Final Portfolio (Revised Assignments 1-3, And Introduction) Folklore

О Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebrations

William H. Wiggins, Jr.

THE UNIVERSITY OF

Tennessee Press

Publication of this book hâș been aided by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies from funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Copyright © 1987 by The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville. All Rights Reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. First Edition.

The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, θ) The binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wiggins, William H., 1934— O Freedom! : Afro-American Emancipation celebrations. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ï. Emancipation proclamation—Centennial celebrations,

etc. I. Title. E453.W65 1987 973-7'i4 86-14597 ISBN 0-87049-520-8 (alk. paper)

For my parents Mabel Leora Washington Wiggins and William Hawthorne Wiggins, Sr.,

a.k.a. Mama Wig and Daddy Wig

ивл» f - ib J

Emancipation Day Drill Team 118

Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation 119

African Liberation Day Concert 120

Emancipation Day Parade 121

Coin: Abolitionist Society, 1838 122

Freedom Souvenirs 123 Burford E. Evans Illustration:

“Juneteenth” 124 Poster: “African Liberation Day

‘77” 125

Preface

When I began my research into Afro-American freedom celebrations, there were no scholarly books in print on the subject. Aside from a mea­ ger list of articles,1 such freedom observances had generated little interest within America’s intellectual community. John Hope Franklin’s The Emancipation Proclamation,7· which chronicled President Lincoln’s moods, thoughts, and actions during his writing of that document, and J. Mason Brewer’s Juneteenth,3 a collection of jokes and folktales often told on this southwestern celebration of Emancipation, are two excellent ex­ amples of this scholarly lethargy toward the subject. Neither writer paid significant attention to Afro-Americans’ reactions to freedom. Franklin and Brewer mention celebratory reactions to Emancipation only as after­ thoughts. Their studies contain no hint of the existence of the dramatic proclamation readings, historical pageants, colorful parades, all-night barbecues, exciting ballgames, or the myriad other customs and rituals with which the masses of Afro-Americans have celebrated their freedom during the last century and a quarter. A Juneteenth celebrant, summing up this scholarly snub, wrote, “I grew up in the tradition, and I am sur­ prised to know that scholars have ignored this event.”4

The celebrants themselves entertain a wide range of attitudes toward these freedom observances. For a significant number of Afro-Americans, their particular local independence observance—whose date varied from region to region—was “the biggest day in the United States” and held more cultural significance for them than July 4th. In 1863 Frederick Douglass called January 1 “the most memorable day in American Annals” before concluding that: “The fourth of July was great, but the first of January, when we consider it in all its relations and bearings is incomparably great­ er.”5 Many celebrants whom I interviewed shared Douglass’s point of view.

Preface xix О Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebrations

For Mrs. Lula Bass, “the 28th of May was far more exciting than the 4th of July.”6 Mrs. Mary Morris recalled the first time she realized August 4 was Emancipation Day: “. . . somebody told me. I said, ‘Well, what’s the big holiday?’ And they said, ‘Well, that’s the Negroes’ Independence Day,’ you know. And, you know, ‘we ain’t got no business celebrating the 4th of July; we weren’t freed. It wasn’t our independence.’ This is their reasoning, you know, that August 4 was freedom day for them.”7 Dr. Jimmy Williams remembered that when he was growing up in Columbus, Mississippi: “We looked upon the 8 th of May as our day. The 4 th of July never really had any real significance for us.”8 Miss Sue Owings wrote: “The legend has it that a Negro got a mule in Washington and arrived in [each ?] town on June 19th with the Emancipation Proclamation. So that July 4th is whites’ Indepen­ dence and June’teen [is] Negro Independence Day.”9 Mr. Jerry Wilson summed up this divided loyalty: “Well, as a patriot and a citizen I celebrate the 4th of July, but from a race standpoint I still like the 19th of June.”10

Another large segment of Afro-American society does not ascribe as much social significance to freedom holidays, however. Many characterize them as “just a ballgame and a picnic,” a day for “fun and frolic and red soda water and watermelon,”11 “a second Christmas,” or another “nigger day,” a cultural term for good times. Senility is robbing a growing number of older celebrants of their remembrances of how these freedom events were observed in the past. One retired schoolteacher confessed that she was “bothered that none of the few remaining relatives and friends of my age could even remember the 8th of August.”12 A few younger “blacks have been ashamed of the 19 th of June”13 and other observances.

Somewhere, despite the scholars’ neglect and the celebrants’ mixed at­ titudes, I felt I would find answers to all the as yet unposed cultural, historical, social, and political questions regarding these freedom celebra­ tions. From June 1972 to February 1973, supported by a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, I logged more than twenty thousand miles in the family Volkswagen, crisscrossing America’s South, Southwest, Midwest, and Northeast to conduct interviews and to observe celebrations of June 19 in Rockdale, Texas, August 8 in Allensville and Crofton, Kentucky, January 1 in Columbus, Georgia, and February 1 in Philadelphia, in search of an­ swers to these questions.

I used several methods of collecting field research data. Throughout the day I constantly entered valuable information into my daily log, a 9 8-cent spiral notebook. In this field-work diary I recorded interviews of cele­ brants who refused to be taped, the names, addresses, and telephone num-

xii O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebrations

bers of new informants, bibliographic references from area libraries and newspapers, spur-of-the-moment ideas, travel routes, and the costs of food and lodging. The next morning I would always review the last day’s notes in order to get some sort of direction for the day.

I was governed by a collect-all-you-can philosophy at each celebration site. I took over three hundred black-and-white and color slide pictures. Baseball scorecards, raffle tickets, posters, programs, and flyers were some of the celebration memorabilia that I dutifully collected and labeled. I also used two different types of tape-recording technique during my observa­ tions of the four celebrations. The January 1st,February 1st, andjune 19th services that I attended were recorded in their entirety with either a reel-to- reel tape or with several 90-minute cassette tapes. I also conducted a series of five-to-fifteen-minute interviews with a random cross section of cele­ brants. Transcriptions of the former enabled me to study the structure of these observances, while the interviews gave me a true reading of what the celebrants thought about the celebrations.

I also devised and used two questionnaires during my field work. The first model was a cumbersome six-page document that I distributed before morning worship at Miles Chapel Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church in Little Rock, Arkansas, and during classes at Jarvis Christian College in Hawkins, Texas; Texas College in Tyler, Texas; and Houston­ Tilloston College in Austin, Texas. I handed out a streamlined one-page questionnaire at the January 1st and February ist celebrations I attended. Both of these instruments, especially the shorter version, gave me the ad­ dresses of several new interviewees, as well as some idea of the geographical regions for the various celebrations.

