Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863-1913

By Ko-lin Chin

The historical memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction has earned increasing attention from scholars. Only recently, however, have historians begun to explore African American efforts to interpret those events. With Defining Moments, Kathleen Clark shines new light on African American commemorative traditions in the South, where events such as Emancipation Day and Fourth of July ceremonies served as opportunities for African Americans to assert their own understandings of slavery, the Civil War, and Emancipation--efforts that were vital to the struggles to define, assert, and defend African American freedom and citizenship.

Focusing on urban celebrations that drew crowds from surrounding rural areas, Clark finds that commemorations served as critical forums for African Americans to define themselves collectively. As they struggled to assert their freedom and citizenship, African Americans wrestled with issues such as the content and meaning of black history, class-inflected ideas of respectability and progress, and gendered notions of citizenship. Clark's examination of the people and events that shaped complex struggles over public self-representation in African American communities brings new understanding of southern black political culture in the decades following Emancipation and provides a more complete picture of historical memory in the South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: May 26, 2006
• ISBN: 9780807876800

Ko-lin Chin

KATHLEEN ANN CLARK is associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and the author of Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863–1913.

Book preview

DEFINING MOMENTS

DEFINING MOMENTS

AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMEMORATION & POLITICAL CULTURE IN THE SOUTH, 1863–1913

Kathleen Ann Clark

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2005 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Jacquline Johnson

Set in New Baskerville by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clark, Kathleen Ann.

Defining moments : African American commemoration and political culture in the South, 1863–1913 / Kathleen Clark.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–8078–2957–9 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 0–8078–5622–3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. African Americans—Southern States—Anniversaries, etc. 2. Slaves–

Emancipation—United States—Anniversaries, etc. 3. African

Americans—History—1863–1877. 4. African Americans—History—

1877–1964. 5. African Americans—Southern States—Politics and

government. 6. Political culture—Southern States—History—19th

century. 7. Political culture—Southern States—History—20th century.

8. Southern States—Politics and government—1865–1950. 9. Southern

States—Race relations. I. Title.

E185.2. C58 2005

975’.0096073—dc22

2004029988

cloth 09 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1

paper 09 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1

Portions of this work appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, in Kathleen Clark, Celebrating Freedom: Emancipation Day Celebrations and African American Memory in the Early Reconstruction South, in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 107–32; and Making History: African American Commemorative Celebrations in Augusta, Georgia, 1865–1913, in Monuments to the LostCause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, ed. Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 46–63, and are reproduced here by permission of the publishers.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: Language that Cannot Be Misunderstood: African American Commemoration, 1863–1913

CHAPTER ONE The Vanguard of Liberty Must Look into the Past: Celebrations of Freedom

CHAPTER TWO A Resurrection of Manhood: Gendered Reconstruction

CHAPTER THREE Has Emancipation Been a Failure?: The End of Reconstruction

CHAPTER FOUR Signs of the Times: Making Progress in the post-Reconstruction South

CHAPTER FIVE Bosoms Filled with Hope: Collective Representation in the Age of Jim Crow

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Emancipation Day in Port Royal, South Carolina, 1 January 1863 22

View of Broad Street in Augusta, Georgia, where African Americans paraded on Emancipation Days over the years 32

Scenes from the Emancipation Day parade and celebration in Charleston, South Carolina 58

The Freedmen's Union Industrial School, Richmond, Virginia, 1866 87

African Americans celebrate the Fifteenth Amendment in Baltimore, 1870 93

Emancipation Day in Richmond, Virginia, [c. 1905] 216

John Hope, African American educator, c. 1920s 226

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have incurred many personal debts while writing this book. In particular, I wish to thank Christine Stansell. Much that I have learned over the years about the challenges and rewards of history, I have learned from her. I was fortunate enough to stumble into her women's history class in the fall of my freshman year in college, and she has inspired me with her passion, commitment, and intellectual generosity ever since. I am particularly grateful for the time and care she devoted to reading the manuscript for this book; her support and advice were indispensable for bringing the project to fruition.

