “a safe place where black people could affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination,” hooks (2014) articulated the homeplace not just as a strategy of family cohesion, but also as a Black feminist mode of shaping domestic space as a “community of resistance” (42). That resistance manifested in part through an assertion of self-rule, albeit under now inescapable state and federal legal structures. Self-rule was a cornerstone of marronage, a means to both reject colonial rule (even in the free states) and to pursue an alternative vision of freedom than colonial visions provided (Diouf 2014; N. Roberts 2015).

Even amid the perils of topography and disparate quality for human habitation, however, acquiring land after emancipation still possessed similar precarities to the lands settled during marronage. Recalling de Brahm’s 1757 map in which such perilous maroon landscapes represented spaces not yet conquered, a post-1865 place like Freedom Hill represented a possible threat to the White political order, rather than part of the integrated polity. Indeed, as political philosopher Mills (1957) argued, the “the political space of the polity is not coextensive with its geographical space” because “dark” [or Black] space is “normatively discontinuous with white political space” (51). Like their maroon predecessors, Freedom Hill’s possession of land and the power it represented drew the fear and rage of Whiteness, which as I demonstrate in subsequent sections, sought through legal and extralegal means to recapture territory and control.

Freedom Hill’s proximity to the White Town of Tarboro, which developed directly from the spoils of chattel slavery since its founding in 1760 as one of the earliest river ports to import enslaved people in the state of North Carolina, has echoes to its maroon predecessors situated on the borders of plantations. Although Freedom Hill’s inhabitants were legal landowners rather than legal fugitives, they were nonetheless subject to substantial surveillance and legal control from Tarboro and other bordering plantation towns. Borderland maroons, although immensely resourceful via their relations with enslaved people on the plantations, were extremely limited in their mobility and were prohibited from making their presence known through open land cultivation and other forms of development, lest they be caught, extracted from the land, and returned to slavery (Diouf 2014, 97–129).

Although Freedom Hill attained some self-sufficiency through their reliance on land cultivation for food and various forms of trade, their movements were circumscribed both by nonstate actors like the Ku Klux Klan and by the jurisdictional boundaries of the neighboring White towns in which they worked. Although these towns were not designated “sundown towns,” the Black Code of the state had tight prohibitions against “vagrancy”—Black people were obligated to be working or on some manner of business in the White towns (Browning 1930, 467). Freedom Hill remained the space of refuge and full bodily autonomy amid such stringent White controls.

The 2006 documentary This Side of the River: The Self-Determination and Survival of Princeville, North Carolina demonstrates the continuities and tensions between the Black town and marronage via land relations. One resident recounted with pride the tale of Turner Prince, a farmer and architect of the town who did what the White planters never bothered to do—cleared much of the swampland and built many of the first homes on the land from short wooden pieces of plywood. Another articulates how the community collectively built a jail, courthouse, churches, stores, and schools all “without the aid of white people” (Language and Life Project 2006). These developments, many of which replicate White town structures, appear far removed from the land relations of marronage, which were far less connected to Western practices of development, law, and governance as manifested through structures like jails and courts. One can surmise that the land clearing and house building completed by Turner Prince were disfavored by maroons mostly because of their fugitive legal status. Even though the cover of forests and swamps was no longer integral to the community’s survival, the churches and schools erected by Freedom Hill’s residents in the first years after emancipation were not mere replicas of their White counterparts; they were direct descendants of the secret clearings in the forests in which maroons and those enslaved on nearby plantations gathered to practice a range of spiritual traditions, including Black Christianity, and to learn from one another. These “hush harbors” were critical spaces of education, communication, and plotting for freedom, and maroons were instrumental to creating and protecting those spaces for all who dared to slip away from the plantations to gather (Johnson and Jersild 2014; Hunter 2022). Although Freedom Hill’s church structures might have resembled their White counterparts more than the hush harbors, their traditions and practices stemmed directly from those of their maroon ancestors.

