Whitened Waves: The Exclusion of Black Fishermen in Maritime Florida, 1865–1920

In 1897, a white fisherman in Bradenton, Florida, complained that at the beginning of December, Tampa captains with “their negro crews” would “invade our waters” and deploy “thousands of yards of stop net” to scoop up mullet in violation of state law.  His complaint about outsiders and their techniques would ring familiar in any fishing community; his specific complaint about the black fishermen of Tampa, however, offers a glimpse at a larger struggle for control of Florida’s Gulf fisheries after the Civil War. Florida’s Gulf fisheries were largely unexploited until the late nineteenth century, when white fishermen took advantage of revolutions in transportation and technology, integrated them into national markets. As they did so, they competed with Cuban, Bahamian, and, to a lesser extent, African American fishermen who had been present in Florida waters for some time. As these new fishermen gained control of various fisheries, they displaced and excluded black fishermen.

Taking the small number of black fishermen in Florida’s Gulf fisheries as a historical problem rather than the result of nature, this paper explores the exclusion of black (African American and West Indian) fishermen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  It begins with an examination of the place of black fishermen in antebellum Florida, then documents black workers in Florida’s maritime world in the context of the upheavals of the postwar years, and then shows how, in creating/exploiting Florida’s Gulf fisheries, white fishermen excluded black workers. Building on the work of scholars who have explored how nature became a contested space in the post-Civil War South and those who have investigated the creation of the South’s two-tier labor system in those same years, this essay merges environmental and labor history to explain the whiteness of Florida’s Gulf fisheries in the twentieth century.