Several others have provided vital support and critical insight throughout this project. I wish to thank the members of my dissertation committee at Yale University, especially Nancy Cott and Glenda Gilmore. Their vision and guidance were indispensable as I ventured onto the then-unfamiliar terrain of the nineteenth-century South. Hazel Carby both inspired me and challenged me throughout my graduate school career.

Many persons, both at Yale and the University of Georgia, provided useful criticism and sound advice at different stages of this project. I give thanks to the members of my writing group in New Haven—Eve Weinbaum, Alexis Freeman, Rachel Wheeler, Rachel Roth, Barbara Blodgett, and especially Jane Levey. I am grateful to my colleagues at the University of Georgia, especially Douglas Northrop, Reinaldo Roman, Monica Cho-jnacka, and Michelle McClellan, for their help and support. Numerous commentators and fellow conference panelists contributed to the progress of the manuscript. The anonymous readers for the University of North Carolina Press helped to make this a much better book than it would otherwise have been. I would also like to thank the editorial staff at the Press, especially Mary Caviness, David Perry, and Mark Simpson-Vos, for their patience, skill, and commitment to this project.

My good friends Jennifer Hirsch, Michelle Stephens, Neely McNulty, Erik Fatemi, and Stephanie Andrews provided insight, a balanced perspective, and much-needed levity along the many years between the book's conception and completion. I have had the good fortune to claim Kio Stark as my close friend and confidante throughout my graduate school and professional career. For her keen intelligence, sharp wit, and good company I am especially grateful.

I received a great deal of support while writing and researching. I am thankful for the Sarah Moss Research Grant and the Center for Humanities and Arts Research Fellowship, both from the University of Georgia. I also benefited from the Albert J. Beveridge Grant awarded by the American Historical Association, the Archie K. Davis Fellowship Program for Research in North Carolina, the Pew Fellowship Program in Religion and American History, and the John F. Enders Grant and Dissertation Fellowship administered by Yale University.

The knowledge, aid, and patience of numerous archivists have contributed greatly to the successful completion of this book. I wish to thank the research librarians at the Virginia Historical Society, the Library of Virginia, the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress, the MoorlandSpingarn Research Center for Research in Black Culture, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, the Manuscript Collection of Perkins Library at Duke University, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Avery Research Center, the South Caroliniana Library of South Carolina University, the Special Collections Department of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, the Special Collections and University Archives of Memorial Library at Virginia State University, and the Archives/Special Collections Department of the Woodruff Library at Clark-Atlanta University, as well as the staffs of the microfilm reading room and the interlibrary loan office at Yale University.

I owe more than I can say to many members of my family for their faith and patience over the last decade. I wish to give a special thanks to my parents, Kenneth and Mary Ann Clark, for teaching me to ask the questions that led to this project. I also thank Bill and Nancy Dean, for their generosity of mind and heart. David, my husband, deserves far more thanks than I know how to give. He and our son, Samuel, have brought such delight and laughter into my life—it is to them that I dedicate this book.

introduction Language that Cannot Be Misunderstood

AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMEMORATION, 1863–1913

RETROSPECT THE PAST AND VIEW THE PRESENT. TO-DAY YOU CROWD THE STREETS OF OUR TOWN, WITH IMPOSING PROCESSIONS, WHICH SPEAK IN LANGUAGE THAT CANNOT BE MISUNDERSTOOD.

from address of Mrs. Thomas Pauley, Georgetown, S.C., 1870

The incomparable thrill of the Emancipation Day celebration never left Albert Brooks. In a 1938 interview with a worker for the Works Progress Administration, Brooks vividly recalled a ceremony he had attended as a young child shortly after the end of the Civil War. On the appointed day, African Americans journeyed from the surrounding countryside to march in a massive parade that quickly overflowed the streets of the town where Brooks lived with his family. Caught up in the excitement, white missionaries rushed to join the procession. One teacher was so intoxicated with joy that she stood on the church steps and just shouted unashamed before all the people that were present. In Brooks's memory, the wind blew strong as his stepfather climbed to the top of the church, shouldering a massive American flag. Brooks described the scene as the Stars and Stripes came to life, snapping and pulling in the fierce wind; his stepfather struggled to hold his ground, then triumphantly raised the flag overhead. Looking back, Brooks recalled: Since that first celebration I have attended many others . . . but I'll never forget the first Emancipation proclamation celebration.¹

