Extract
BLACK CARIB BASTION of FREEDOM.
These indomitable people maintained a stronghold of liberty on St. Vincent, despite waves of colonial oppression
Like so much else, it was Columbus's fault; he dislodged the pebble that set off the avalanche of demographic upheaval that first flung three races together--and at each other's throats--in the West Indies. The Indians were already there, by turns peacefully or bloodily minding their own business. Then the Europeans arrived to decimate them and usurp their land and with them came a trickle of kidnapped Africans that became a torrent as the century wore on. The elements assembled, Euro, Afro, and Indio, were smelted into uniquely American alloys in a Caribbean furnace stoked to the melting point by monumental injustice. Yet out of this bitter history came transcendent stories of freedom--such as that of the Black Caribs of Saint Vincent. Their tiny nation, an amalgam of Afro-Carib half breeds with runaways from plantation slavery and castaways from wrecked slave ships, was a beacon of liberty in a ...See the full content of this document
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