In seventeenth-century colonial North America, marronage appeared first. But as the eighteenth century succeeded the seventeenth, marronage as the prevalent form of Black resistance became increasingly difficult, as merchant and manufacturing capitalists expanded plantation slavery, rationalized the structures of domination between the colonies, and defeated the native Americans. As slave communities formed, marronage was eventually superseded. By the middle of the eighteenth century, for the mass of Blacks the steady transfusion, via the Atlantic, of new Africans, the genius of Black Christianity, the construction of Creole dialects, the founding of Black and Seminole-like maroon communities, the flight to the Black quarters of southern cities, the plotting and actualizing of rebellions, and the construction of familial and communal relations in the slave quarters, were all a part of their preservation as an African people and the nurture of the Black radical tradition. On the other hand, the drift toward assimilation to the Europeans by a fraction of the Black population was of little importance. The crude racialism that walled American culture exacted a toll that only the most desperately alienated at the racial and psychological margins of the Black and white societies could be expected to pay.

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making o…, loc. 1462