Rudolph Knight, a lifelong resident of Princeville, recalled in This Side of the River the extensive practice of land cultivation across the town, not as a means of extracting profit or simply curating beauty in the space, but as a symbiotic relation to and reliance on the land to nourish the residents both physically and spiritually (Language and Life Project 2006). As he recounted the various forms of racial terror and abuse residents experienced while working in neighboring White towns like Tarboro and threats experienced to Princeville itself, Knight described the garden and the church as spaces where Black people could go to “cry it out,” to release the rage, anger, and grief of White supremacy. Diouf (2014) similarly described some maroon communities, particularly in the hinterlands of the plantations, both as spaces where cultivated food and medicines were traded or shared with enslaved peoples and as spaces to which the enslaved frequently ran away to recover from the worst forms of White brutality—a refuge for healing, release, and ultimate survival.

As residents moved from their position first as “squatters” on Freedom Hill to property owners during Reconstruction (Mobley 1986, 343), the meaning of the land as a signifier of freedom, self-determination, community cohesion, and a viable future took a firm hold, even amid its ecological precarity (Wright 2020), which became apparent after a major flood in 1867, just two years after their arrival. In addition to the homeplace’s position as a stable, dedicated space for the family to exercise freedom and autonomy for generations (Dyer and Bailey 2008), the collective lands that constituted Freedom Hill symbolized how, as Hawthorne (2019) articulated, “Black life always remain[s] in excess of the logics of racial-spatial violence” (7). That is, the extractive relations between the community and Tarboro, and other neighboring White places never defined Freedom Hill; the residents were able to build sustenance, safety, and sustainability for themselves and each other via food production, resource sharing, and social systems that could not be possible without a deep and continuous relationship to the land.

The critical mass of educated residents, combined with the high levels of land ownership meant that the people began giving the land its own formal political identity vis-à-vis other localities, which it was eventually forced to assert in a bid to become Princeville, the first incorporated Black town in the United States.¹

Governance

Maroon communities existed outside of the legal property and place regimes of the United States, creating fugitive landscapes that disrupted the colonial order of land ownership and legal jurisdiction. These “unsecured” geographies not only limited the efficiency and scope of slavery in the United States, but they also “shoaled” the totalization of land and human conquest, thus allowing a range of alternative physical and political relations to land to emerge, preserving other ways of living resurfaced by recent scholarship (e.g., King 2019). Postemancipation land tenure posed the fundamental challenge for Black communities of desiring the purported stability of state-sanctioned rights but living with the realities of subjugated status under the state and as a social class. Thus, when Freedom Hill took the steps toward becoming a municipality, the community was caught in a contradiction between resisting the state-sanctioned White supremacy stripping their power as new citizens of the country and choosing to further embed themselves with the same state powers to establish greater political and economic independence. The result of these efforts was Freedom Hill as a maroon geography with a “legal” status under the state.

By 1875, Black people saw their political rights eroded in Edgecombe County. Facing increased threats by the Ku Klux Klan, which emerged in North Carolina in the late 1860s to aid the state’s Conservative party in defeating Republicans, many were functionally prohibited from both voting and serving in office. As an unincorporated community, Freedom Hill was subject to the all-White governance of Edgecombe County government; however, their collective numbers as a free Black community meant that, much like their maroon predecessors, they successfully relied on mutual protection to prevent White supremacist violence (Mobley 1981, 348).

Ultimately, residents of Freedom Hill sought municipal incorporation so they could build their own local government and promulgate laws for themselves—using the state legal structure to claim as much independence as possible within that structure. For the White planter class in Tarboro and surrounding areas, the idea of a Black municipality was not initially viewed as a significant threat to White supremacy and reinforced the same purposes of allowing Freedom Hill to exist in the first place—maintaining social segregation while keeping a local labor pool. By 1879, a mass Black exodus from the South was underway, with town recruiters and Black activists encouraging relocation to Kansas, Indiana, and other parts of the Midwest as part of the Exodusters movement (Painter 1992). A Black town was viewed as a necessary concession to maintain the status quo.

The incorporation of Princeville, however, was ultimately more reflective of the domination of the plantation regime than the legal independence and equity of the Black municipality. The town’s incorporation statute—ratified by the North Carolina General Assembly—placed profound limitations on its municipal powers, demonstrating the intimate relationship between the state government and the White interests of Edgecombe County, who had no intention of allowing Princeville the “privilege of self-government” (Mobley 1986).