Between the four field trips, I telephoned or wrote to the new inter­ viewees and contacts that I had collected during my last trip. I collected valuable oral and printed celebration data through my correspondence. Celebration sponsors, such as August first’s Mr. Ted Powell and February first’s Mr. Emanuel Wright, sent me numerous copies of old celebration programs, posters, and flyers. Mr. Wright’s and Mr. Powell’s letters also contained fascinating descriptions of the histories and activities of their celebrations. A telephone call to the Texas Legislative Council earned me a four-page memorandum on “Emancipation Day in Texas as a State Holi­ day,” copies of the 1972 House Resolution 23 which honored “the Black people of Texas” and recognized “ ‘Juneteenth’ as an annual holiday of significance” and of the 1978 House Bill 1016 which made Juneteenth a legal state holiday in Texas, an address by Representative Al Edwards, the

Preface xiii

bill’s sponsor, to the Texas House of Representatives, and three “related clippings” on Juneteenth from area newspapers.14

My most successful library research has been accomplished by sifting through microfilms of old Afro-American newspapers. Through trial and error, I finally devised a research methodology that was effective and simple: all I had to do was match the newspaper (The Atlanta Daily World) with the celebration common to that geographical region (January 1st) in order to reap reams of celebration data. A wealth of front page stories, editorials, political cartoons, photographs, and complete speech texts were recovered through this method. The titles of celebration speeches and pag­ eants were collected by systematically reading the community news pages of these newspapers. National Afro-American weeklies, such as the Chi­ cago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier, devote several pages to local news from such small, southern black communities as Social Circle, Geor­ gia. More often than not, these nameless local reporters included the speaker’s name, sermon title, and celebration site of their local freedom celebration. And the systematic reading of all the letters to the editor during a particular celebration’s observance month also turned up a few letters on the subject.

I also had some success retrieving celebration data from the Congres­ sional Record. The National Freedom Day debate, personal remarks of Afro-American representatives on Negro History Week and Juneteenth, and the several years of congressional debates and hearings over the issue of making the birth date of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a national holiday were among the subjects of interest. The King holiday materials were catalogued in the Congressional Record Index. However, I was able to retrieve my information on Juneteenth, National Freedom Day, and Negro History Week only by closely reading those issues of the Congressional Record that coincided with the anniversaries of these celebrations.

This intellectual quest has not been a lonely one. Henry Glassie, John F. Moe, Fred McElroy, Roger D. Abrahams, Gladys-Marie Fry, Cam Collins, Peter Wood, Jerry Davis, Marilyn White, Roby Cogswell, Judy McCulloh, John McGuigan, Anne Schockley, Phyllis May, Bess Lomax Hawes, Stanley Warren, Dan Ben-Amos, Adrienne Seward, Robert Chrisman, and Richard M. Dorson are just a few of the scholars who took the time either to write flattering letters of recommendation, to offer helpful suggestions and en­ couraging words when I needed them most, to read and edit my rough drafts, to send me seminal celebration sayings, articles, and interviews, or to just give me “that look” when we greeted one another at all the Ameri­

xiv O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebrations

can Folklore Society meetings that have been held since I began writing this book.

My family has been most supportive. My parents, my in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Dallas and Mary Slaughter, Auntie Leila Blakey, and Mr. and Mrs. Anthony and Effie Lewis, Sr., are just some of the relatives who either gave me food and lodging, provided me with fresh interview contacts, found old celebration memorabilia for me, or allowed their food to cool as I made yet another “important point” about my research. My children, Wesley and Mary Ellyn, handed out celebration questionnaires. And my wife, Janice, did it all. She packed my bags, made my travel reservations, prepared field­ trip lunches, kept the house quiet when I was writing, traveled with me when she could, read my rough drafts, and always let me know that she believed in my ability to write this book.

The weaknesses and shortcomings of this study are mine, not theirs.

Preface xv

CHAPTER I

................. ................................... :

I ain’t telling you nothing. You’re gonna have to dig for your information like I did.

Juneteenth celebrant (1972)

Following the Freedom Trail

My research began with four field trips. In June of 1972.1 drove over twelve hundred Volkswagen-punishing miles to attend a Juneteenth celebration in Rockdale, Texas. In August of that same year I witnessed an August 8th Emancipation homecoming in Allensville, Kentucky. New Year’s Day, 1973, found me and my family participating in the annual Emancipation Day service in Columbus, Georgia. And thirty days later I was in Phila­ delphia, Pennsylvania, observing a National Freedom Day celebration. Although they occurred more than a decade ago, I still find myself reliving some of the myriad personal experiences of these four freedom celebration journeys.

The road to Rockdale wound past numerous icons of southern life and culture. Tennessee cotton fields, their green bolls still closed like unopened rosebuds, were silent symbols of the region’s economy. The Arkansas rice paddies, with their willowy, green shoots bowing in the wake of the high­ way’s traffic, were gentle reminders of the impact of African slaves on the local agronomy. And Texas melon patches, endless acres of gnarled vines, broad leaves, and ripening fruit, conjured up images of the region’s racial stereotypes.

There were other reminders of slavery and Jim Crow poverty. Crossing the churning, muddy Mississippi triggered thoughts of slavery and the horrors of being sold “down the river.” In all of the southern states I passed abandoned shotgun shacks, whose warped gray walls and sagging russet­ rusted roofs poignantly symbolized the region’s gripping poverty and ruthless segregation.

I stopped in Houston long enough to rendezvous with my Juneteenth guides and family friends, Reverend and Mrs. J.L. Parks. After quickly shifting my suitcase, camera, and tape recorder into the trunk of their

Following the Freedom Trail i

larger Chevrolet and parking my Volkswagen in their garage, we headed for Mrs. Parks’s farm, which was located on the outskirts of Ennis, Texas.

Déjà vu rode with us on this leg of our trip. My parents had taught at nearby Prairie View A&M College in the late 19 3 os. Glimpses of my Texas childhood flashed back to me as I viewed the roadside melon stands on the outskirts of such area towns as Cypress and Hockley. Everything about them looked so familiar: purple stalks of sugarcane leaning against white­ washed walls; bushel baskets of fresh tomatoes, green beans, okra, corn, greens, and other vegetables set on crude, handmade tables; and neatly stacked mounds of watermelons—both the oblong, two-toned green, jagged-striped, and the round, dark green variety—towered over all this produce. Propped against the bases of these fruit towers were “red ripe watermelon” signs, printed in uneven, whitewash brush-lettering on torn pieces of cardboard boxes; and evenly cut scarlet melon halves, glistening in the hot sun, were drawing both customers and flies.

As we passed a Hempstead produce stand, a boyhood incident burst forth from my subconsciousness like a clap of summer thunder. Thirty summers earlier, at another Hempstead farmer’s roadside stand, I had

TEXAS

Rockdale

Texarkana

Houston

June Field Trip

Memphis

KENTUCKY

Louisville

INDIANA! Bloomington

Ж

_ Nashville TENNESSEE.

■--------------- ARKANSAS^/

% Little Rock

bolted from my mother’s side, scrambled over to the melon pile, thrown my body in a bear hug over one of the larger melons, and begged, “Momma, please buy me this watermelon. Please, Momma, please.” My naive antics amused the white cronies of the stand manager, causing one of them to chuckle, “Sambo really loves that melon.” Angered by the farmer’s pe­ jorative remark, my mother replied tartly, “His name is NOT Sambo!” She also derived some sense of personal satisfaction from ordering the manager to “Put that melon in the trunk of my car!” as she paid for the purchase with a flourish. The family still laughs about this childhood incident that initiated the family custom of marking my birthday with a watermelon instead of a cake. As we drove by, I smiled faintly and wondered if that stand was located on or near the same spot where my boyhood drama had been acted out.

This rich, black land, with its freshly plowed rows glistening in the hot afternoon sun like rolls of licorice in a candy store’s lighted display case, also stirred bittersweet memories in Mrs. Parks. She recalled picking cot­ ton in these same fields in 1925 and never earning more than forty cents a day, despite working nonstop from sunup to sundown. But forty-some years later—“Praise God!”—she was riding through the same fields in her own air-conditioned car. She concluded her reverie with a triumphant chuckle and the traditional saying that I was to hear often during the next few days, “Yeah, we’ve come a long way. From the pigpen to the palace!”

