14663: Burnham: Jorge Biassou in Florida (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: thor burnham <thorald_mb@hotmail.com>

>From Thor Burnham:


A moment in black history: General Jorge Biassou
Read more Black History online

http://www.staugustine.com/stories/020103/new_1293356.shtml

By DAVID NOLAN
Special to The Record

Everyone has heard of Gen. Colin Powell. But did you know that two centuries
before Colin Powell there was a black general in St. Augustine? His name was
Jorge Biassou, and he was one of the leaders of the slave uprising in Haiti
in the 1790s, recruiting Toussaint L'Ouverture to the cause. In the twists
and turns of international politics, Biassou became a Spanish general.

He came to St. Augustine in 1796 and stayed until his death in 1801. He was
the second highest-paid official of the colony. He lived in the Salcedo
House on St. George Street (a reconstruction of that building now houses
Whetstone's Chocolates), and commanded a free black militia out of Fort
Matanzas (now run by the National Park Service). His funeral was held at the
Catholic Cathedral and he was buried at Tolomato Cemetery on Cordova Street.
Alas, there is no marker celebrating this black general at any of these
places.

Biassou has not only been written about by Jane Landers in her book "Black
Society in Spanish Florida," but also figured as a character in the 1995
novel "All Souls Rising" by Madison Smartt Bell, which was a finalist for
the National Book Award.

David Nolan is a St. Augustine author and historian. For the past 25 years,
he has collected and written about the black history of St. Augustine
drawing from personal interviews and oral histories, microfilms and news
clippings of The St. Augustine Record and The Florida Times-Union, the files
of the St. Augustine Historical Society Research Library, the Martin Luther
King Jr. Center, Atlanta, and other resources from around the United States.



_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail