The Black Flawda Archive's Time Capsule Launched 2020 by Flawda Archivist Athena Guice — a living historical archive, editorial resource, and community memory project documenting Black Floridian history, Afro-Indigenous birth traditions, and the midwives, catchas, and communities who kept us alive when the state would not.

Origin note: The BFAP was born December 2020, as the founder navigated postpartum depression and single motherhood —Sometimes the most sacred archives are built in the hardest seasons.

What's the Black Flawda Archive Project?

Across generations, Black & Indigenous communities built systems of survival, care, and resistance despite segregation, displacement, and state violence. Florida's holds one of the most under-archived and contested Black-Native histories in the United States.

Among those community builders were Black midwives—known throughout the South as Catchas and Grand (Granny) Midwives—who welcomed generations of babies into the world.

Birthed by Afro-Indigenous archivist Athena Guice, The Black Flawda Archive Project is a living time capsule and community memory project—a place to remember not only what was taken from us, but what we built anyway.

The Black Flawda Archive exists to recover and preserve that history along with those they served. Through research, oral histories, and community memory work, we document the stories of Black and Indigenous Floridians who healed, organized, nurtured, resisted, and built despite forces designed to erase them.

Inspired by Keleina Reid Maxwell's Birth Behind the Veil, this project asks what Black communities understood about birth, healing, and survival that dominant institutions refused to see.

Semi-annually, we center a different "Black Flawda" theme that honors the resiliency of our ancestors. Currently, we are centering sacred ceremony and rituals:

Births, Baptisms, and Betrothals.

Our first public exhibit launches in 2026 right in Fort Lauderdale. Stay tuned for Floridian stories, photographs, records, and histories. Because history does not live behind us. It lives in our bodies, our families, and the ways we continue to birth babies, ideas, movements, and civilizations.

Featured Ancestor: Grand Midwife Gladys Nichols Milton

Womb-to-Tomb Journey: Tried to bury us, but dey ain'know we was seeds.

Born in Caney Creek, Walton County, Gladys Nichols Milton safely delivered more than 2,000 babies across Florida's Panhandle. In the 1970s, she became nationally recognized for leading the fight to secure legal recognition for midwives as legitimate healthcare practitioners.

Milton founded the Milton Memorial Birthing Clinic in Laurel Hill—the first birthing center of its kind in Florida's Panhandle—and welcomed families of all races through its doors. She continued her work despite attempts to outlaw midwifery and the burning of both her home and clinic.

More than a midwife, Gladys Milton was a healer, advocate, educator, and guardian of community knowledge. Her legacy reminds us that Black midwives were not simply birth attendants—they were architects of care, autonomy, and survival.

For her service and dedication, she was inducted into the Florida Women's Hall of Fame in 1994. Read 'Celebrating Gladys Milton.'

Semi-annually, the Black Florida Archive Project will center a different "Black Flawda" theme that honors the resiliency of our ancestors. Currently, we are centering sacred ceremony and rituals:

Births, Baptisms, and Betrothals

Baptism at De Leon Springs, 1915 (circa). State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

Get in touch: Black Flawda Archive Project

Contributions, questions or stories? We'd be honored to hear from you!