The 1885 charter of the Town of Princeville begins by subordinating the town’s own regulatory authority “to all provisions of the law applicable to the town of Tarboro.” Although latter provisions of the statute and subsequent state amendments in 1923 grant Princeville residents the power to elect their own local officials, the first section of the charter creates a preemptive limitation on the local government to pass laws that might conflict with those of Tarboro. The North Carolina General Assembly further limits Princeville’s municipal power by placing restrictions on its property taxes and imposing a poll tax on its electorate.

Although the North Carolina General Assembly possesses unfettered power to create, amend, and dissolve municipal bodies at its discretion, there is nonetheless a standard set of municipal powers granted to most cities and towns across the state. Those powers always include the ability of the city council to promulgate ordinances (Lawrence and Millonzi 1982). The anomaly of Princeville’s incorporation statute as the only Black municipality in Edgecombe County is demonstrated through assessment of the incorporation statutes of four White municipalities in the county, two of which possess smaller populations than Princeville—Tarboro (incorporated 1760), Leggett (incorporated 1895), Conetoe (incorporated 1887), and Rocky Mount (incorporated 1907)—all of which were granted power of local rule, including promulgation of ordinances, setting their own local tax rates, and total sovereignty from any necessary relationship with neighboring municipalities and other forms of local government. Princeville was thus created by the North Carolina General Assembly not only as a legal ward of Tarboro, but also as a contested territory, a space without a solid legal grounding, much like its maroon forebears. Such legal and social precarity gives context to subsequent attempts by Tarboro and Edgecombe County in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to undermine and indeed dissolve Princeville’s charter, in efforts to thwart the growth of Black political power that emerged early in the town’s history (Mobley 1981, 1986).

Beyond the question of political sovereignty, the North Carolina General Assembly’s restriction on Princeville’s local tax powers also had implications for its ability to sustain a local economy on the same terms as White towns. Local taxation power is an important rationale for communities to seek incorporation, as revenue provides essential and exclusive resources for town development—from infrastructure to housing to health care facilities (Frug 1998; Rusk 2013; Tyson 2013). Controlling taxation power thus controls development capacity—and future growth. In the case of Princeville, Tarboro retained its status as the dominant economic power, maintaining Princeville’s economic dependence on its industry for local employment, and eventually luring some of Princeville’s most prominent residents—Black merchants and politicians—to live within Tarboro’s boundaries, where they would access greater amenities, including flood protection (Mobley 1981, 1986).

Although it is unclear when or if the North Carolina General Assembly officially repealed the language in Princeville’s charter that subjected the town to Tarboro’s laws, state records indicate that the town had a municipal code that did not appear to be bound by Tarboro by 1978. The local tax restrictions, however, affected Princeville for decades, culminating in its nearly failed efforts to construct a municipal water system in the 1970s (Barefield 1972).

It is important to note that despite the undermining of Princeville’s charter, such explicitly disparate conditions are sufficient, but not ultimately necessary, to compromise Black towns. For example, the 1987 incorporation statute of Taylortown, a Black-founded town in Moore County, North Carolina, arguably looked more like Tarboro’s than Princeville’s. Yet, given the underlying socioeconomic structure of Taylortown, its labor relationship to the golf resort in the Village of Pinehurst, and the rise of so-called “colorblind” laws and policies—Taylortown and Princeville share similar fates in terms of independent development (Purifoy 2021b).

Additionally, Princeville’s annexation powers—its ability to expand the town beyond its original borders as occurs in response to population growth—although unspecified in its 1885 charter and subsequent amendments, were ultimately restricted via an exemption to the generally permissive statewide annexation rule. Princeville’s Tarboro-based town attorney, Martin L. Cromartie, Jr., called attention to this discrepancy in a 1974 newspaper article:

The town, unlike most other municipalities in North Carolina, has no power to annex. It was exempted from a general annexation law passed by the legislature “because it was a ‘colored’ town which might ‘run wild,’” Cromartie said in a letter to [assistant U.S. Attorney General] Pottinger. (W. Smith 1974)