This study centers on African American commemorative celebrations that transpired in southern towns and cities, such as the Emancipation Day ceremony so vividly recollected by Albert Brooks. African American public commemorations proliferated during the postwar years; the largest ceremonies occupied the public squares of southern towns and cities, drawing hundreds of men, women, and children from the surrounding countryside. Elaborate parades were a staple of such celebrations, along with speech-making, prayer, song, and festivities that frequently stretched late into the night. In addition to communitywide ceremonies, numerous commemorative events transpired under the auspices of individual churches, schools, and associations. While the immediate postwar years witnessed some of the most intensive commemorative activity, African American celebrations did not end with Reconstruction. Instead, black southerners sustained—and in some instances emboldened—commemorative traditions well into the twentieth century.

Commemorative celebrations were one facet of a vital and dynamic African American public culture that developed in post-Civil War southern communities. Surveying the number and variety of African American public ceremonies, meetings, and demonstrations occurring after Emancipation, one woman predicted, Some will look [back] upon these times as if nothing but politics, mass meetings, drums and fifes and gilt muskets were all the go.² For the most part, however, the dynamics of southern black public culture have eluded scholarly attention—only recently have historians begun to analyze the role of public events in postbellum southern black communities.³ This study builds on recent scholarship by exploring the particular role of urban commemorations, such as Emancipation Day celebrations and Fourth of July ceremonies, in the development of southern black political culture during the decades following the Civil War. Most especially, I examine the role of urban commemorations in African American struggles over public self-representation, struggles that were critical to black southerners’ evolving debates over how best to define, achieve, and defend their freedom. In the years following Emancipation, as African Americans labored to define themselves in ways that would legitimate their claims to citizenship and promote their progress in the South, commemorative celebrations became critical forums for constructing collective African American identities for both black and white audiences. The development of southern black commemorations reflected ongoing debates among African Americans over how they could best represent themselves, debates that centered on such issues as the content and meaning of black history, class-inflected ideas of respectability and progress, and gendered notions of citizenship.

African American commemorations manifested widely shared cultural and political practices, but they also embodied the varied circumstances of black southerners. With this diversity in mind, I focus on commemorations occurring in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, although the full body of evidence I use also includes examples from Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington, D.C. Each of the four states that form the core of my study produced widespread commemorative activity that, in many cases, extended from the postwar period into the twentieth century. Examined collectively, these traditions illustrate both a wide variety of local practices and common links among black ceremonies throughout a substantial area of the South. Examples from other states suggest a measure of common ground across the South—between African American commemorations in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia and those in other parts of the region. But there were clearly important differences as well, as even a cursory examination of traditions in places like Louisiana and Texas makes clear. This study offers a window onto a rich and varied public culture that deserves still further attention from scholars of southern history.

This is a study of urban black public ceremonies. This does not mean, however, that African Americans from the countryside did not attend and participate in urban commemorations. Cities like Norfolk, Richmond, Raleigh, Charleston, and Augusta produced large and energetic celebrations that regularly drew visitors and participants from a wide swath of the surrounding countryside. Thus, commemorations also provide a window onto public interactions between blacks from the country and those who resided in towns and cities. In particular, large demonstrations such as Emancipation Day ceremonies and celebrations of the Fourth of July afforded urban African American spokespersons unique opportunities to convey their own understanding of black interests to large numbers of rural black laborers.