An hour later, we arrived at Mrs. Parks’s “homeplace,” a neat forty-acre farm just west of Ennis. A group of about ten, including relatives and friends who had driven down from Austin for the day, were just taking their seats around two long tables set under the front yard’s two shady oak trees. The white-tablecloth-covered tables were loaded with platters of bar­ becued chicken, long link sausages and brisket-sized chunks of beef, bowls of steaming brown beans seasoned with hunks of jowl bacon, a cold apple, lettuce, and mayonnaise salad, trays of white “store-bought” bread, frosty pitchers of red lemonade, jugs of homemade blackberry wine, and a pan of peach cobbler. As we joined them, mention of my being born in Louisiana caused one of the diners to remark jokingly, “Oh! You from Lousyana. That’s the place where this Negro got off the train and asked these white fellas, ‘Where do the colored folks hang out in this town?’ One of them said, ‘The last one hung out in that tree over yonder.’ [We all laughed.] Negro said, ‘When is the next train due?’ ‘Ain’t another due for four hours.’ Negro said, ‘That’s all right, I’ll catch the one that just left!’5,1

This meal proved to be the first of several opportunities for me to enjoy

2 O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebration Following the Freedom Trail 3

black east Texans’ food and fellowship. That night the Parkses reminisced over past Juneteenth celebrations, Aunt Polly served some delicious home­ made ice cream, and I nursed numerous headaches from eating it too fast. Sunday was spent visiting churches in Lyons and Palestine. At the latter church, I had to convince some reluctant interviewees that I was neither a “professional football player” nor an “FBI agent” before I was finally able to spend the remainder of the day talking with them about Juneteenth and University of Texas football, and eating too much free barbecue, potato salad, cornbread, and lemon meringue pie.

Monday morning Mrs. Parks made a fire in the ranch’s old black wood­ burning stove and cooked her husband and me a delicious “ranch style” breakfast of thick strips of bacon, scrambled eggs, grits, biscuits, and black coffee. After breakfast, Reverend Parks, who was my “chauffeur for the day,” drove us to the all-black Griffin community, a rural, dirt-road, cul-de- sac village, centered around a general store and an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, located six miles outside of Milano just off State Highway 36. For more than an hour Reverend Parks joshed with old friends. “Lord, have mercy! What are you doing here?” “I’m like the devil walking to and fro on the earth seeing whom I might devour.” After sharing gales of laughter and breath-stopping bear hugs, Reverend Parks intro­ duced me to a portly friend and told her of my interest in Juneteenth, to which she replied laughingly, “Oh, you want to know about nigger day.” I persisted, and she finally continued in a more serious vein, “. . . way back in the old folk’s days, way back when I could remember, old folks used to have picnics, you know. . . . We’d walk from here, usually nothing but teenagers, you know, nothing but kids walking here. And they’d have it over in Minerva and we’d go over there and they’d have all kinds of amuse­ ments for the young people. . . . They’d have all kinds of little dresses, little umbrellas to match the dresses. You know and all just like that.” And she concluded incredulously, “You don’t know nothing about it?”2

I pondered my cultural ignorance as we drove under a wrought-iron archway sign proclaiming “Fair Park” in one-foot letters, into about sixty acres of flat, amber, sandy land, dotted with tufts of parched grass, with a few brownstone stands nestled under scattered clumps of scrub oak trees. The central recreational area was dominated by a baseball diamond, a quarter horse racetrack, and a covered dance pavillion, enclosed with a freshly painted, gray chain-link fence, which glistened in the hot sun like a cowboy’s silver hatband.

The barbecue stand was the first of several booths that I visited prior to

4 O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebration

attending the afternoon worship services scheduled for the dance pavillion. As I chewed on my extra-hot barbecue sandwich, Mr. Artis Lovelady, the vendor and celebration sponsor, explained why he was having a Juneteenth observance: “I just wanted to do something, just wanted to kinda bring back old times and let the younger people see what we used to do to celebrate it on account of our Emancipation Proclamation.”3

At the beer stand, a few men had gathered to swap jokes and bits of community gossip between absent-minded swigs from frosty brown bot­ tles of Pearle Beer, which they fondled incessantly like performing comedi­ ans manipulating their microphones. Although they agreed with Mr. Love­ lady’s reasons for sponsoring the Juneteenth celebration, their strong disapproval of the upcoming afternoon sermon was aptly summarized by one of the men, who remarked, “I ain’t never been to a 19 th in my life where they had preaching . . . I ain’t never heard tell of nothing like that.”4

The beer drinker’s claim that a sermon was not usual for a Juneteenth celebration seemed to be confirmed by the initial unsettled atmosphere at the pavillion where the services were scheduled. In fact, Reverend Marvin Smith, the worship-leader, was himself moved to make these critical obser­ vations on first seeing the worship site.

I never been in anything like this. You come out to a open space, no people to give attention; children just running and playing and all this noise ... I think we ought to be more concerned, serious, because this is a one hundred seven years since Emancipation, since our freedom. And we ought to recognize that this is a blessing coming from God that we were liberated and set free ... I wouldn’t have been here if I would have known that it was just going to be set up lightly, like nothing was going on.5

Expressing very low expectations for the scheduled service, he concluded, “However, we’re here now and we’ll go on with song, Scripture, and prayer . . . and get out of here.”

No doubt because of these misgivings, Reverend Smith opened the ser­ vice with less than Sunday morning fervor. He led us in a long-meter chanting of the hymn, “I Hasten to His Throne,” read the “entire one- hundred-and-twenty number of Psalms,” and intoned a traditional prayer that thanked God “for bringing us through the journey seas of life,” warned the wicked “that the building is on fire,” and “begged” spiritual power for the speaker.

Smith: Lord, bless this man of yours. People: Yes!

Following the Freedom Trail 5

Smith: Give him the power to preach your word. People: Ooooooh, yes! Smith: May the gospel that fall from his lips. People: Yes! Smith: Be as sharp as a two-edged sword. People: Yes! Smith: May it cut sin to the right and to the left!6

After the prayer, Reverend Smith led us in chanting another chorus of “I Hasten to His Throne.” He concluded his perfunctory devotion with this somewhat uninspired introduction of the speaker: “The service is now in the hands of Dr. Williams from San Antonio.”7

Before the service was over, Reverend Smith’s half-hearted prayer that the speaker be given the power to preach was answered. Reverend Kelley Williams was somehow able to rise above his distracting setting and indif­ ferent audience to deliver a powerful freedom sermon, steeped in the tradi­ tional images, cadences, and themes of earlier Emancipation Day ad­ dresses. By the time Reverend Williams reminded his congregation of Juneteenth’s cultural significance, his black suit coat lay discarded, crumpled in a gray metal folding chair; and his sweat-soaked white shirt had been loosened at the collar to better allow his bulging vocal cords, which contracted and expanded under a glistening patina of sweat, to proclaim:

Williams: God has made a way for us, Ooh Black man, you ought to turn to God.

People: Yes! Williams: And tell Him take you and use you in Thy service. People: Amen. Williams: You have been good to me. People: Sure have! Williams: You opened doors for me. People: Yeah! Williams: You opened doors for me. People: Yeah! Williams: That’s been closed in my face. People: Yes! Williams: Ooooooh Lord, almighty! You stood by my side. People: Yes. Williams: When doors were shut in my face. People: Yes. Williams: When I was beaten and whipped. People: Yes. Williams: You stood by my side.