Maroon communities were spaces of Black freedom created to be independent of the state and were thus heavily surveilled and limited in their mobility and growth by the state as spaces feared beyond White colonial control. Princeville was established to practice Black visions of freedom as far outside of White control as possible under the laws of the reunited nation. As a legal municipality, the town experienced similar surveillance by state and nonstate actors, with its growth and mobility tightly controlled by law and by a dominant White political regime afraid that the Black town might “run wild.” In these parallels is evidence that the function of legal emancipation was not simply a concession to end slavery and reunify the nation; it was just as much a means of maintaining a geopolitical status quo obscured by amended legal frameworks. The Black town was allowed to legally exist mostly to the extent that the White political regime could successfully extract its labor, while keeping its own place ambitions under control, including those regarding its growth and development.

Although there are multiple avenues to observe systematic extraction and control imposed on Princeville, the provision of water infrastructure is particularly robust, precisely because water access, distribution, and quality are prerequisites for municipal development and growth. Following more than a century of collective, community-based water services via individual and community pumps, Princeville pursued the development of a modern, centralized water system in the 1960s and 1970s. The process and outcomes of developing this critical infrastructure projects offer clarifying insights into the mechanisms of both the plantation power regime, and the town’s commitment to principles of collective action and mutual aid in the absence of state protection.

Development

The precarity of flight from slavery and conquest, combined with holding physical geographies as a harbor against colonialism was a major reason why marronage could not have been accomplished through principles of individualism that pervaded European colonial philosophy and frontierism. Various social and physical infrastructures were required both within and outside of maroon communities for people to survive. Winston (2021) referred to “fugitive infrastructures” as a characteristic of maroon geographies that “delineates an organizing framework through which to comprehend people’s adaptability and reactions to oppressive structures not as isolated and individual but as equally structural as the structures they resist” (8). During slavery, this meant that maroon communities had to build systems to secure food, water, information, and common language as a means of safety and to sustain themselves. Particuladrly in the so-called “borderland maroon communities,” located adjacent to the plantation, maroons had to build relationships of trust and systems of mutual aid with people still enslaved on the plantation to improve everyone’s living conditions and to increase opportunities for further flight and more secure freedom (Diouf 2014, 19). Diouf described a total “maroon landscape,” comprised of thousands of maroons, which were networked across the U.S. South, practicing a form of freedom that N. Roberts (2015) describes as “a living thing,” a combination of positive and negative forms of freedom that is always expanding and reshaping itself.

Like the maroon geographies that preceded it, Princeville possesses social infrastructures in abundance, despite lacking much of the physical infrastructure that permits the forms of economic development expected in municipalities. Both the 2006 and 2022 documentaries on Princeville demonstrate these infrastructures in action, from residents’ recollections of collaborative land cultivation and stewardship to ensure that all were fed and that the land could continue to sustain itself and them across generations, to the dense and often informal networks of resources and services available to the community via various people’s homes (Language and Life Project 2006; Cox 2022). One resident recalled how the community raised hogs, chickens, vegetables, and flowers, and survived through sharing, trading, and helping each other prepare for the winter months (Language and Life Project 2006).

Such practices of community solidarity and mutual aid are also exemplified by the fact that by 1965 Princeville had experienced catastrophic flooding from the Tar River seven times and rebuilt each time with most of its residents. Residents who were interviewed after the 1999 floods from Hurricanes Floyd and Dennis recalled why it was so important for their families to pull together and reestablish their town, even knowing that it was likely to be destroyed again:

For my forefathers to come across that Tar River Bridge as free people for the first time in their life with absolutely nothing, nothing but their God-given talents. And to swamp land, Princeville was absolutely swamp land. And to build Freedom Hill and to thrive in Freedom Hill. They used their blood, sweat, and tears to build houses, to build businesses. And for us to say, not because of what might happen in the future, we’ve got to turn our backs on what they did for us and move someplace else? Cannot happen. Cannot happen. (Grace-McCaskey et al. 2021, 347)

Embedded in the commitment to stay, even under the most extreme conditions, is the acknowledgment that Princeville successfully manifested a vision of freedom and lifestyle not replicable in other landscapes. One of the residents interviewed in This Side of the River called the experience “a fun struggle”—“Black folks have taught the world how to transform adversity into opportunity” (Language and Life Project 2006).

