William Loren Katz (1927–2019)

My guess is that this was originally intended to about blacks and Seminoles, but that there wasn’t enough material for a full book so author William Loren Katz expanded it to include black Indians in general (“Indians” is his term). The result is uneven; the information about blacks and their relations with the Seminoles is interesting and scholarly, but the rest of the book is a farrago of anecdotes about anything Katz can find that’s even peripherally related to blacks and Indians. Europeans are always capitalist exploiters and blacks and Indians are always mutually supportive peaceful protosocialists except when they’re not, of course, and Katz gets around that by calling Indians that fight other Indians “mercenaries” and claiming that whites forced tribes to keep black slaves.

There’s very little – a few pages – about the Civil War era; it’s claimed that the Five Nations (Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole) treated their black slaves kindlier than whites did. There’s no mention of Stand Waties’ Confederate Cherokee massacre of black Union soldiers at the Second Battle of Cabin Creek and no mention of the ongoing Cherokee and Chickasaw Freedmen controversy.

Although there’s a short bibliography, there are no footnotes, which makes it difficult to check out things that Katz claims. There are numerous photographs that Katz claims depict “black Indians”, but none of them have source attributions, again making it difficult to check; an Amazon reviewer claims that one of the photographs actually depicts Filipinos.

Interesting for the accounts of black Seminoles – but I’m taking those suspiciously until I can do more research.… (altro)

Though Canadian students are not taught American History in any detail, most can likely name Plymouth Rock as the first foreign colony in the United States.

Some might even dredge up Jamestown, or the Lost Colony of Roanoke.

But they will not name the colony on the mainland of South Carolina, established in the wake of Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón.

Even though that was six decades before Roanoke Island, eight decades before Jamestown, and almost 100 years before the Mayflower landed.

In fact, even American readers, even those who have recognized the complicated heritage which surrounds the celebration of holidays and anniversaries like Columbus Day, may not have heard of this colony. (Have you?)

"In the distant South Carolina forests, two and half centuries before the Declaration of Independence, two people of color first lit the fires of freedom and exalted its principles."

The legends of the white, Christian, European settlers are much more pervasive. They're the folks that schoolchildren draw and colour in social studies classrooms. Except that, ironically, most of the colours are left in the crayon box.

"Though neither white, Christian, nor European, they became the first settlement of any permanence on these shores to include people from overseas. As such, they qualify as our earliest inheritance."

Forget the frontier mythology, Katz suggests:

"In the real wilderness two dark people met and often united. They were not driven together by any special affinity based on a similar skin color. Their meetings were unwittingly arranged by their enemies, the Europeans, who exploited both."

The history that Katz discusses requires all of the crayons in the crayon box. He is not only discussing the races that are traditionally left out of the colonial versions of history, but also the intersections between them.

And he's not just talking about it. Every couple of pages, there is an image -- a photograph or a painting -- which along with quotes from original source documents and liberal use of sub-headings makes for a good reading pace.

These images do not show the string of pale faces that one most often sees in the plates of conventional history texts, and they often reveal a spectrum of pigmentation that demonstrates that there is nothing black-and-white about this history lesson.

My longer response to this work is available here.… (altro)