[music] - 200 years ago, there were people living here who took tremendous chances for freedom.

- How long have this history been here and nobody knows.

These people were courageous.

They were resilient.

And these are the themes of Angola.

[music] People drive by this site every day and don't know the history of this plot of land.

It is a mighty history.

[music] Yes, this is the place.

This is the site that started me on a path of [music] curiosity about the people who lived on this property in the early 1800s.

And the name of the settlement was Angola.

[music] - Angola is the evocative name for an early 19th century Maroon community on the south side of the Manatee River, one of the rivers that empties into Tampa Bay on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

When I refer to Angola as a Maroon community that refers to people who were seeking freedom, escape from enslavement was not just to the North.

Starting in the 1680s, people went south to Spanish Florida.

[music] - The ownership of Florida over the centuries really comes down to European colonial powers, and Ponce de Leon was the first European to claim Florida for the Spanish crown in 1513.

The Spanish crown owned Florida for most of the next 300 years.

- Starting in the 1680s, the Spanish King Charles II decreed that anyone who escaped in what was then the English colonies could be free and waves of people came.

- Enslaved people left plantations in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and they were seeking safety.

It was said to be a haven.

They existed along the Manatee River until 1821.

[music] This wasn't just a community of formerly enslaved people.

You had Seminoles, and they were intermingling and trading with each other.

[music] - The Seminole people are descendants of the Creek people.

The Creek people had their own colonial struggles against first the British colonies and later the United States.

When blacks migrated south to Angola, they began to assimilate.

There was an allyship.

And so in the eyes of many people, they began to be referred to as Black Seminoles because of that close relationship.

[music] - This is history that we were not taught.

So I was coming to this story as a total novice.

I had read Dr.

Kantor Brown's book called Florida's Peace River Frontier, and I started asking the historians in Manatee County about Angola, and they shared with me that this was a myth.

At that time, we had no physical evidence.

And so I started the looking for Angola Project.

I thought, I need to tell this story.

I learned that through archeology, we can prove that certain early settlements like Angola existed.

- Archeology isn't simply about just taking a shovel and starting to dig.

My first responsibility was to do the background research.

[music] - Reflections of Manatee is a historic museum that's dedicated to sharing the stories of all the people that settled along this area of the Manatee River.

Trudy and Jeff Williams are the founders, and it is because of them that they preserved the Manatee Mineral Spring property, as well as the three houses from the 1860s that make up the museum here.

In 2006, I was a recent graduate of New College of Florida, and I had done research under Dr.

Uzi Baram, focused along the Manatee River that had possibly related to Angola.

Trudy and Jeff approached us and said, we have the Manatee Mineral Spring property and you could certainly come and try excavating there.

I ended up joining Reflections of Manatee and used that position to coordinate with Uzi in hopes of finding the evidence that we were all looking for the evidence of Angola.

- And we were off to the races.

- We started looking at what was ultimately a really complicated stratigraphy, but we were able to have ground penetrating radar done to see what was under the ground.

So I looked for places where it was deeper down before anything was hit.

When we were doing the excavations, my overriding thought was my career could die here.

[music] Tampa Bay is a large area.

There's four rivers.

So there was no clarity that, yes, this would be the spot.

Then, in 2008, came upon materials deep down that were of the right time period.

- Finally, we were finding artifacts.

- We found a coin and I told Sherry Svekis, bag it up, send it up to Tallahassee, to the state archeologist to look at.

That coin was minted in 1808, the ancestors ensured we found this.

[music] We did more excavations, opened up more of the area after the lab work.

It was consistent.

And that is the point that, yes, part of Angola is here at the Manatee Mineral Springs Park.

[music] We have evidence that they lived in cabins, in fact, well built cabins.

[music] We know they grew beans and peas, corn.

We found tremendous numbers of fish bones.

And so we know they used the rich marine resources of the Manatee River.

[music] - We found that the people of Angola, they were hunting.

They were fishing.

A lot of different fish remains.

A lot of shellfish remains.

This is a 3D representation of the excavations.

This layer here was pretty much 1970 to today.

This bottom layer or the 1810s.

So the Angola Maroon community.

We found evidence of a structure.

We found pieces of wood still in situ.

[music] Everyone smoked pipes.

We found so many.

[music] - And one of the most important finds a small rectangular wooden box.

And inside that box was the full skeleton of a small dog.

To just have that sense that someone had a dog, it died.

Built a small coffin for it.

And we remember, which is so, so important.

These were real people building lives for themselves, for their families, for their friends, based on being free people.

- Now, the Angola Maroon community is recognized by the National Park Service.

on the Underground Railroad Network to freedom.

[music] - With some of the evidence, the materials were quite curious.

They were easy to recognize.

They were British mass-produced ceramics, and the first question at this period for the research was what are British goods doing in Spanish Florida?

And why would people of African heritage have them?

- During the three centuries that Spain had control of Florida, they actually lost control to the British between 1763 and 1784 until the end of the Revolutionary War.