After the 1965 flood—100 years after the founding of Freedom Hill—Princeville saw its first physical infrastructure built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—a 2.5-mile dike along the river, offering flood relief, and generating a more positive outlook for the town’s future. Ray Matthewson, then Princeville’s mayor, heralded the new infrastructure as a turning point in the town’s development:

With the river taken care of, there’ll be building and remodeling, and people coming back instead of leaving. We’ll have running water in the houses, too, and maybe the government will give us a grant of some type for sewage disposal. … We haven’t had success about industries yet, he said.

Town development requires complex physical infrastructure to facilitate the establishment and growth of commercial industry, residential growth, and to manage flows of water and waste for public health. In the United States, local development is often predicated on a competitive rather than cooperative model; municipalities compete for finite resources to build fragmented systems that hoard resources and exclude forms of development and populations deemed “undesirable” (Rusk 2013; Seamster and Purifoy 2021). Having survived the more direct White supremacist efforts to destroy the town through violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Princeville faced more subtle threats through its efforts to develop in the same ways as its White counterparts, most prominently, the Town of Tarboro. The persistence of these challenges into the present day, and the continued reliance on community cohesion and social infrastructure to persist and rebuild after storms in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, reinforce a categorization of Princeville (and many other Black towns like it) as a continuation of marronage, as well as a contextualization of White towns like Tarboro as a modern iteration of plantation power.

Princeville by the mid-1960s did not possess a centralized water and sewer system, relying instead on individual and community drinking water wells, outhouses, and septic systems in select places, all of which were compromised by the high water table and poor soil drainage, with scarce financial resiliency to completely recover after each flood (Mobley 1981). The installation of the dike created a new opportunity to focus much of the town’s efforts on economic growth and development of local industry to further the towns’ goals of greater autonomy, as most residents’ labor and spending power was transferred to Tarboro, which possessed all the industry and nearly all the business commerce (Mobley 1981, 23–26).

Indeed, from Tarboro’s antebellum cotton economy in the late nineteenth century, to its fertilizer plant, knitting mills, and lumberyards developed at the turn of the twentieth century, Princeville provided a consistent supply of physical labor and service work to the town, although “it took no large share of Tarboro’s new prosperity” (Mobley 1981, 25). Developing Princeville’s water distribution infrastructure was considered a major step toward ultimately redistributing that prosperity, even though Tarboro maintained ownership and control over the water supply (W. Smith 1974). Its first opportunity to realize that goal came in the late 1960s.

By the 1970s, finance for such critical infrastructure as water and sewer was accessible by low-income communities through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), eventually through the agency’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which was established in 1974 (U.S. HUD 2014). The program applied a formula to determine which communities were in greatest need of interest-free funding for various economic development projects—from remediating substandard housing to building recreation centers to improvement of municipal services (U.S. HUD 2018). Through its attempts to access this funding for its water infrastructure, Princeville officials discovered in the early 1970s that Tarboro had been utilizing Princeville’s population demographics and economic eligibility to qualify for millions in HUD funding for its own development projects. According to Harvey L. White, who served as an external manager for Princeville in 1973, none of the funding granted through Tarboro’s applications was distributed to Princeville (H. L. White, personal communication, April 17, 2018). This discovery was just the first of multiple stoppages in Princeville’s efforts to build its water system. With its funding eligibility stolen, the town sought intervention from HUD, only to be further hindered by the agency itself. Rather than compensate Princeville for the funding unjustly gained by Tarboro, HUD directed its funds toward “improving Princeville’s management so that it could learn to properly manage public resources” (H. L. White, personal communication, April 17, 2018).

Maintaining plantation power is not an isolated effort of any one town or agency—public or private. Rather, the system is supported by various complementary institutions at all levels of government and in the private sector, which can, even without coordination, isolate subaltern communities and reinforce existing flows of power and resources. Such combined efforts are well demonstrated in the case of Princeville’s decades-long fight for a water system.