6 О Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebration

Smith: Right, Elder! Williams: Ooooooooh church, why don’t you say amen today? People: Amen! Williams: God is on your side. People: Yes. Williams: You ought to turn to God. People: Yes. Williams: [Glancing at the men gathered at the beer stand\ You ought to

throw away your beer can. Smith: Right, Elder! Williams: You ought to throw away your whiskey bottles. People: Amen. Williams: And get down on your knees and say, “Lord, I thank ya.” People: Amen! Williams: “That you brought me from a long ways.”8

After the sermon, Reverend Smith helped the exhausted Reverend Williams back into his coat before striding to the pulpit and confessing, “I’m just happy! Look like I’ve been in church today now. At first it didn’t register with me very much, but, you know, you have to get in touch with God. Wherever you stop at and call on His name you can have church. Under your own vine and fig tree. So you don’t have to go back to yonder’s mountain. But anywhere you kneel down, call on God. You can hear from heaven.”9 Yes, we had had church that day.

The next morning, as Reverend Parks and I loaded his car for our return trip to Houston, he complained about not hearing enough sermons in Houston that could match the emotion and eloquence of yesterday’s June­ teenth sermon. However, he would not miss using the farm’s outhouse. Nodding toward the backyard privy, Reverend Parks confessed, “I just can’t take it. I tried to use that thing but that turd just went back up! Like that Negro who was falling and one of his friends told him he was about to fall on a white woman, so he curved back up!”10 I often recalled this anecdote during the one-and-a-half-month research period between field trips.

A tip from my mother, who had overheard some friends making plans to attend the “8th of August homecoming” in Allensville, Kentucky, had me headed for this western Kentucky hamlet on August 5, 1972. West of Central City I entered a strip-mining region. Monstrous yellow coal shov­ els were scooping jagged black and brown gashes of coal and topsoil out of the green landscape. Growling bulldozers added to the ecological carnage by uprooting live trees and piling them on top of mounds of dead trees

Following the Freedom Trail 7

Bloomington

INDIANA

Allensville

Louisville

Crofton Elizabethtown

Hopkinsville WKENTUCKY August Field Trip

whose smoldering brown leaves and gasoline-doused trunks scented the air with wreaths of acrid blue smoke.

After checking into Hopkinsville’s Holiday Inn, I headed east to Allens­ ville. The pastoral vista seen through my front window conjured up a vision of slavery’s agrarian age. The fields of beige feed corn—soon to be harvested—yellow burley tobacco, and green soybeans, alternating with the gently sloping pastures, dotted with herds of Black Angus cattle and an occasional chestnut horse, reminded me of a slave quilt.

The region’s genteel past was faintly echoed by the massive front col­ umns featured on many of the neat mass-produced tract homes. Occasion­ ally, an authentic “Big House,” complete with tall columns, wide porches, and large front gates would come into view. Of all the dwellings, these old and genteel mansions were the most vivid reminders of the region’s past tradition of slavery. For local residents, memories of that era still ebb and flow in oral family histories. During an earlier interview, for example, Mrs. Bennie Mae Smith recalled a “slave story” that her grandmother had told her: “. . . the master didn’t want Bill to go into the army because he was a good worker. He hid him up under a strawstack until February in the storm because he didn’t want them to take him because he knew how to work and he’d do it.”111 found myself wondering if one of these old plantations was the scene of this long-preserved family story.

My reverie was momentarily broken by the appearance up ahead of a rectangular black-lettered sign that read: “Allensville, Ky., Pop. 300.” Within seconds I was driving slowly on the village’s tree-lined main street. As I bumped across the L&N railroad tracks, the sight of the deserted, dingy gray depot called to mind another memory of Mrs. Smith’s, a happy

childhood remembrance of the pageantry and excitment surrounding the arrival of past 8th of August excursion trains:

When I was a child it was really something. Really big. Reverend Wiggins, I have known express trains to run out of Louisville and pull in down there with two carloads and just unload there and celebrate. . . . And the brass band would meet the train eight o’clock in the morning, and they would start their celebration. And boy, I’d just go mad. Early in the morning I’d be dressed. I’d be jiggling soon as that band started playing, until my mother couldn’t tie a ribbon on my head, when that band would start. It was wonderful.

They would use those undertakers’ horses—and those were the most prettiest prancing horses keeping time with that music—and they would ride those horses with those high hats [laughter], it would be interesting to watch those horses walk with that band. . . ,12

No bands or prancing horses welcomed me. Once over the railroad crossing I turned right at the first street and soon began to find cars parked on both sides of the street. At the next intersection I turned right again and drove two blocks to the Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church, the celebration site, where I parked my dusty Bug alongside the other sparkling clean Chevrolets, Buicks, Fords, Cadillacs, customized vans and motorcycles, bearing Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Penn­ sylvania, Tennessee, and Kentucky license plates. The majority of the Ken­ tucky plates were issued in Todd County, the home county for Allensville. License plates from Jefferson, Louisville’s home county, and Christian, nearby Hopkinsville’s home county, were also prevalent. Getting around in this mass of machinery brought to mind something else that Mrs. Smith had told me. “We just get there and meet. And there are so many cars coming in there. You can [see cars] for miles. Cars on top of cars.”13 How right she was.

The red-brick church’s front yard was teeming with commercial and social activity. On either side of the front walk was a huge maple tree whose leaves provided cooling shade for the neatly dressed celebrants and busy concessionaires. The Methodists ran an open-air barbecue stand under the tree on the left, while the host Baptist committee had constructed a neatly screened-in barbecue booth under the tree on the right side of the yard. Round, galvanized tin washtubs, filled with ice and bottled and canned soft drinks, were visible at both booths. And over at the Methodist stand a young boy was busy cranking an ice-cream freezer. Women workers, their once spotless white aprons now soiled with orange smudges of barbecue sauce, used their similarly sullied towels to shoo flies away from the sweet­

8 O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebration Following the Freedom Trail 9

potato, pecan, apple, and transparent pies (the latter a regional favorite made with egg whites, sugar, and butter) and from the multi-layered choc­ olate, vanilla, coconut, and pound cakes. Tired celebrants rested on old church pews located throughout the yard, nibbled on spicy barbecue sand­ wiches, and swigged from cool bottles of pop, while conversing with old friends. As Mrs. Smith had said earlier, “They done told the boss man that they wanted off for that day. And the white people understand . . . that the Negroes celebrate that day.”14

After mingling with celebrants in the churchyard for several hours, conducting interviews, taking pictures, and observing the various events, I gathered my equipment and walked up the gravel road leading from the church to Bradford Park, the local baseball diamond. The park, which was named after a deceased local baseball star, had a skinned red-clay infield, crooked lime foul lines, and an outfield of ankle-deep meadow grass. Several hundred fans had gathered to see the Allensville Hoppers play the Merrittown All-Stars. Most of the spectators were sitting in the three-row- high wooden grandstand, either dodging foul balls that penetrated the rust-weakened chicken-wire backstop, or stuffing themselves on soft drinks, hot dogs, potato chips, chewing gum, and candy purchased from a wooden concession stand located behind the home-plate screen. About ten male spectators were shooting craps at the end of the left-field foul line.

