The Ethnocide of the Black Seminoles Sold out by Greedy Natives for Citizenship
- Ishmael Bey
- 2 days ago
- 15 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
A Legal, Racial, and Political Disappearance of a Nation
( By Ishmael A. Bey — Urban Indian Heritage Society )
Ethnocide as the Erasure of a People by Classification
Ethnocide is the deliberate destruction of a people’s identity, culture, and continuity not through physical extermination, but through legal, bureaucratic, and racial means.
The Black Seminoles So-called Black-Indigenous descendants of free maroon and Indian alliances in Florida and the Southeast were systematically targeted for erasure through state law, federal policy, and racial science from 1830 onward.
If the Snyder Act made all Native Americans citizens in 1924 then why were the Seminoles still fighting for citizenship in 1927 ???
The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act (Snyder Act)
The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States. However and this is critical it did not automatically override tribal sovereignty or extend to all Native groups equally.
Key details:
Many tribes were already under “trust” status with the federal government through treaties.
Some, like the Seminoles of Florida, had never signed a treaty surrendering their sovereignty.
Therefore, U.S. officials could (and did) argue that those Seminoles were technically “foreign wards” or “outside the jurisdiction” of the United States.
So even though Congress said “all Indians,” the government used legal loopholes to exclude independent nations particularly the Florida Seminoles who had never formally submitted to U.S. rule.
The Snyder Act
The Seminoles’ Unique Political Status
The Seminole Nation was never fully conquered. After the Third Seminole War (1855–1858), many Seminoles fled deep into the Everglades and maintained independent bands.
When the U.S. claimed victory, these unconquered bands:
Never signed a treaty with the United States.
Were not “allotted” under the Dawes Act.
Lived outside of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ control.
As a result, the federal government didn’t classify them as wards or citizens they existed in a gray zone: not foreign, not domestic, truly “sovereign.”
That’s why the 1927 article shows Chief Tony Tommy trying to petition President Calvin Coolidge directly for citizenship.
He wanted voluntary inclusion for his people, to receive benefits and protections other Native groups already had but without losing their Seminole identity.
Racial Politics: “Aborigines” and the Florida Color Line
Notice the article uses the term “Aborigines” instead of “Indians.” That language reflects both the scientific racism of the era and Florida’s Jim Crow racial hierarchy.
Florida officials often classified Seminoles especially darker, “Negroid-featured” bands as “Colored” or “Negro,” not “Indian.” This created a dual exclusion:
Legally excluded as non-citizen “Indians.”
Socially excluded as “Negroes,” barred from the white/Native benefits system.
So while western tribes like the Navajo or Sioux got citizenship and benefits, Florida Seminoles were left stateless and denied both the rights of citizens and the recognition of their Indigenous sovereignty.
The Era that the Black Seminoles were sold out for Federal Recognition
Legal Gray Zone (1920s–1930s)
Until the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, the federal government had no uniform mechanism to recognize non-treaty tribes. That’s why Seminoles weren’t officially recognized until 1957, when the Seminole Tribe of Florida was organized and federally acknowledged.
Between 1924 and 1957, Seminoles in Florida:
Had no formal citizenship status recognized by either the state or federal government.
Could not vote, receive allotments, or access federal health/education programs.
Were effectively a sovereign nation without recognition the same condition Chief Tony Tommy was trying to end.
The Larger Meaning: Citizenship ≠ Equality
This case reveals how the U.S. government weaponized citizenship as a political tool. Even when Indigenous people wanted it, they were told they didn’t qualify. Even when they didn’t want it, it was imposed upon them.
The 1924 Act was therefore symbolic, not universal it masked a continued system of exclusion based on:
Race (“Negroid” features excluded from “Indian” classification)
Treaty status (no treaty meant no recognition)
Land status (no reservation meant no “jurisdiction”)
Chief Tony Tommy’s 1927 petition is direct evidence that citizenship for American Indians was conditional, racialized, and selectively applied, not a blanket inclusion.
🪶 Summary
In 1927, the Tampa Bay Times printed Chief Tony Tommy’s petition to President Coolidge under the headline “Seminole Indians Seek Citizenship in the United States,” describing the Florida Seminoles as “Aborigines.” At that moment, the word carried an anthropological meaning signifying primitive or original peoples but within the American racial hierarchy it functioned as a code for non-white, non-citizen, and non-European.