If the discovery of Tarboro’s fraudulent CDBG funding did not result in political vindication or compensation for Princeville, the appointment of the two HUD-funded external managers—both Black men—provided important insights into the town’s endeavors and challenges. Ernest Barefield and Harvey L. White served successive terms in Princeville—Fairfield in 1972 and White in 1973. The two external managers were charged with publishing analyses of Princeville’s administrative compliance and failures. These analyses are valuable, however, not only as evidence of the towns’ contemporary conditions, but also as a perspective on the politics undergirding its development efforts. Barefield’s (1972) assessment that Tarboro’s “high tolerance of Negro existence … may change should Princeville become an active Black town and a true force in the county” (1) makes plain Tarboro’s plantation relation to Princeville, such that its success is a threat to Tarboro not simply as a local town competitor, but as a subordinate space that cannot be allowed to possess the full power of a town. White’s (1973) assessment of Princeville highlights the features of continued marronage—the holding together and collective pursuit of freedom (the “fun struggle”) amid regular catastrophe and persistent sociopolitical threats, that have maintained the town through legal battles to establish its existence as a town (W. Smith 1974) and further attempts at its dissolution by White suburbs and its two most recent floods in 1999 and 2016 (H. L. White, personal communication, April 17, 2018).

The Town prides itself on the fact that no slave has ever lived in Princeville, and that it once existed under the name of “Freedom Hill.” This factor of pride in its origin appears to have been the moving force that has held the community together under inhumane conditions during the last two hundred years [including slavery]. Although this desire to endure as a distinct entity has enabled the Town to survive, it has also produced a community which has severe economic and environmental restraints. … The willingness to endure the known fate of complete economic disaster and personal sacrifice appears to be the most valuable asset that the community has. (White 1973, 2)

Discussion and Conclusions

Marquetta Dickens, a Princeville native and community leader, confronted North Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest in a scene in the documentary Freedom Hill. Forest advised the Princeville leaders and business owners that they had yet to “reach across the aisle” to connect with African American conservative Republicans to get them “on [Princeville’s] team” so they could access more resources to rebuild and sustain the flood-beleaguered town. Dickens later responded to Forest—“my people can’t keep depending on changed hearts and words” (Cox 2022). This moment is significant because it highlights the persistent contradiction between White town/plantation logics and the sustainable development of the Black town. If White development is predicated on extractions from Black spaces, as argued earlier, then Black towns can expect little of the state governments designed to reproduce the same forms of development.

In Development Arrested, Woods (2017) challenged the still-prominent idea that “unfree labor systems, particularly slavery, are feudal or semi feudal throwbacks that are incompatible with capitalism” (6). Instead, he argued, bringing forth the works of scholars like Jamaican economist George Beckford, that there is “capitalist dynamism, adaptability and innovation in plantation regimes and not the rigid and unchanging aristocracy of mythology” (7). Woods made perceptible the evolution of the plantation system of unceasing profit seeking through resource extraction in the contemporary planning and development of social-spatial relations in the Mississippi Delta.

If the Mississippi Delta is a regional representation of those relations, one can understand the cases of Princeville and Tarboro as local representations with regional implications. That is, if the independence efforts of Princeville are viewed properly as attempts to break free from the “social order,” the combined—and ostensibly uncoordinated—efforts of Tarboro, Edgecombe County, the State of North Carolina, and various agencies of the federal government, “innovated” their planning strategies to re-create the same social order that sustained the White towns for more than a century. Per Reed’s (1988) urban Black regime, the locus of power shifted to reinforce White power, stripping Black power of its saliency. The “ordeal” of the challenged water system is one strategy of such innovation and represents just one example of how the U.S. municipality is functionally predicated on Whiteness.

