BLACK PIONEERS

WHAT? BLACK PIONEERS? INDEED! Most famously, the "Trail of Tears" saga customarily depicts the cruel uprooting of the so-called "Five Civilized Tribes" from their wealthy, American assimilation roots, lands, possessions, in the southeastern states, and their overland trek to distant Oklahoma with their own mixed multitudes of African slaves. The 1830s and 1840s are the periods in history, when uprooting occurred in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, and other southeastern states or territories. Then-President Andrew Jackson was the moving spirit and principal political, "white" manifest destiny maven behind most of it. But, there also was another, less famous, as infamous, trail of tears, involving multiple generational families of "free" African American veterans, whose freedom roots go back to the American Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, some were before this, dating back into the 17th century as being FREE people. These brave resourceful people had later married, bought land--land that they had wrestled from the howling wilderness-- to make into productive colored farming communities, consisting of kin, friends, collaterals, in the nation's still hopeful adolescence when the stirring rhetoric of the "Declaration of Independence" still resounded! Anna-Lisa Cox in her rousing book, THE BONE AND SINEW OF THE LAND: AMERICA'S FORGOTTEN BLACK PIONEERS & THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY (2018), recounts family generations' moves from the same lands as the "Trail of Tears" Indians, in roughly the same time period, into land of Northwest Territory of the Ordinance of 1787. Here is Indiana, Ohio, Illinois , they sought to restore their uprooted lives from encroaching whiteness' privileges, who free blacks defied. White privilege took away their rights to bear arms, vote , educate their children, have black preachers and others that were designed to deny them personhood, prosperity, and anything but subservience. The descendants of free black men and women found this to be wholly unacceptable , so they moved into the Northwest, where matters were not ideal. But were far better than what they were facing in States like North Carolina, Tennessee, etc . These black pioneers are easily forgotten as we see versions of white pioneers traveling 'West;' but these black ones had pioneered, when what was then the "West," before 1804's Louisiana Purchase.