When Senator Scott Beason used the same term on an FBI wiretap eight decades later, calling Black casino patrons “Aborigines,” he repeated that older logic: separating dark-skinned descendants of the South’s first peoples from those legally recognized as “Indians.” In both cases, “Aborigine” did not affirm Indigeneity; it was deployed to strip it away to mark certain populations as outside the boundaries of citizenship and civilization.
The newspaper’s “Aborigines seeking citizenship” and Beason’s “Aborigines in the casino” thus form a linguistic continuum: from the scientific racism of the 1920s to the coded racism of the twenty-first century, the same word has been used to deny the Indigenous identity of Black Americans and reinforce the false divide between “Indian” and “Negro” that underpinned the ethnocide of the Black Seminoles.
Historical Foundation: The Multi-Ethnic Seminole Nation
Before conquest, the Seminoles were not a single “tribe” but a confederation of Creek refugees, Yamasee, Miccosukee, African maroons and others.
The very word Seminole derives from the Spanish cimarrón meaning “runaway” or “free one.”
Freedom not race defined Seminole identity.
Samara, Simara, Cimarron, Maroon , Seminole arawak: símara;
espanõl: cimarrón;
português: marrom, chimarrão
Mawon In Haitian Creole
Ximawon
This freedom-based identity made them dangerous to the slaveholding and colonial order: a living proof that Indians , Free Blacks and Africans could unite outside of white control.
However the Timeline shows that a Split took place within Seminole Tribal Identity
The Legal Construction of Ethnocide
1. 1830–1842: Racial War and Captivity
The U.S. declared the Second Seminole War.
Gen. Thomas Jesup (1837) stated: “This is a Negro, not an Indian war.”
With that phrase, Washington reclassified the conflict as a slave rebellion, not an Indigenous war stripping the Seminoles of treaty protections.
Captured Darker-Indigenous people were sorted by skin color: lighter captives treated as Indians, darker captives sold or re-enslaved.
→ Legal act of ethnocide: Dividing one nation by phenotype and destroying its political unity.
1853: The Florida Indian Ban — Criminalizing Indigeneity
Florida’s Legislature passed “An Act to provide for the removal of the Indians now remaining in Florida beyond the limits of the State.” “It shall be unlawful for any Indian or Indians to remain within the limits of this State…” “Provided, that the Indians and half-breeds residing among the whites shall not be included.”
This act made being Indian a crime unless one could pass as white or “half-breed.” Black-Indigenous families who remained were forced to register as Colored, Creole, or Mulatto to survive.
→ Legal act of ethnocide: Criminalization of Indigenous identity and forced racial reclassification.
1866: The Freedmen Clause and the Invention of the “Black Seminole”
The Reconstruction Treaty with the Seminole Nation promised equal rights to “persons of African descent and blood.”
Bureaucrats twisted this clause to segregate rather than include.
“Freedmen Rolls” replaced the unified Seminole census, separating the “Negro element” from the “by-blood” rolls.
→ Administrative ethnocide: Legal separation of one people into two “races” within the same nation.
1870–1924: Racial Naturalization and Citizenship Exclusion
The 1870 Naturalization Act allowed only “white persons” and “persons of African descent” to become citizens leaving Indigenous and mixed people ineligible.
The Indian Citizenship Act (1924) granted citizenship only to Indians “under federal jurisdiction.”
The Florida Seminoles who had no treaty and were not federally enrolled were left stateless.
→ Political ethnocide: Declaring the original Seminoles non-citizens in their own land.
1924–1935: The “Ban on Indian Blood”
U.S. naturalization law barred “aliens of Indian blood.”
Caribbean and Black-Indigenous applicants (like Harold Ernest Dore in 1935) were denied citizenship for admitting Carib or Indian ancestry.
Simultaneously, denying African ancestry left them ineligible as “non-white aliens.”
→ Legal paradox: Indian blood = foreign; Negro blood = servile. Identity itself becomes a barrier to existence.
“Ban on Indian Blood”: What It Really Meant
This phrase the “ban on Indian blood” was not a single statute, but a composite of U.S. racial exclusion policies that treated Indigenous ancestry (especially Caribbean, Latin American, or “foreign Indian”) as an alien race, outside the “free white” and “African” categories recognized in law.
Specifically:
The Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson–Reed Act) established race-based quotas and classified “Indians” from outside the continental U.S. as Asiatic, thereby banning their entry and naturalization.
The U.S. Supreme Court cases Ozawa v. U.S. (1922) and U.S. v. Thind (1923) codified “whiteness” as a prerequisite for naturalization excluding Indians, Arabs, Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous Americans born abroad.