The four-hour contest had several interesting side shows. The left-field crapshooters scattered in comical pell-mell fashion each time a home run was hit into that section, and the fans engaged in good-natured, game-long “signifying,” the traditional game of verbal insults, with the players and umpire. (One fan offered the umpire his glasses through a hole in the rusty foul-screen in an effort to improve the arbiter’s calls.) Between innings a lone bootlegger strutted back and forth before the crowd with full bottles of whiskey crammed into both of his rear pants’ pockets; and members of a Louisville motorcycle club, astride chrome-plated cycles and dressed in sequin-studded leather jackets that glistened in the bright afternoon sun, drew high-pitched squeals of admiration from the teenage girls in the stands every time they bounced slowly across the outfield grass to the accompaniment of roaring motors belching plumes of blue smoke into the hot summer air.

The sun had set behind Mt. Pleasant Baptist’s steeple before the Hop­ pers had defeated the All-Stars 16 to r i, and I started the forty—five minute drive back to the sanctuary of my Hopkinsville motel room.

Before checking out of the motel the next morning, I reviewed my field

io О Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebration

notes while eating a delicious western Kentucky breakfast of the region’s distinctively salty ham, grits, scrambled eggs, homemade biscuits, and several cups of coffee. On my way to observe Crofton’s 8th of August celebration, I stopped to say hello at the home of Reverend C.A. Striplin, a minister who had befriended me when I was pastor of Freeman Chapel Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church in Hopkinsville. Reverend Striplin’s impressions of the previous day’s celebration were only mildly critical.

Up there [Allensville] is no leadership. Up there, I mean, just an assembly. And I was just observing you know, nobody called together. It’s just a practice they’ve been meeting. They play ball and they serve something—I didn’t see this, I heard this—that they used to have a band come in. But up here it was just nobody called the other preacher or anything. Everybody is free and doing, you know. I was driving along—driving out you have to be careful—and I said, “Well, here we are sheep without any ' shepherd.” And everybody happy. They licking on ice cream, eating this one, pulling at one another just enjoying themselves away from the white folks.15

But he was severely critical of the celebration I was about to attend. “Now down there [Crofton] . . . the people have been full of rowdy, you know, likker drinking. I know they’ve had a few killings down there. You know, every two or three years they knock off one at Crofton.”

Reverend Striplin’s final remarks filled me with some apprehension as I approached Crofton’s Bradley Park. The littered condition of the park only served to heighten my fears. Trash was everywhere. In finding a place to park, I had to steer my way through a maze of empty wine, whiskey, gin, and soft-drink bottles and beer cans which cluttered the landscape and roadway along with discarded candy wrappers, ice-cream cups, gnawed barbecue bones, half-eaten fish sandwiches, crumpled cigarette packages, empty matchboxes, cigar and cigarette butts, and solid paper napkins.

Automobile traffic in and out of the park followed a two-acre, Y-shaped, dusty, brown dirt road. The park road’s two Greenville Road entrances joined midway in the park to form a single lane that ended at the baseball field clearing. Massive oak trees edged the two forks of this road providing daytime shade for the homemade stands of wire and wood where ice cream, barbecue, hot dogs, and white buffalo fish sandwiches were sold to the celebrants. The celebration merchants had also strung electric lines of red, blue, green, and orange ioo-watt bulbs from the trees’ branches to provide light for their night customers.

Following the Freedom Trail n

The gambling booth was located on the right fork of the road, well away from the other booths. Its crap table, a plywood rectangle covered with green felt and resting atop an empty oil drum, was discreetly hidden during the daytime in a clump of trees and underbrush ringing the park. The dozen or so young males who had gathered there sported uncombed naturals, impaled with Afro-picks, and had free-tail-flopping, barbecue-and- lipstick-stained shirts, rumpled pants, dusty shoes, and blood-shot eyes. They whiled away the bright daylight hours either playing tonk, signifying, laughing, leaning on the bright-colored jukebox popping their fingers to the blaring soul music, or poised in front of it rehearsing a new dance step, sipping wine from brown-bag-encased bottles, or taking tokes from joints cupped discreetly in their hands.

The thick aromatic billows of smoke filtering from the screened-in bar­ becue stand were a pleasant relief from the pungent wreath of marijuana smoke hanging over the gambling booth. An American Club sign, printed in red letters on a white background, hung over the cashier’s window. It reminded me of an earlier discussion with Mr. Claude Snorton, Sr., con­ cerning the Club’s origin, “It wasn’t no lodge. The first thing they called it was the . . . Afro-American Club. In the beginning when I started in it. Finally, we cut the ‘Afro-’ off and just had an American Club.” And, peering through the booth’s screen wall at the man barbecuing chicken parts and pork ribs over a “great long pit,” I also recalled what Mr. Snorton had said about barbecuing at earlier 8th of August celebrations. “We had barbecue and we’d sell ham about two dollars a pound. . . . Another guy that worked with me called him Jimbo. He was a hell of a guy. Me and him we work all day and all night and then come home and rest a while and go back . . . we’d take it in shifts.”16

The baseball diamond was deserted. No players were fielding grounders on the red clay infield or snagging flies in the outfield meadow; neither were there any fans seated in the rickety wooden grandstand watching a game or arguing with the umpire. This tranquil scene was apparently far different from earlier Crofton celebrations. Mr. Snorton attributed this waning of baseball’s popularity to “young Negroes” dissipating their ath­ letic talent in “wine” and “dope.” He recalled playing on “a hell of a [Crofton] ball club” that once beat the Nashville Elite-Giants, a touring professional team in the old Negro leagues, and regularly played visiting teams which “would come out of Nashville . . . [and] Illinois . . . and play” on past holiday afternoons.

When I returned to my car, a novelty kiosk had been set up in the

12 O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebration

parking lot. The vendor was doing a brisk business selling his assortment of balloons, inflatable clowns and animals, stuffed gorillas, flying birds, straw hats, Hawaiian leis, beaded necklaces, toy watches, punch balls, whips, swagger canes, and American flags to young and old celebrants. The road leading out of town was deserted, in sharp contrast to Mr. Snorton’s description of this same road during past celebrations: “ ... at one time they had five thousand. . . . And they’d be so many people out there they’d [be] parked from there [the church] clean back to Bradley Park . . . they used to run special excursions during that time from Evans­ ville and Hopkinsville. They’d come in the morning. They’d get here at eight o’clock and leave at four. And we used to have special buses out of Nashville and Evansville. There’d be four or five Greyhound buses.”17 But there were no long lines of parked cars and buses to impede my exodus from Crofton during this 8th of August.

For the remainder of the summer and fall I transcribed tapes, wrote letters, read microfilm, built an Emancipation celebration bibliography, and planned my upcoming January ist celebration field trip to Columbus, Georgia. Because of the holiday break I was able to take the family along. I selected the Columbus celebration for research and personal reasons. In terms of my research, this trip would allow me to conduct interviews and collect January ist data in Nashville and Atlanta. Furthermore, the close proximity of Columbus to the Alabama border would afford me the oppor­ tunity of attending several other observances in the two-state area. Person­ ally, it would give me the chance to treat my family to two nights of fun in Atlanta. The trip would also allow Janice and me the chance to introduce our daughter, Mary Ellyn, to such Afro-American cultural and historical landmarks as Nashville’s Fisk University and Atlanta’s Spelman College.

Mount Eagle’s solitary pine trees, gnarled and dwarfed by the elements into serpentine configurations that would shame any award-winning bon­ sai, foreshadowed the brooding, southern Georgia pine forests that had been the scenes of countless lynchings, castrations, beatings, Klan rallies, and other rituals of southern racism.