During the war of 1812, even though it was Spanish Florida at that time, the British also used Florida as a base of operations for the Gulf Coast.

The British told freedom seekers that if they fought with the British that at the end of the war they would become British subjects.

- And so the people living in Angola consider themselves British subjects and were using British goods.

- They weren't just hiding in the wilderness.

They were very much involved in the colonial power politics of the time.

They were living here in freedom, and they were certainly willing to fight again for it.

[music] - This was the place they call home until their homes were destroyed under the direction of Andrew Jackson.

- Spanish Florida was a danger to the slave regime.

It was a danger to the plantation system.

1821, the US gains Florida from Spain and there's a slave raid that comes down.

- That settlement was torched.

- I don't think any of us can really understand that depth of desperation and fear.

[music] - Hundreds are captured.

We don't know how many were killed, but some escaped.

[music] - Some escaped into South Florida.

They jumped into dugout boats where they crossed the dangerous Gulf Stream.

- Earlier, the Maroons were promised that if they fought with the British, they could live on British lands in freedom.

So they took up that offer.

- And landed on an island in the Bahamas.

- And created a community that gets referred to as Red Bays.

[music] There's been so much that's been so remarkable in this research, and Rosalind Howard is one we can credit for this.

- Her research showed names on a manifest.

- We have a list of people at Red Bays who had been there for seven years.

at 1828.

The British colonial government wanted to know who was on their territory and wrote up a list of who was there.

- The government said, okay, these are free enslaved people.

This is still British territory.

They cannot be enslaved again.

They had their documentation.

- So this is as good of historical evidence as one can have.

And so we have that connection between the Bahamas and Florida.

[music] - Many of the descendants of Angola in Red Bays, Bahamas, had no idea where their ancestors had come from in Florida.

But Daphne Towns connected the dots.

[music] - I was born in Nassau, Bahamas.

I came to Florida winter of '92 on a quest based on a dream that I had.

That I will go to Florida and find hidden treasures in the sand.

In this dream, there was a billboard.

Florida hidden treasures in the sand.

So all of these years I'm looking for hidden treasures.

And then one day, 2017, I was already a residence here in Bradenton, Florida, and I was invited by a group to the Manatee Mineral Springs Park.

And while there, my husband saw the sign of the Angola Maroon community that lived there in the 1800s.

And so I went over and read the marker.

Some of the words were the Angola Maroon community got passage to Red Bay, Andros Island, which is in the Bahamas.

I said, whoa, this is my mother's home.

I immediately called my sisters in the Bahamas and they said, yes, Daphne.

Our ancestors is from Florida.

We didn't know where in Florida.

And right then I knew, okay, this is it.

This was my family's history.

I started to look for persons that's involved with this history.

I then contacted Dr.

Uzi Baram.

He was like, do you know we found, and have proof that your ancestors lived there.

And we found it from hidden treasures in the sand.

And right then I was like, wow, I'm not crazy.

It was not a dream.

It was a vision.

- The treasure is that legacy of the determination, the courage of the ancestors and those hard choices made 200 years ago.

- I went to his lab at New College, and he had a little drum that they found.

And I started to beat the drum for him.

And oh my God, like both of our spirits came alive till it brought tears to our eyes.

And I said, we gotta honor the ancestors with live music and costumes and come back and dance and let them know we returned to the place that was once home.

- And so she is the founder of Back to Angola Festival.

- Welcome to the Back to Angola Festival.

- It's like a family reunion bringing the descendants from Red Bay, Andros.

- She's helping us to understand the Angola people.

[music] - We're looking at almost three different cultures of people.

We were Floridians, became Bahamian by force, but we are also British until 1973.

- Those descendants are coming back to.

Learn about their history.

[music] - We had vendors that had basket weaving.

That was a part of our ancestral culture.

The wood carving.

The Junkanoo is a part of our culture.

[music] Junkanoo rush is dated all the way back to our ancestors coming from Africa way before there was the Bahamas, we parade in costumes with goatskin, drums, cowbells, horns.

[music] The first Junkanoo costumes was made out of newspaper and coat hanger.

So it was junk and they made beauty out of junk.

And we're celebrating freedom.

We're just not dancing because we're trying to show off like I'm no longer enslaved.

I'm free.

It really hits your soul and it helps you to think and identify who I am.

Where did I come from?

Where am I going?

How am I going to continue the legacy?

[music] - The Back to Angola Festival brings out the meaning of doing the archeology.

[music] - We would like to give this cutting board to Daphne Towns and the Back to Angola Festival 2026.

- Thank you very much.

- Everybody got a story?

Everybody want to know where they're from.

And I, my grandmother, always say, "If you know where you're from, you'll have a good idea where you're going."

[music] - All of this has been just so, so fortunate because if it had waited longer, the evidence might have disappeared.

- People are learning this story, and they now know that it is not a myth that Angola existed.

- By looking at the past and seeing that people persevered through incredible challenges.

Hopefully this inspires, and particularly this Black history just tells an important story of people who just never, never gave up that hope for freedom.

[music]