By 1935, immigration officers routinely used “Indian blood” as a disqualifying factor for citizenship regardless of whether the person was North, South, or Caribbean Indigenous.
In Dore’s case, then, the presence of “Indian blood” — even from the Caribs of the West Indies made him “non-white” and thus barred from naturalization.
Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton UP, 2004): “The 1924 Act redefined American citizenship as a racial privilege. Indigenous and mixed-race peoples from the Caribbean and Latin America, though often Christian and English-speaking, were rendered racially ineligible for naturalization.”
Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers (UNC Press, 1995): “Under the 1790 and 1870 acts, Indian blood disqualified an applicant unless it could be obscured by whiteness or replaced by African descent.”
Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (NYU Press, 1996):
“U.S. courts treated Indigenous ancestry as the definitive marker of non-citizenship, even when the applicant’s culture and nationality were Western.”
Chief Tony Tommy’s Petition (1927)
In 1927, Seminole leader Tony Tommy (Tommy Jumper) announced his intent to petition President Calvin Coolidge for Seminole citizenship.⁹ He represented the “pure” Everglades bands and deliberately omitted the Afro-Indigenous Seminoles living near coastal Black communities.
This was not just betrayal but survival politics.
To secure recognition, he had to conform to Washington’s racial ideal of the “authentic Indian.” Including the Black Seminoles would have delegitimize his plea under Jim Crow norms.
Bureau of Indian Affairs Segregation and the 1957 Constitution
By the 1930s, BIA officials in Florida — notably C.C. Belle and H.T. Knecht — wrote openly that “Negro Seminoles” were ineligible for inclusion in any tribal rolls.¹⁰
In 1957, the United States recognized the Seminole Tribe of Florida but restricted membership to those listed on the 1957 “by-blood” roll. Afro-Indigenous descendants were excluded from their own nation.
Through these overlapping systems, the Black Seminoles endured a full-scale ethnocide, the destruction of a people’s identity through law, policy, and narrative.
Continuity and Survival
Despite the erasure, the Black Seminole lineage survives:
In Mexico: The Mascogo people of Coahuila, descendants of John Horse’s followers, maintain Afro-Seminole language and customs.
In Texas: Seminole descendants known as Black Indian Scouts served in the U.S. Army from 1870–1914.
In Oklahoma: Seminole Freedmen continue to litigate for equal citizenship under the 1866 treaty.
In Florida and the Caribbean: Afro-Indigenous families maintain genealogical and oral memory of Seminole maroon heritage under the guise of “Colored” or “Creole” ancestry.
Legal Conclusion: Ethnocide Proven
The United States and the State of Florida committed ethnocide by:
Criminalizing Indigenous identity (1853).
Racially partitioning a unified people (1866).
Denying them national belonging (1870–1924).
Rewarding racial purity over heritage (1957).
These acts meet the United Nations definition of ethnocide:
“The destruction of the cultural identity of a group without necessarily destroying its members.”¹¹
The Black Seminoles were not exterminated; they were paper-genocided out of existence.
The Path to Reclamation
Organizations like the Urban Indian Heritage Society now carry the work of reversal. By documenting genealogical continuity, asserting collective identity under UNDRIP (Articles 8–33), and invoking the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (25 U.S.C. §5301), descendants can reclaim the status denied to their ancestors.
UIHS stands as both a memorial to ethnocide and a movement of rebirth proof that while legal erasure can destroy names, it cannot erase lineages.
The ethnocide of the Black Seminoles was the erasure of freedom itself, a campaign to obliterate a people who embodied the fusion of Indigenous sovereignty and African liberation. Through laws of removal, racial science, and recognition, the United States extinguished the political existence of the very people who first defined liberty on its soil.
Yet the descendants endure.
Their survival in Mexico, Oklahoma, Florida, and America’s cities is the living contradiction to centuries of policy that sought to unmake them.
They are, still, the Ya Seminoli —- The free ones.
Selected References
UNESCO, Draft Convention on the Crime of Ethnocide, 1948.
Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (Univ. of Texas Press, 1993).
Thomas S. Jesup, Letter to Secretary of War Joel Poinsett, 1837, National Archives, War Dept. Records.
Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Florida, 1852–1853, pp. 149–151.
Treaty with the Seminoles, March 21, 1866, U.S. Statutes at Large 14:755.
Naturalization Act of 1870, 16 Stat. 254.
Indian Citizenship Act, June 2, 1924, 43 Stat. 253.
The Courier-News, Feb. 22, 1935, “Denial of Negro Blood May Cost Man U.S. Citizenship.”