Red and russet hues dominated the wintry southern landscape from Chattanooga to Atlanta. The run-off from spring and summer rains had sculpted the region’s amber soil into an endless array of configurations. These same scarlet hills on which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., dreamed of brotherhood coming to “little black boys and little white girls” passed quickly before me. In other places, the groping tentacles and shriveled leaves of the brown, dormant kudzu vines covered clay ravines, abandoned

Following the Freedom Trail 13

houses, dilapidated barns, junked machinery, trees, telephone poles, guy wires, and any other stationary objects that lay in their paths in an effi­ ciently relentless manner that reminded me of the way a dying, repressive social system of segregation had once strangled the region, fostering a proliferation of “white” and “colored” signs over lunch counters, bath­ rooms, drinking fountains, and other social accommodations.

I was charged with anticipation, on January 1,1973, as I parked our car in the red clay parking lot of the New Providence Baptist Church, the site of Columbus’s Emancipation celebration. Racing through my mind was the realization that in a few moments Janice, Mary Ellyn, and I would be experiencing a cultural ritual that members of my father’s family had participated in. My paternal grandmother, Mrs. Anna Sanders Wiggins, while serving as a school principal, had actually sponsored January 1st celebrations at her school near Jackson, Georgia. And, more importantly, my father had participated in similar January 1st celebrations during his Georgia boyhood.

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14 О Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebration

I was about to turn a new page in my father’s past. As a boy I had often thumbed through his worn, leather-bound, purple-backed college scrap­ book, staring at his old baseball, basketball, and football photographs— he was a three-letter man—with their faint, white ink doggerel captions, in an effort to imagine what his Paine College days were really like. On other occasions I would take down from the living-room closet an old shoebox, loaded with a raft of baseball clippings, faded and brittle with age, and read all about his baseball exploits in such far-off places as Sioux Falls, South Dakota. But this ritual celebration, unlike the scrapbook’s pho­ tographs and the shoebox’s clippings, transcended time and would allow me to experience first hand the same freedom service that my father knew as a boy growing up in southern Georgia. It would give us much more to share.

The celebration site was a new, yellow-brick church with twin white columns and a pointed white wooden steeple. The neutral hues of the sanctuary’s beige walls, yellow frosted windowpanes, hardwood floors, natural yellow-finished pews, pulpit, and three modern highback minister’s chairs contrasted with the deep maroon carpeting that covered the pulpit area, as well as the center and two side aisles. Two choir stands, complete with microphones, flanked the pulpit area, where several gray folding chairs had been placed to accommodate the many participants. Two fold­ ing chairs and a portable lectern had been set up in the half-moon-shaped area between the altar rail and the pulpit.

Representatives from almost every social stratum of Columbus’s Afro- American community could be found among the three hundred celebrants, most of whom were dressed in their Sunday-best black, blue, and gray suits, or yellow, red, green, and orange dresses. They were crammed into the sanctuary’s two sections of pews. A few babies and several grade-school children also were present. Although the women celebrants outnumbered the men, Reverend Cloud’s opening announcement implied that men held the prominent positions at this gathering. “Will the following people come to the platform: Brother E. Adams, Jr., Reverend H.L. Gladney. Mrs. Rosie Walker will come to the second platform. Mrs. Ethyin Kirby will come to the second platform.”18 The pulpit area was off limits to the women participants.

We stood and sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” were led in prayer by Reverend Adams, heard the choir sing “More Love to Thee Oh Christ,” listened to the reading of the Twenty-third Psalm, and sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” before Mrs. Rosie Walker walked to the “second

Following the Freedom Trail 15

platform” lectern and welcomed us: “Ministers of the gospel, Christians young and old, we the members of the New Providence Baptist Church welcome you with great anticipation. We have prepared ourselves to re­ ceive you, our guests, with open hearts and greetings of joyful love. We welcome you here today to share these services with us as we celebrate one- hundred-and-ten years of freedom. . . . From all of us to all of you we extend our heart-felt welcome.” As Mrs. Walker returned to her seat, there was a smattering of polite applause and mumured affirmations of “amen” and “yes.”

Next we stood and sang the civil-rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome,” in the traditional call-response style heard in countless 1960s civil-rights news telecasts. Then Mrs. Ethyln Kirby also walked to the “second plat­ form” lectern and read the Emancipation Proclamation. After slowly es­ tablishing eye contact with her attentive audience, Mrs. Kirby began to speak in the dramatic tones and cadences that we would hear again in the sermon.

Kirby: America, I saw you grow. I saw your rocks and rills, thy woods and temple hills. America, I saw your military forces on land and sea . . . Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Virginia ... I saw you. I saw you ignore the warning of God and Lincoln’s Preliminary Proclamation . . .

People: Yes! Kirby: I can hear you, America. I can hear you at the Emancipation

Proclamation, January 1, one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, issued by the President of the United States containing among other things the following: “To wit, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States, order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated states and parts of states are henceforth forward shall be free . . .”

People: Amen!

As I joined in the loud applause and heard the earnest cries of appreciation that immediately followed Mrs. Kirby’s presentation, I was suddenly re­ minded of something that Dr. William Holmes Borders had said about the ritual during our stopover in Atlanta. “Whenever they found a per­ son . . . who would really do it [read the Emancipation Proclamation] with understanding, it was a great and a glorious thing. But it’s difficult to so find, for a person to get into it, vicariously, this reading of the Emancipa­ tion Proclamation so that it is a burning fire for the audience . . . every

. . . . 16 О Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebration

now and then we pick a person who was zealous; who knew it; who could share it. And when we did it was a woman most of the time.”19

A violin solo of “Deep River” preceded Reverend George B. Thomas’s celebration sermon that began with the twin themes of slavery:

Thomas: There were 75 million or more of those whom we call slaves who were taken from Africa and brought to this land.

People: Uh huh. Thomas: Notice now I said 75 million. How many million were wasted

and lost in the process? Oh what a chapter of history if we were to look at it. It might shock us to understand it.

and Emancipation:

Thomas: So He [God] said, “Black folk, I called you now up out of Egypt·”

People: Amen. Thomas: “The Egypt of slavery.” People: Yeah.

Reverend Thomas concluded with a statement of the traditional belief that God has chosen these lowly, former slaves and their heirs to be His instruments of salvation for America.

Thomas: “I called you out of the evils of segregation and degradation.” People: Yeah. Thomas: We gonna get rid of the ghetto mentality. People: Yes, sir! Thomas: We’re gonna get rid of the colored folks’ mentality. People: Amen! Thomas: We’re gonna get rid of the niggerized and the Negro mentality. People: Yeah! Thomas: We’re gonna understand what the souls of black folks mean. People: Amen! Thomas: Because God has put into us the power of being a strange

people. People: Amen! Thomas: And so the eyes of the world are saying, ‘Well, if the Black folks

in AMERICA don’t serve the task or accomplish the task of humanizing the soul of this man, this nation and the people of this land, there is little hope for the salvation that would come for the fulfillment of God’s purpose to the world.”

After the sermon, I was introduced and allowed to circulate copies of my questionnaire among the congregation, during the rambling, humorous remarks of Reverend Howell.

Following the Freedom Trail 17

Howell: Do we have any new pastors among us? If so . . . will all pastors stand. Give them a hand. Some of them gray and some of them old and some of them young. . . .