A variety of black leaders—missionaries, ministers, educators, journalists, political aspirants, and other community spokespersons—invested considerable time and energy in organizing commemorations in southern communities, and their efforts are at the heart of this story. Indeed, while southern black commemorations reflected the engagement of a wide range of participants, they particularly embodied the visions, strategies, struggles, and conflicts of African Americans who took up positions of leadership in urban areas of the post-Emancipation South. Community spokespersons dominated—though by no means monopolized—the ongoing public debates over collective self-representation that shaped the development of commemoration during the decades following Emancipation.

The community leaders who figure prominently in the following pages were not a homogeneous class. Northern-born African Americans, freeborn black southerners, and a rising group of freedpeople all participated energetically—and at times oppositionally—in the creation and maintenance of commemorative traditions. Black spokespersons also differed by other important measures—in education, politics, material circumstance, religious identity, and gender; these differences helped to shape contrasting approaches to ceremonies.⁴ As time wore on, existing distinctions among black leaders were compounded by generational conflicts. Older generations of spokespersons vied with an up-and-coming generation of black leaders who came of age after Emancipation with their own perceptions of the past and aims for the future.⁵ When the high hopes of Reconstruction gave way to the increasingly tumultuous conditions of the late nineteenth century, African Americans’ difference in opinion on such pressing issues as emigration further diversified the black leadership in the South.⁶

Given the wide range of distinctions among leading African Americans in the postwar decades, it is difficult to locate a point of coherence, much less choose a single form of identification, such as a black elite, bourgeoisie, or middle class or middling class. Nevertheless, there is one important point of unity that makes it possible to pair an economically struggling former slave working as an itinerant minister with a freeborn, formally educated black state representative in the postwar South, at least for the purposes of this study. In spite of the significant differences in experience and circumstance separating the two, both were self-identified leaders in southern black communities. Both aimed to speak to—and for—other members of their race. And one element of their leadership, as these black spokespersons saw it, was the responsibility to shape the collective representation of African American interests and identities through public ceremonies.⁷

I use the terms spokesperson, leader, and leading African American throughout this study. These designations, however, are meant to signify the self-perception of a large and unwieldy cast of historical actors rather than to reflect a straightforward expression of their role in relation to large numbers of black southerners. Whenever possible, I delineate the relationship between black leaders and the communities they sought to represent, including points of both conflict and cohesion. In particular, I explore changes occurring in the composition of black commemorative celebrations from Reconstruction, when large ceremonies regularly engaged hundreds, even thousands, of African American men, women, and children, to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when smaller and more subdued events often reflected the efforts of African American leaders to forge links with potential white allies by demonstrating the progress and respectability of the black population in highly controlled public occasions.

I also at times use elite and rising class to describe leaders who participated in commemorations. Representatives from fragile northern African American middle-class communities who came South after the Civil War were frequent organizers of postbellum black ceremonies. In the following decades, African American commemorations were clearly implicated in ideologies of racial uplift, premised upon class-based distinctions among blacks.⁸ At the same time, improved educational and economic circumstances of some African Americans widened the distance between at least some black leaders and the broader black communities that they hoped to lead.⁹ Thus it is both possible and necessary to analyze African American spokespersons’ actions in terms of sharpening class identities.

While acknowledging other scholars’ important insights into the problems inherent in ideologies of black progress that rested upon highly racialized class definitions, I differ in my emphasis. I stress the ways in which African American leaders’ class-inflected actions were aimed at combating white supremacy and creating new possibilities for black success under harrowing conditions in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South.¹⁰ Many of these African American leaders of commemorations—especially during the post-Reconstruction decades—might be termed accommodationists. That is, they believed in interracial cooperation as a foundation for African American advancement and sometimes urged African American communities to be patient in their expectations for southern progress. Some actually evinced greater trust in white elites than they did in working-class black southerners. In retrospect, it is clear that such confidence in whites was usually misplaced, and that the tendency of bourgeois black leaders to distrust working-class African Americans—and emphasize the alleged deficiencies of southern black populations—helped to reinforce the power of white supremacy and cripple black political organization.