Nevertheless, Princeville still exists after 156 years, a fact made possible not by municipal incorporation or the patronage of the White planter class, but from the collective insistence of formerly enslaved Black people and their descendants to carve out a place of freedom amid unfreedom, to practice livingness in the context of persistently ascribed social death. Such practices of solidarity, of adaptation, of collective and repeated rebuilding after catastrophe, of mutual aid and safety, reflect the modalities of what Gilmore (2022) called “abolition geographies,” in which communities endeavor under adverse structural conditions to build separate structures that create better conditions for living. Winston’s (2021) maroon geographies framework specifies how abolition is spatialized through the evidence and accounts of places like the Black communities of Montgomery County, Maryland; in this case, the story of Princeville, North Carolina, demonstrates how “Black refusals [can] consolidate into an entire infrastructure of fugitivity that organizes and sustains life beyond racial violence” (12). Although Princeville reflects a prominent postbellum approach to pursuing racial parity to White towns through state recognition and legal power—which might appear directly counter to the pursuits of marronage—the town’s lived experience of systematic legal and social subordination, combined with the persistent challenges of living in the floodplain—the geographic refuse of the White planter class—made the reinforcement of maroon practice inevitable for their survival. A preexisting ideological commitment to these practices is thus sufficient, but not necessary for their realization. Indeed, the fundamental challenges of Black capitalism manifested through Black towns like Soul City, North Carolina, and the Greenwood community of Tulsa, Oklahoma (e.g., Black Wall Street), could still result in practices of marronage despite intentions to the contrary. Although by no means automatic, marronage is a Black tradition with practices that have sustained Black survival across time.

Dickens demonstrates her own “flight” from the constraints of formal municipal governance through her founding of Freedom Org, a community development corporation whose “focus is to assist traditionally underresourced communities as well as individual community members to discover their own freedoms. This includes harnessing collective power through historical preservation, economic development, education, community engagement, and agriculture.” The photo above this mission statement depicts a group of Black people and allies holding up Black power fists and kneeling beside the graves of Princeville’s ancestors, prepared to tend to their legacies just as they are prepared to tend to the land through their farming project. The horizontalism and collectivism of Freedom Org’s mission statement, with its continuous connections between people and land and freedom, are the legacy of marronage. Although its origins are inextricable from centuries of enslavement, brutality, and death, marronage has been salient to the continued survival of Black people since legal emancipation and remains a critical reference for practices of refusal of ecological and human extraction and visions of forms of freedom outside of Western regimes.

The phenomenon of Black town marronage extends far beyond North Carolina, and indeed beyond the South. Black towns, both incorporated and unincorporated, from Tamina, Texas, to East Palo Alto, California, face similar fights for autonomy against parallel White towns (Goel et al. 1988; Tresaugue 2015). As Barefield (1972) and White (1973) both acknowledged in the 1970s, standard policy prescriptions do not function as viable solutions to this phenomenon, as the plantation power regime is, as Woods (2017) asserted, innovative and ever evolving. The work of shaping that evolution, however, begins with making it perceptible and focusing increased attention to the practices that endure beyond those innovations. Although there is little known documentation to support an explicit commitment to marronage in Black towns, further research in this area could reveal clearer lineages from the maroon community to the Black town. Regardless of the availability of such documentation, the interrelated projects of Black geographies and abolition geographies could contribute to making those connections clearer both to build a more cohesive narrative of pre- and postslavery Black geographies and to support extant Black towns in strategizing from an always imminently relevant and usable past.

Acknowledgments

I offer my deep gratitude to the editors of Annals of the AAG and my reviewers for their careful attention and helpful feedback on multiple iterations of this article. I also thank the Dangerous Playground writing group at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill for their very generous reading of a much earlier version of the article. Thanks to my partner Dr. Antonia Randolph, for her support and invaluable advice throughout the process. To the scholars of Black geographies, Black towns, and histories of the African diaspora who have taken up marronage in such thoughtful and provocative ways, I thank you for the immense strength of your research and hope to be in continued conversation with you. Finally, very special thanks to Resita Cox, Marquetta Dickens, Kendrick Ransome, and the crew of Freedom Org for their generosity in inviting me to be part of the Freedom Hill documentary project and its generative community conversations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danielle Purifoy

DANIELLE PURIFOY is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research focuses on the racial politics and law of development in Black towns and communities, and on Black ecological relations, particularly in forest landscapes.

Notes

1 Note that this is a debated fact and that there are other Black towns that also claim to be “the first.”