The documented history of the Brown-Taylor Family has them as established in South Carolina as “free blacks” in the 1700’s against a backdrop of an evolving empire of plantation slavery envisioned by Christopher Columbus during his first voyage in 1492.  African American history was being documented from this period as the first Africans arrive in Hispaniola with Christopher Columbus as free people.  There is much evidence to contradict this stated first arrival of Africans to what is being coined as the “New World.”

 

Historians, archeologists, anthropologists and other scientists and scholars now know that Columbus did not “discover” America. Not only were Native Americans present when he reached the New World, but also Africans, Asians and Europeans, among others, who had been sailing to the Americas thousands of years before Columbus ventured across the Atlantic.(1)

 

South Carolina in particular was an English settlement and held the majority of African Americans.  Most of the free black families established in the Thirteen Colonies before the American Revolution were descended from unions between white women, whether indentured servant or free, and African men, whether indentured servant, free, or slave. These relationships took place mostly among the working class, reflecting the more fluid societies of the time. Because the mixed-race children were born to free women, they were free. Through use of court documents, deeds, wills, and other records, such families were traced as the ancestors of nearly 80 percent of the free Negroes or free blacks recorded in the censuses of the Upper South (Va., Maryland, NC, Tenn.) from 1790-1810.

                                                                                               

                                                                        Authored by: Ayisha Jeffries Cisse (Brown)