However accurate, such judgments should not prevent us from seeking to understand the complex beliefs, motivations, tactics, and accomplishments of so-called accommodationists on their own terms. Only by taking seriously the full range of southern black strategies—including those with conservative elements—can we hope to better understand the complex dynamics of African American political culture in the decades following the Civil War. Moreover, black leaders in the Jim Crow South—whatever their weaknesses—were dedicated to promoting the interests (as they perceived them) of all black southerners, under conditions that no early-twenty-first-century scholar, however capable, can fully appreciate. When examined through the lens of commemorative activity, the strategies of many accommodationists appear as carefully calibrated efforts to extract vital white support for black interests and create sustainable methods for southern black self-help at a time when the most virulent white supremacists insisted on the impossibility of any form of African American achievement whatsoever.

This book proceeds chronologically, beginning with the early postwar period, when substantial public celebrations engaged large numbers of rural and urban freedpeople, as well as freeborn black southerners, black northerners, white missionaries, and Federal officials. Early Emancipation Day ceremonies and other commemorations embraced a broad range of participants in a collective demonstration of black citizenship within an expanded American polity. Indeed, the energetic postwar celebrations were a moving representation of democratic, participatory urban public culture. Black and white, male and female, northern and southern, rural and urban, adult and child, freeborn and former slave—all had a role in the exuberant postbellum celebrations, in stark contrast to the lines of segregation and exclusion that characterized most antebellum public ceremonies in both the North and the South. Like the mass political meetings that overflowed church halls and town squares and engaged the participation of men, women, and children, postwar commemorations embodied the expansive visions of civic and political participation that Elsa Barkley Brown and other historians have identified as developing out of African Americans’ experiences of—and resistance to—slavery. Hundreds, even thousands, of participants marched side by side in elaborate parades, sang and prayed on behalf of freedom, and raised their voices to cheer the speeches of black and white dignitaries.¹¹

Even as they sought to celebrate a new consensus, however, commemorations clearly manifested divisions and hierarchies within the black population. Many urban ceremonies, for instance, emphasized the leadership structure, organization, and ceremonial traditions of free black communities. Indeed, one of the most notable aspects of very early celebrations in cities like New Orleans, Augusta, Charleston, Norfolk, and Richmond was the display of black associations and institutions in exuberant marches. Reflecting antebellum structures and organization, the parades rapidly expanded to embody the full panoply of churches, schools, voluntary associations, paramilitary organizations, and Republican alliances that defined black society and political culture in many southern communities. In parade formations, these organizations were typically preceded by individual leaders, including local spokesmen, who rode on horseback or in carriages at the front of the parades. The tight organization testified to the existence of considerable social and political networks prior to Emancipation, as well as to the rapid expansion of community organization and leadership after the war. But it also reflected preexisting social distinctions among black southerners—most especially between former slaves and the freeborn blacks (many of them men) who dominated political organizations and leadership positions in postwar urban black communities. And it anticipated further differences that developed in the context of freedom.

Some ceremonies represented social distinctions quite clearly: men strode by in parades while women and children watched from the sidelines; farm laborers were marginalized as militias and skilled craftsmen and religious and political spokesmen occupied center stage. There was a particularly stark contrast between the highly organized—and relatively orderly—events initiated by formerly free black leaders and the parodic revelry of annual processions in which freedmen, attired in fanciful masks and costumes, teasingly mocked figures of white authority with satirical songs as they paraded through southern towns. The latter ceremonies were rooted in antebellum slave traditions and persisted in communities in Georgia and North Carolina during the decades following the war, even as a separate set of postwar traditions, embodying very different views of black identity and political relations, developed alongside them.¹² During the 1870s, intensifying tactical debates and political rivalries within black communities were also reflected and reinforced in the composition and tenor of commemorative celebrations.

