Roundtable

 Sebastian Garcia, John Lancaster, Scot French

Fifty years ago, the US celebrated its last major historical anniversary: the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence. At the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement, Black activists viewed the upcoming national remembrance as an opportunity to revise normative narratives about the Black lived experience throughout the nation’s past. In December 1974, Marcia M. Greenlee, the Historical Projects Director of the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation (ABC), filed a National Register of Historic Places nomination form for Negro Fort, the former site of a maroon community of free Blacks and Native Americans that existed in Spanish Florida between 1815 and 1816. Greenlee’s nomination of Negro Fort was a part of the ABC’s broader mission to recover and memorialize Black sites of memory ahead of the US Bicentennial. In the section about the site’s significance, Greenlee christened Negro Fort’s violent destruction at the hands of General Andrew Jackson as part of his desire to “[bring] the entire Florida province under American rule.”

The site that American statesmen and soldiers termed “the Negro Fort” in 1815 was created by the British during the War of 1812 as a base of operations for their planned invasion of the southern US through Spanish Florida. Following their defeat in February 1815, the British left their fortifications and weapons to their Indigenous and formerly enslaved Black allies, who helped the British build, grow, and sustain the military installation during the war. The fort’s inhabitants lived autonomously for about a year and a half until American convoys led by Andrew Jackson obliterated “the Negro Fort” in July 1816, as they felt threatened by its real and imagined symbols of Black freedom and Indigenous resistance. The destruction of what previously stood as the largest free community of formerly enslaved and Indigenous peoples in US history paved the way for Jackson to take over the entire Florida peninsula and eventually incorporate it into the United States. Since the fort’s destruction in 1816, different generations of Americans, including Greenlee’s, have invoked its memory to reinforce or recast contemporary attitudes about race, history, identity, and the nation.

Our roundtable seeks to illuminate this forgotten chapter of Florida’s role in the American story by discussing our production of a six-episode narrative podcast series titled "The Memory of Negro Fort Podcast." Our podcast tells the story of how and why Americans throughout time have remembered and erased the memory of a community and its destruction that carried considerable ramifications for Florida’s cession to the Union, the US’s expansion of slavery, Indian removal, and the racialized ideologies that accompanied these efforts. Our podcast also leverages the increased attention paid to our nation’s past throughout America 250 celebrations to help re-situate the story of Negro Fort to the national story.

Through the two producers and faculty mentor who guided the project institutionally, our roundtable seeks to frame the construction and publication of The Memory of Negro Fort Podcast as a case study for how digital humanities practitioners might embrace podcasting as an innovative way to tell essential stories about our nation’s past. Throughout our proposed roundtable, we plan to highlight our historical research on the memory of Negro Fort and talk about how we adapted it into a narrative-driven podcast. Given that the public increasingly engages with history through podcasts, we viewed the medium as an apt antidote to our subject’s contemporary obscurity. Despite this growing affinity, few conversations deconstruct podcasting as a genre and praxis that democratizes history into the public sphere. Consequently, we position our roundtable as an instructive space to demonstrate how we coalesced the elements of narrative-driven podcasts—including interviews, music, sound effects, and voice actors—in ways that both differ from and mirror traditional academic methods of researching and communicating about the past. In other words, we view podcasting not simply as a communicative medium but also as a genre that allows us to interpret and reconstruct the past in new ways for diverse audiences inside and outside of the academy.