People: [Laughter.] Howell: Some of them good-looking and some of them bad-looking. People: [Laughter.] Howell: But they’re pastoring. And I’m proud of their work and proud of

working with them. Yes. Brother Adams, the newly appointed pastor of St. Mark’s AME Church. Nice-looking young man. Watch out there! Who was that said, “Yes, he is”?

People: [Laughter.] ,

My quick scanning of the completed questionnaires that the ushers were bringing to me turned up two references to a May 28th celebration date that I knew nothing about.

After the benediction, two elementary schoolteachers, Mrs. Agnes Hubert and Mrs. Lula Bass, sat with me on one of the front pews and talked about the May 28th Emancipation date, as celebrated in the neigh­ boring Alabama towns of Hachatubee, Eufaula, Clayton, Hatsboro, Melville, and Pittsfield.

Bass: We didn’t spend too much time with the 4th of July. Hubert: Right. Bass: ‘Cause we didn’t care nothing ‘bout those white folks day. Hubert: We didn’t start to celebrate it until we got in the city. Bass: Until we got in the city. But you know what has actually happened;

the reason they don’t celebrate the 28th like they used to? We have become culturized like the man just finished speaking of; we’ve been picking up these other folks’ culture. We had our own day, but now . . . everything is their day.20

Thanks to my successful field trip, my family and I were in a gay, light­ hearted mood as we drove away from the celebration site on Highway 80 toward Tuskegee Institute. There was not a cloud in the sky and the tem­ perature was in the mid fifties. As we drove down this sunny, southern road, the car radio blared a play-by-play description of the Cotton Bowl football game; Mary Ellyn peered silently out of the car’s back window at the tall, stately pine trees, while eating an ice cream cone; and Janice and I talked about the celebration we had just participated in.

This was another cultural side trip for Mary Ellyn. In Nashville Janice and I had shown her Fisk University and told her the story of how a choir of ex-slaves raised enough money from singing spirituals to European royalty to build historic Jubilee Hall. In Atlanta we had shown her the famous

18 O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebration

“seat of Negro learning” with its proud institutions of Morehouse, Clark, Morris Brown, and Spelman Colleges, the Interdenominational The­ ological Center, and Atlanta University, where such cultural heroes as W.E.B. Du Bois, Benjamin E. Mays, Whitney Young, and Martin Luther King, Jr., had either studied or taught. Now we were capping her cultural enrichment with a visit to Tuskegee Institute, perhaps the most famous of all Afro-American institutions of higher learning.

Within an hour we were driving slowly through the immaculate campus, looking for a place to park. After parking we strolled over the neatly kept grounds, pausing to photograph our young daughter in front of such his­ torical sites as the famous statue of Washington lifting the veil of ignorance from the unshackled slave, the new chapel, old Douglass Hall, the labora­ tory of George Washington Carver, and the home of the Institute’s founder, Booker T. Washington. As we walked from site to site, Janice and I tried consciously, with all the solemnity of Williamsburg, Virginia, tour guides, to make the pretty pigtailed girl skipping between us aware of her history and heritage.

It was dark when we started back to Columbus, and our mood had quickly shifted from relaxed gaiety to quiet dread. Mary Ellyn, exhausted from all the walking, had fallen asleep on the car’s back seat, but Janice sat next to me wide awake, anxiously staring ahead at the lonely highway, the infamous Highway 80 on which several civil-rights workers had been killed. As the road signs of Marvyn, Crawford, and other hostile little towns flashed before our car’s headlights, I thought about a nasty experi­ ence that Reverend Parks had had in a similar southern town: “There was one town that had a sign, ‘Nigger, run! If you can’t read, run anyhow!’ We stopped for gas and asked to use the restrooms. The man said, ‘We ain’t got no restrooms for niggers!’ That’s what he said, ‘no restrooms for niggers!’ I told him to stop putting gas in my car, and we drove on down the road.”21

After what seemed like an eternity, we both breathed a sigh of relief as we spotted the flashing light of our motel sign; and we drove quickly toward the comfort of its light. As I carried the sleeping Mary Ellyn into our motel room I recalled something that Dr. Thomas had said earlier that day. “Let freedom ring. And yet its ring is hollow now. And yet its promises are still not ours. But we still say let freedom ring. But then deeper than words, let it ring into practice so that it might evidence that people of this land enjoy the right to be free.”22 The relieved look on my wife’s face and the easing of the knot of anxiety within my stomach were reminders that indeed “freedom’s promises are still not ours.”

Following the Freedom Trail 19

One month later, I experienced no such anxiety during my drive to Philadelphia to observe National Freedom Day. As with the May 28th and August 8th celebrations, chance had played a major role in my discovery of this celebration. While browsing through back issues of the Pittsburgh Courier in an effort to ease the eye-strain caused by several hours of squint­ ing at microfilm accounts of Atlanta’s January ist celebration, I noticed this intriguing headline, “Emancipation was it January i or February i [?].” Included in the article was a historical summary of the celebration’s origin: “Mayor [sic] R.R. Wright, Sr. . . . believed that not January 1,1863 is the date the Black man’s freedom began, but February 1, 1865, the day Lincoln signed the 13 th Amendment which really made the Black free. Mayor [sic] Wright was so convinced that February 1, 1865 was the day Negroes were freed that he succeeded in getting President Truman to de­ clare February 1 National Freedom Day.”23 This discovery sparked corre­ spondence between myself, Dr. Mays—the author of the article—and Major Wright’s youngest son, Emanuel. Mr. Wright sent me several old celebration programs and invited me to attend that year’s celebration.

Overcast gray skies, freezing temperatures, and blowing snow were my companions on the Philadelphia trip. A blanket of snow covered the fertile Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania farmlands. In eastern Indiana and west­ ern Ohio an occasional “I house” (so named because of its ubiquity on rural Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa landscapes) with its white walls, smoking twin red brick chimneys, and frosted windowpanes, appeared on the horizon. .

The drive from Wheeling, West Virginia, to Philadelphia was the most nerve-wracking leg of my trip because of the slick, snow-covered inclines. Nor were driving conditions on the flat land much better. A recent snow,

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high winds, and freezing temperatures had turned Interstate 76 into an obstacle course of snow drifts and icy bridges, conditions the truckers made all the more treacherous by splashing blinding sludge on my wind­ shield as they sped by and buffeting the light front end of my rear-engine car, making it hard to handle.

But all that was finally behind me as I stood, along with about one hundred and fifty black bourgeoisie, in the rotunda of Independence Hall, gazing at the Liberty Bell. The celebrants were either teenage members of the John Rhodes Junior High School glee club or elderly, retired black professionals. The choir was uniformly dressed in white shirts and black pants or white blouses and black skirts. Their elders were fashionably attired in suits and dresses of black, blue, brown, and other subdued hues. During the next ninety minutes we sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” were led in a flowery invocation, sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” listened attentively to Mr. Emanuel C. Wright read Pennsylvania’s National Free­ dom Day Proclamation, and watched solemnly as a small group of “dis­ tinguished citizens” placed a wreath at the foot of the Liberty Bell.