Postwar commemorations also reflected the diverse efforts of black and white northerners who traveled to the South in the wake of Emancipation and attempted to shape black ceremonies according to their own interests. Men like Henry Turner, James Lynch, and Richard Cain—all leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church—were among the most vigorous organizers; Federal officials, southern white Republicans, and white missionaries representing organizations like the American Missionary Association also had a hand. All these groups had their own visions of postwar black society and politics, visions that they attempted to enact through their leadership of public celebrations. In the years after Emancipation, many northern black leaders emphasized gendered notions of propriety—and particularly the public demonstration of middle-class manhood—as critical to the achievement of freedom and citizenship. Far from expressing a distinctly southern black political culture, then, the large, urban postwar commemorations embodied the full range of participants—and conflicts—that characterized Republican politics in the postwar South.

The efforts of a broad spectrum of spokespersons to assert their leadership were evident in many aspects of the celebrations, but most particularly in the extensive speech-making that quickly became a staple of postwar events. Taking advantage of the opportunity to address large numbers of southern freedpeople, different orators made distinct, often conflicting, appeals. Some speakers, both black and white, emphasized the duties and responsibilities of freedom, taking care to warn their listeners against expectations of free land and encouraging men and women to sign contracts with white landowners. Others took a different tack. Some assertive black spokesmen and a handful of white leaders conveyed more expansive visions of freedom, as when the unflagging militant Martin Delany, speaking before an audience of freedpeople at a public meeting on St. Helena's Island in South Carolina, urged them to continue to defend their rights in the great tradition of those who had taken up arms to fight for freedom.

While they had much in common with other political meetings, rallies, and demonstrations that transpired after the war, commemorations were in many ways distinctive. Above all, they were ceremonies designed in part to establish and reinforce collective understandings of history. Participants invoked the accomplishments of ancient Africa, reviewed the horrors of slavery, and thanked God for intervening in human affairs to end the sin of bondage in the United States. Orators established links between the founding of the country and the origination of black freedom and employed a genealogical vision that traced new patterns of American heroism through the generations. Enthusiastic crowds applauded the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation, while speakers outlined a freedom-loving American ancestry that tapped for brotherhood such diverse figures as Crispus Attucks, John Brown, Robert Gould Shaw, and Abraham Lincoln. Turning to the future, they envisioned freedom and equality spreading outward from the United States to envelop the world.¹³

The various histories generated through African American commemorations went hand in hand with the political work of Reconstruction. Both the transformation of slaves into citizens and the reconstitution of the nation required cultural labor that rested, in part, on the ability to make history, that is, to assert particular understandings of the past. Organizers constructed both the American and black pasts to assert the legitimacy of Emancipation and promote their vision of black freedom and citizenship embedded in a united national community. Ministers representing the AME Church, for instance, repeatedly emphasized slavery as both a sin against God and a transgression against the country's destiny to spread freedom and equality both at home and abroad. Looking to the future, they stressed the proven accomplishments of black men, whether in ancient Egypt or in American wars, as proof positive of their capacity for the full rights of citizenship, including suffrage.

Even as they sought to celebrate a new historical consensus, however, postwar commemorations just as frequently embodied negotiation and debate, reflecting and reinforcing political struggles among constituencies. Freedpeople did not always agree on historical interpretation; nor did the freeborn African Americans, Union army officers, Freedmen's Bureau officials, white Republicans, or northern missionaries who also had a role in shaping postwar ceremonies. These separate groups invested the past with multiple and conflicting meanings, which in turn were linked to distinct aspirations for the future.¹⁴

However contentious, the commemorations of the early postwar years reflected an unparalleled embrace of an integrated national community and projected a future of abundant liberty for both black and white Americans. And yet, even before Reconstruction came to an end in 1877, white Republicans had begun to retreat from those racially inclusive visions of the nation. By the 1880s, the commencement of national reunion between northern and southern whites, which rested upon the exclusion of African Americans from both history and the full rights of citizenship, was well under way. As historian Nina Silber demonstrates, the culture of conciliation was evident in everything from highly romantic plantation melodramas—which were quite popular in the North—to joint reunions between Union and Confederate troops.¹⁵ By the turn of the century, white supremacists had largely succeeded in spreading their particular gospel of the past and putting their version of history to the service of racial apartheid.¹⁶ These efforts found their ultimate expression in the release of the movie Birth of a Nation in 1915, with its depiction of a noble southern family, devastated by war, bravely fighting back (by raising the Ku Klux Klan) against the still more terrible ravages of black savages—and their equally culpable white abolitionist sponsors—during Reconstruction.