Tampa Bay Times, Feb. 6, 1927, “Seminole Indians Seek Citizenship in United States.”
Bureau of Indian Affairs, Florida Agency Correspondence (Belle & Knecht, 1933–1939).
United Nations Economic and Social Council, Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, 1970.
Bonus Article :
The Political Rebranding of the “Aboriginal”: Detribalized Black Indigeneity from Florida to the Modern South
Throughout American racial history, language has functioned as an instrument of classification, separation, and erasure. The term “Aboriginal” originally meaning first or from the beginning underwent a profound semantic inversion in the United States. By the early twentieth century, it had become a descriptor for people considered Indigenous in origin but racially unfit for tribal status. In both the Jim Crow South and federal Indian policy, “Aboriginal” became the name for the detribalized Indigenous-Black population those whose ancestry linked them to America’s first peoples but whose political recognition had been destroyed through racial law.
Florida’s Dual Narrative of Citizenship and Exclusion
When the Tampa Bay Times reported in 1927 that “Seminole Indians Seek Citizenship in the United States,” it described the Florida Seminoles as “Aborigines.” The use of that word did not celebrate their Indigeneity it positioned them as outsiders, native yet foreign, original yet uncivilized. It acknowledged their existence while simultaneously denying their sovereignty. Within Florida’s colonial structure, “Aborigines” referred to the Indigenous remnants who lived beyond state jurisdiction and outside federal treaties.
This linguistic framing allowed Florida and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to separate the “Indian Seminoles” (those living in the Everglades who could be racially depicted as non-African) from the “Black Seminoles,” the maroon descendants living near coastal towns and Black settlements. The former were constructed as “tribal Indians,” potential candidates for recognition; the latter were written out of existence as “Negroes.” Thus, in Florida’s racial bureaucracy, “Aboriginal” became shorthand for a population too dark to be Indian, too native to be African, and too free to be white a people trapped in a social category of dispossession.
Beason’s Remark and the Continuity of Racial Logic
Eighty-four years later, Alabama Senator Scott Beason invoked the same word under vastly different circumstances but with the same racial meaning. During a 2011 FBI wiretap of state lawmakers discussing Black casino patrons, one Republican remarked, “Those are your Indians,” to which Beason replied, “They’re not Indians; they’re Aborigines.” His statement carried the full weight of the South’s racial lexicon. He used “Indian” to represent official recognition and legitimacy, and “Aborigine” to signify the racialized other dark-skinned, culturally alien, and outside the protected identity of “real Indians.”
Just as Florida officials once used “Aborigine” to describe unrecognized Seminoles, Beason used it to mark Black Americans as non-citizen primitives in their own ancestral territory. The continuity between these usages reveals a persistent ideological thread: the notion that certain Black Indigenous populations are “native” but not “nation.” Both in 1927 Florida and in 2011 Alabama, “Aboriginal” served to acknowledge presence while denying belonging.
Detribalization as a Tool of Control
This linguistic shift from “Indigenous” to “Aboriginal” mirrors the process of detribalization that occurred across the Southeast. By redefining Afro-Indigenous peoples as Aboriginal remnants rather than organized nations, the state could simultaneously erase treaty responsibilities and segregate them under the category of “Colored.” It was a bureaucratic sleight of hand: racialize the tribal, and the treaty vanishes.
The same dynamic that excluded Black Seminoles from federal rolls in 1957 reappears in Beason’s casual remark more than half a century later. Both reflect the belief that dark-skinned Indigenous people are Indigenous in origin but alien in law a people whose very existence confuses the racial order. To call them “Aborigines” is to render them native but stateless, Indigenous but rightless.
Sign and Share the Petition
From Recognition to Reclamation
The persistence of this term demonstrates how linguistic ethnocide continues into the present. The word “Aboriginal” in these contexts does not describe ancestry; it prescribes hierarchy. It is a label used by state power to name the descendants of America’s first peoples while denying their collective political identity.
The Urban Indian Heritage Society challenges this colonial vocabulary by restoring meaning to the word’s original root —ab origine—and reclaiming it as a statement of survival. Those who were dismissed as “Aborigines” are, in truth, the first peoples of the Southeast, the descendants of Seminole, Yamasee, Creek, and maroon ancestors who refused erasure. What the state once called “detribalized,” UIHS now calls re-tribalized the return of a people to their name, their heritage, and their rightful place among the Indigenous nations of this land.
The Natives Sold out the Black Indians for Federal Benefits from Great White Father
FIRST TRIBE
