Gad the 7th son of Israel

GAD The Black Seminoles……

The Black Seminoles or Afro-Seminoles are Black Indians associated with the Seminole people in Florida and Oklahoma. They are mostly blood descendants of the Seminole people, free Blacks, and escaped slaves (called maroons) who allied with Seminole groups in Spanish Florida. Many have Seminole lineage, but due to the stigma of having dark skin, they all have been categorized as slaves or freedmen.

Black Seminole19th-century engraving of a Black Seminole warrior of the First Seminole War (1817–8)

Total populationest. 2,000

Regions with significant populations
Oklahoma, Florida,
& Texas in the United States;
the Bahamas; Mexico

LanguagesEnglish, Afro-Seminole Creole, Spanish

ReligionProtestantism, Roman Catholicism and syncretic Islam

Related ethnic groups Gullah, Mascogos, Seminoles

Historically, the Black Seminoles lived mostly in distinct bands near the Native American Seminole. Some were held as slaves, particularly of Seminole leaders, but the Black Seminole had more freedom than did slaves held by whites in the South and by other Native American tribes, including the right to bear arms.
Today, Black Seminole descendants live primarily in rural communities around the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. Its two Freedmen’s bands, the Caesar Bruner Band and the Dosar Barkus Band, are represented on the General Council of the Nation. Other centers are in Florida, Texas, the Bahamas, and northern Mexico.

Migration to Mexico

Facing the threat of enslavement, the Black Seminole leader John Horse and about 180 Black Seminoles staged a mass escape in 1849 to northern Mexico, where slavery had been abolished twenty years earlier. The black fugitives crossed to freedom in July 1850.They rode with a faction of traditionalist Seminole under the chief Coacochee, who led the expedition. The Mexican government welcomed the Seminole allies as border guards on the frontier, and they settled at Nacimiento, Coahuila.