In the fast-changing cultural and political conditions of the late-nineteenth-century South, African Americans scrambled to adjust to devastating setbacks. During the latter years of Reconstruction, political arguments among blacks, as well as interracial conflicts within the Republican Party, made it ever more difficult to mount large, unified celebrations. This was particularly true for ceremonies on the Fourth of July; here the difficulties also reflected the diminished faith of at least some black leaders in the potential for true equality within the South—or the nation at large. Black-led ceremonies, which had for a time dominated public culture in many parts of the urban South, seemed to fade in comparison with the large and dramatic celebrations that accompanied Democratic triumphs and the redemption of the region. Adding insult to injury, the violence that helped make possible Democratic victories included attacks on African American public gatherings, including several commemorations.

In spite of setbacks, African Americans maintained—and in some cases, amplified—commemorative traditions such as Emancipation Day celebrations. This was particularly true in places where individual black spokespersons turned commemorations into forums for organizing African Americans and representing black communities and ideas to white audiences. So Charles Hunter, an educator and political activist in Raleigh, North Carolina, reshaped annual Emancipation Day celebrations to embody his vision of interracial progress in the South. Events under Hunter's guidance typically included addresses by white officials, as well as collective declarations of black interests; black leaders’ political and historical oratory stressed themes of mutual dependence and shared interests across racial lines.

Through their commemorative labors, southern black organizers like Hunter literally made progress in the post-Reconstruction South. Many late-nineteenth-century Americans—including an increasing number of urban southerners—had come to define meaningful history as progress. Moreover, a growing number of white Americans embraced theories of social Darwinism that cast Anglo-Saxons as uniquely capable of achieving the qualities of progress—or at least, as far advanced over other races. Southern black spokespersons embraced the fundamental notion of history as progress but challenged vital aspects of white-authored ideologies. Constructing black history so as to emphasize African Americans’ progress since Emancipation, they also insisted that future regional and national advancement would be contingent upon black freedom and interracial cooperation. In the hands of African American leaders, public commemorations thus became critical forums for enacting and projecting black-authored visions of progress, with the aim of injecting African American interests into local, regional, and national debates.

While the articulations of progress that came to dominate many Emancipation celebrations in the 1880s and early 1890s clearly embodied the political strategies of urban black spokespersons vis–à–vis southern white revanchists, they also revealed intensifying tactical arguments within southern black communities, including struggles over the issue of emigration. Charles Hunter raised his voice in praise of southern black progress not only to appeal to whites but also to answer the increasingly vociferous African Americans who had ceased to believe in the possibility of black advancement in the South. At times, Emancipation celebrations became forums for emigrationist perspectives; more often, black leaders’ insistence on progress was designed to counter the emigrationists. And there were other disagreements: over the wisdom of remembering slavery, over the role of women in black society, and over what constituted respectable public behavior; these tensions and open disputes plagued efforts to elaborate a coherent vision of black progress and produce united public African American ceremonies in the late-nineteenth-century South. The decline of black militias that accompanied the onset of Jim Crow further weakened commemorations in some places, as the processions that had long been a key component of African American self-representation no longer enjoyed the protection afforded by armed black men. Finally, escalating white-on-black violence and the steady elimination of black rights that defined the era struck a terrible blow against even the most optimistic and determined black southerners; in one state after another, confident assertions of black progress gave way to responses ranging from searching self-doubt to bitter anger in the late 1890s and early 1900s.

