Intellectual historian, political scientist, social entrepreneur and media veteran with an interdisciplinary background, researching "landed Blackness” as "United States Post Emancipation Marronage (USPEM)." A founder of MarronageOrg, Oxbridge Africas (OA), the Cambridge AntiRacism Forum (CARF), Cambridge Enterprise’s CRoSS+Hub, and the Cambridge Histories of Marronage (CHoM) Workshop series, he’s a Teaching Fellow at the Global History Lab (GHL) and a Research Associate at the Cambridge Black Advisory Hub (CamBAH). A native of Tsenecommacah (“the Virginia Tidewater’s” Gloucester County”) as a descendent of the original indigenous Native AmerIndian, the African and European communities, and serves on the Fairfield Foundation’s Family Circle Leadership Group’s Executive Committee.

Abstract: This research analyzes the political thought and intellectual history of Freedom Colony Founding Families (FCFFs) in the United States from 1865 to 1900. Introducing the concepts of “Landed Blackness” and “United States Post Emancipation Marronage (USPEM),” building upon Jonhenry “Hank” Gonzalez’s “post emancipation marronage” and expanding it from Haiti to the USA, this work explores how these families created autonomous Black communities, using land ownership, strategic worship traditions, and collective governance to resist post Civil War systemic white supremacy and institutional racism. Comparing freedom colonies with maroon societies in the African diaspora, the article highlights the global significance of marronage as a framework for understanding “Black landed” autonomy. By engaging with anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial scholarship—including the works of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith—the article situates USPEM within a broader global context of Black resistance and marronage. Through Michel Foucault’s concept of the "regime of truth,” this research investigates how these families created their own truths to resist and redefine their socio-political reality, drawing upon primary sources, family histories, and scholarly literature to provide an in-depth exploration of the socio-political dynamics, intellectual foundations, and economic strategies of freedom colonies as marronage communities. This scholarship connects the history of freedom colonies to contemporary Black political thought, emphasizing their continued relevance in the fight for racial and economic justice today. The article concludes with a reflection on the modern relevance of freedom colonies in movements for reparations and racial justice.