Africans in the Americas and islands of the Indian Ocean who escaped from slavery, through flight or manumission, and lived in independent settlements, were referred to as maroons in English, and as cimarrones in Spanish America. The English word "maroon" itself likely derives from the Spanish word "cimarron".

Maroon communities were a constant threat to plantation societies. It was difficult for colonial authorities to eradicate Maroon communities, because they were often hidden in remote environments. Maroons also frequently utilized guerrilla warfare to defend their settlements. This created a constant state of conflict with authorities, where Maroons would sometimes be used as allies by enemies attacking a colony. Sometimes, Maroons would also function as trading partners with remote settlers or Natives.

Maroon settlements often created unique cultures, separate from greater society. Communities sometimes developed Creole languages by mixing European tongues with African languages, creating languages like Saramaccan in Suriname. On other occasions, Maroons would adopt creolized variations of a local European language as a common tongue. Sometimes maroons mixed with Indigenous peoples, eventually evolving into separate creole cultures such as peoples like the Garifuna and the Mascogos.

Maroon entered English around the 1590s, from the French adjective marron, meaning 'feral' or 'fugitive', itself possibly from the American Spanish word cimarrón, meaning 'wild, unruly' or 'runaway slave'. In the early 1570s, Sir Francis Drake's raids on the Spanish in Panama were aided by "Symerons", a likely misspelling of cimarrón. The linguist Leo Spitzer, writing in the journal Language, says, "If there is a connection between Eng. maroon, Fr. marron, and Sp. cimarrón, Spain (or Spanish America) probably gave the word directly to England (or English America)."

Alternatively, the Cuban philologist José Juan Arrom has traced the origins of the word maroon further than the Spanish cimarrón, used first in Hispaniola to refer to feral cattle, then to Indian slaves who escaped to the hills, and by the early 1530s to African slaves who did the same. He proposes that the American Spanish word derives ultimately from the Arawakan root word simarabo, construed as 'fugitive', in the Arawakan language spoken by the Taíno people native to the island.

In the New World, as early as 1512, African slaves escaped from Spanish captors and either joined Indigenous peoples or eked out a living on their own. When runaway slaves and Amerindians banded together and subsisted independently they were called "Maroons". On the Caribbean islands, they formed bands and on some islands, armed camps.

The earliest Maroon communities of the Americas formed in what is now the Dominican Republic, following the first slave rebellion on 26 December 1522, on the sugar plantations of Admiral Diego Columbus. A typical Maroon community in the early stages usually consisted of three types of people:

Maroon communities faced great odds in surviving the attacks by hostile colonists, obtaining food for subsistence living, as well as reproducing and increasing their numbers. As the planters took over more land for crops, the Maroons began to lose ground on the small islands. Only on some of the larger islands were organised Maroon communities able to thrive by growing crops and hunting. Here, they grew in number as more slaves escaped from plantations and joined their bands. Seeking to separate themselves from colonisers, the Maroons gained in power amid increasing hostilities. They raided and pillaged plantations and harassed planters until the planters began to fear a massive revolt of the black slaves.