And still, black ceremonies continued in many southern communities. Emancipation celebrations in particular maintained—or in some cases, regained—momentum during the early years of the twentieth century. As white supremacists lay waste to the fragile edifice of black rights, African American leaders scrambled once again to find a way forward. This study concludes with an examination of the various ways in which black politics during the onset of Jim Crow found expression in African American commemorative ceremonies from the late 1890s until 1913, the year marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. As black spokespersons struggled amid ever worsening conditions, conflicts intensified over how best to represent race. Some leaders set their sights on obtaining white support for an ever narrowing program of black progress, a program that frequently began and ended with industrial education. Others persisted in condemning white resistance to black achievement and demanded the reinstatement of political rights as a requisite for progress. African American commemorative culture embodied these widening conflicts, as some ceremonies disputed racist versions of the South's past, while others praised a narrow vision of black progress, and others developed into platforms for romanticizing slavery and cautioning black participants against the alleged perils of political activities. At a time when public culture lay at the very core of the nation's understanding of itself, all these endeavors embodied African American struggles to find a path forward for the United States—one that would, finally, bear out the promise of freedom.

chapter one The Vanguard of Liberty Must Look into the Past

CELEBRATIONS OF FREEDOM

YES, THE NATION WILL GO TO THE CEMETERY AT SPRINGFIELD TO-DAY, AND SHEDDING THE TEAR-DROP ON THE YET FRESH GRAVE OF Abraham Lincoln, WILL SWEAR BY HIM, AND ALL THEIR ORPHANS AND WIDOWS, AND SLAIN, AND WOUNDED, AND BROKENHEARTED, TO MAINTAIN THE HONOR OF THE STARRY STANDARD—the Union of these States—the liberty of all men—forever and forever.

James Lynch in Augusta, Georgia, 4 July 1865

Dramatic scenes unfolded even before the Civil War was over. African Americans throughout the country rejoiced at Federal victories and celebrated President Abraham Lincoln's issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863. The president had devised the proclamation so that it applied only to slaves residing in rebellious states; he exempted Union-occupied territories of Louisiana and Virginia, as well as Tennessee and border states that remained loyal to the Union. But this did not stop African Americans—even in officially excluded areas—from celebrating. While Federal officials took care to confine the proclamation's impact, African Americans seized upon the president's action as a resounding affirmation of their own understanding of the ongoing national conflict—that it was a battle between slavery and freedom.

African Americans’ expansive interpretation of the Emancipation Proclamation was in keeping with the mutinous actions of black southerners from the very onset of the war. Ignoring President Lincoln's efforts to assure slaveholders that the Federal government had no intention of interfering with the South's domestic institutions, they persisted in their belief that slavery was at the heart of the national conflict, and they began to press the cause of freedom early on. By acting in ways that weakened slavery from within and put pressure on Federal officials to alter their policies, African Americans across the South launched what historian Steven Hahn has aptly described as the largest slave rebellion in modern history.¹ Praying for freedom, running away to Union lines, cultivating work slowdowns on plantations, passing on news of the war's progress through the grapevine telegraph, and engaging in countless other acts of resistance, hundreds of thousands of black southerners worked to undermine slavery long before they were officially set free.²

By the same token, men, women, and children who rejoiced at liberty in the midst of war did more than manifest delight and thanksgiving, although the shared expression of heartfelt emotions was certainly a vital aspect of their celebrations. By embracing a carefully delimited policy as a harbinger of universal freedom, black celebrants imbued the president's action with new meaning and propelled the cause of liberty forward. African Americans continued to step up their actions to challenge slavery in the weeks and months that followed—even slaves who remained well within the Confederate interior did all they could to spread the word of the Emancipation Proclamation, keep abreast of military and political developments, and further erode their masters’ power. When they had the opportunity, thousands more escaped to Union lines, where they built fortifications, moved supplies, and served in numerous capacities, including as seamstresses, laundresses, hospital attendants, guides, and even spies; others took over properties abandoned