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.