[9] In 1990, the tribe received the majority of a $56 million judgment trust by the United States, for seizure of lands in Florida in 1823, and the Freedmen have worked to gain a share of it.

[11] The Spanish strategy for defending their claim of Florida at first was based on forcing the local Indian tribes into a mission system.

However, due to a combination of raids by South Carolinan colonists and newly introduced European diseases to which the Indians had no immunity, Florida's native population was quickly decimated.

[citation needed] As early as 1689, enslaved Africans fled from the South Carolina Lowcountry to Spanish Florida seeking freedom.

Over centuries, the Africans in the Lowcountry and Sea Islands gradually formed what has become known as the Gullah culture of the coastal Southeast, with its own Creole language.

[12] Under a 1693 edict from King Charles II of Spain, the black refugees received liberty in exchange for defending the Spanish settlers at St. Augustine.

Following the Treaty of Paris signed in 1763 at the conclusion of the Seven Years' War, Spanish Florida was ceded to the Kingdom of Great Britain.

He believed their name was derived from the word "simanó-li", which according to John Reed Swanton, "is applied by the Creeks to people who remove from populous towns and live by themselves.".

This was used to describe the runaway slave communities of Florida and of the Great Dismal Swamp on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, on colonial islands of the Caribbean, and other parts of the New World.

Adopting certain practices of the Native Americans, maroons wore Seminole clothing and ate the same foodstuffs prepared the same way: they gathered the roots of a native plant called coontie, grinding, soaking, and straining them to make a starchy flour similar to arrowroot, as well as mashing corn with a mortar and pestle to make sofkee, a sort of porridge often used as a beverage, with water added— ashes from the fire wood used to cook the sofkee were occasionally added to it for extra flavor.

African American linguist and historian, Lorenzo Dow Turner documented about fifteen words spoken by black Seminoles that came from the Kikongo language.

Certain cultural practices, such as "jumping the broom" to celebrate marriage, hailed from the plantations; other customs, such as some names used for black towns, reflected African heritage.

[27] In exchange for paying an annual tribute of livestock, crops, hunting, and war party obligations, Black prisoners or fugitives found sanctuary among the Seminole.

I saw, while riding along the borders of the ponds, fine rice growing; and in the village large corn-cribs were filled, while the houses were larger and more comfortable than those of the Native Americans themselves.

[33] Creek slavers and those from other Native groups, and whites, began raiding the Black Seminole settlements to kidnap and enslave people.

Black enslaved people had a syncretic form of Christianity brought with them from the plantations and developed a Pan-African culture that was expressed in writing, language, religion, and social structure.

The slaves joined Native Americans and maroons in the destruction of 21 sugar plantations from Christmas Day, December 25, 1835, through the summer of 1836.

Historians do not agree on whether these events should be considered a separate slave rebellion; generally they view the attacks on the sugar plantations as part of the Seminole War.

The Mexican government welcomed the Seminole allies as border guards on the frontier, and they settled at El Nacimiento [es], Coahuila.

For the next 20 years, black Seminoles served as militiamen and Native American fighters in Mexico, where they became known as mascogos, derived from the tribal name of the Creek – Muskogee.

[54] By the 1940s, descendants of the Mascogos numbered 400–500 in El Nacimiento de los Negros, Coahuila, inhabiting lands adjacent to the Kickapoo tribe.

After allotment, "[f]reedmen, unlike their [Native] peers on the blood roll, were permitted to sell their land without clearing the transaction through the Indian Bureau.

The black Seminole Scouts (originally an African American unit despite the name) played a lead role in the Texas-Indian Wars of the 1870s, when they were based at Fort Clark, Texas, the home of the Buffalo Soldiers.

[60] Descendants of Afro Seminoles, who identify as Bahamian, reside on Andros Island in the Bahamas in an Area called Red Bay.

A few hundred refugees had left in the early nineteenth century from Cape Florida to go to the British colony for sanctuary from American enslavement.

[66] The settlement was in compensation for land taken from them in northern Florida by the United States at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Moultrie Creek in 1823, when most of the Seminole and maroons were moved to a reservation in the center of the territory.

The Oklahoma and Florida groups were awarded portions of the judgement related to their respective populations in the early 20th century, when records were made of the mostly full-blood descendants of the time.

However, the black Seminole descendants asserted their ancestors had also held and farmed land in Florida, and suffered property losses as a result of US actions.

In October 2000, the Seminole Nation filed its own suit against the Interior Department, contending it had the sovereign right to determine tribal membership.

Although the BIA could not issue CDIBs to the Seminole Freedmen, in 2003 the agency recognized them as members of the tribe and advised them of continuing benefits for which they were eligible.