Our next service took place in nearby Congress Hall, a restored national shrine whose sterile, artificial atmosphere reminded me of Disney World and Six Flags Over Texas. We sang “The Star Spangled Banner” and “We Shall Overcome”; heard introductions (“Our guest speaker comes from a long tradition begun by the illustrious founder of African Methodism nearly two centuries ago”) and an eloquent sermon that verbalized the patriotism enacted in the earlier wreath-laying ceremony at the Liberty Bell:

Let the record show that we’re not satisfied with anything less than that which all Americans enjoy: good housing, education, jobs, and above all that liberty and that justice that’s given in our Constitution. Our fathers and our mothers sang “Freedom after while when we get home.” But we are singing with the youth of our nation “Freedom now!” because we are at home. We’re at home here in America. We’re at home here in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We’re at home here even in Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama. This is our country!24

We also heard witty post-sermon remarks, “Mr. Chairman and my friends, I’m too smart a man to speak after a bishop speaks. I learned that a looooong time ago. I’m a Baptist with Methodist inclinations.”25

But the highlight of this service was the John Rhodes Junior High School choir’s dramatic recitation, which wove selected passages from spirituals,

20 О Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebration Following the Freedom Trail 21

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the Constitution, a Martin Luther King, Jr., sermon, and Langston Hughes’s poetry into a powerful paean to freedom. First, a girl stepped forward and said:

Girl: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1965, “Today I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world that we’re about not to turn around. We’re on the move now and no wave of racism can stop us.”

Choir: I too sing, America! I am the darker brother!

Next a boy stepped out of the choir’s front row and continued this narrative pattern with a reference to the Constitution:

Boy: The beginning of the Black man’s freedom here in America as it was in the United States’ Constitution. I will recite the law which gave our forefathers their freedom, the Thirteenth Amendment. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime whereas the party has been duly convicted shall exist in the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Congress has the power to enforce the article by appropriate legislation.”

Choir: I too sing, America! I am the darker brother!

I smiled and thought: Mrs. Kirby would be proud of them. It was almost noon when we stepped outside into the cold winter’s air

for a brisk five-minute walk to the Ben Franklin Hotel for the Freedom Day luncheon. An integrated audience of over four hundred Philadelphians had paid ten dollars each for the privilege of sitting at formally set circular tables in a stately dining room with a cathedral ceiling and several gleam­ ing, low-hanging chandeliers, and eating a gourmand’s luncheon of “half grapefruit, braised top sirloin of choice beef covered in mushroom sauce, candied sweet potatoes, string beans noisette, assorted rolls and butter, coffee, tea, milk and sherbet.”26

The celebrants were well groomed and expensively dressed in tailored suits and designer dresses. Several women had casually thrown their mink stoles over the backs of their chairs with the same nonchalance that the Allensville, Kentucky, baseball players had shed their cotton warm-up jack­ ets on the sideline benches before the 8th of August game. Choirs, classical pianists, and aspiring divas entertained us while we dined. Mrs. Parks was right, some of us had truly come “From the pigpen to the palace.”

The after-dinner speech by Mr. Mal Goode, the United Nations corre­ spondent for ABC News, was hard-hitting. First he disarmed us with humor:

\ _ . 22 O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebration

Goode: I said it to Dr. Davis and I’ve said it on other occasions, that we have become so sophisticated that we have forgotten the church and especially when we get two cars and we are able to buy whiskey by the case now. We used to buy it by the half-pint.

People: [Laughter.] Goode: We have lots of clothes and three or four pairs of shoes and we get

to church on Easter and New Year’s Eve.

Shifting subjects suddenly, Goode boldly denounced American racism:

About a month ago, the man now gone from us, President Lyndon Johnson, told an audience at the University of Texas, “Despite the progress made in race relations,” he said, “Black and white Americans are still on unequal ground.” Is there a single one of us, black or white, Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant, Republican or Democrat who would deny this to be a fact of life and [also] here in Philadelphia? And I come to your city at this celebration to ask any one of these more than three million in the metropolitan area, TELL ME WHY . . . TELL ME WHY THIS is TRUE IN 1973!

He advocated busing:

Talk about busing. They were busing children for GENERATIONS! Busing white children to and fro across towns and through the counties when Black children were WALKING ROADWAYS IN THE SNOW AND SLEET AND MUD. AND THE MUD SPLASHING ON THEM FROM THE BUS WHEELS!

We talk about busing . . . even some Black children, some Black adults are opposed to busing. There’s no great deal to busing. If it requires that it takes busing to give a child a quality education . . . THEN DAMMIT! LET’S BUS!27

And praised the Black man’s contributions to America’s development: Every time you pull up to a traffic light you owe a debt of gratitude to

a Black man, Garret Morgan. Everytime you have a blood transfusion you owe a debt of gratitude to a Black man, Charles Drew. Every time you use a mask in a coal mine or any kind of period of destruction you owe a debt of gratitude to that same Black man, Garret Morgan. WHAT MOOOOOORE I ASK, DO WE HAVE TO DO?

We showered him with applause in a standing ovation as he returned to his dais seat.

The concluding segment of the luncheon was given over to awards. The Richard R. Wright Scholarship Award went to a young Afro-American male student who was admonished to “Take that scholarship, burn the midnight oil, and make good.” Mr. Wright was given a surprise award “In

Following the Freedom Trail 23

appreciation for twenty-five years of continuous, meritorius service” to National Freedom Day. Members of the Women’s Committee were recog­ nized. A committee of young Afro-American businessmen was deputized by the group to study the plight of the city’s Afro-American community and make a report at the next year’s celebration. Finally, Dr. Davis dismissed us by saying, “If our work has been completed, thank you for coming, and tell ’em about it for next year so we can have twice as many people and ask for a larger hall. Thank you for coming and goodbye.”

On the way out of the hotel, I bought a copy of Major Wright’s biogra­ phy, Black Boy of Atlanta, the final trophy of my four-trip search for freedom, and began reading it that night in my hotel room prior to begin­ ning the long trip back to Bloomington and the continuation of my research.

CHAPTER 2 We too, have days of equal importance to us as St. Patrick’s Day is to the Irish. With sufficient pride and leadership we can make ours of equal note.

Irish Boys on Parade, Savannah Tribune (193y)

The Roots and Fruits of Emancipation Celebrations

Contemporary Emancipation celebrations, whose structural and cultural origins can be traced to earlier slave holidays, have exerted continuing influence on Afro-American culture during the twentieth century. Numer­ ous nascent cultural celebrations, often highlighting one or another of the many rituals and festivities that compose an Emancipation celebration, have spun off of these older, multi-celebratory freedom events. Further­ more, New Negro and some Black Cultural Nationalist ideologues have based their social theories of racial aesthetics, unity, and progress upon the traditional songs, dances, cuisine, and other expressions of Afro-American culture which these freedom celebrations have perpetuated and preserved since their inception.

The simple, leisure-time celebrations of the slaves were the cultural forerunners of these freedom celebrations. Slaves were allowed time off from their labor during certain periods of the calendar year. Saturdays and Sundays were normally set aside for rest and relaxation on the planta­ tions,1 and occasional celebrations were staged when there was a planta­ tion visitor, or when a member of the master’s family had a birthday or got married.2 The most extensive of these slave holidays, however, were those seasonal celebrations observed annually when the two most critical planta­ tion chores, planting and harvesting, had been completed. After the crops had been planted, chopped free of weeds, and grown to a mature size, slaves were normally given time off to frolic. This summer season in the slave calendar was called the “laid-by” period. (Interestingly enough, a significant number of August 8th and Juneteenth celebrants that I inter­ viewed still referred to their celebrations as events that occurred after the

The Roots and Fruits of Emancipation Celebrations 2524 O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebration