UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808–1915

Mitch Kachun

How the public commemoration of emancipation from slavery helped shape African American political culture

With the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, many African Americans began calling for "a day of publick thanksgiving" to commemorate this important step toward freedom. During the ensuing century, black leaders built on this foundation and constructed a distinctive and vibrant tradition through their celebrations of the end of slavery in New York State, the British West Indies, and eventually the United States as a whole. In this revealing study, Mitch Kachun explores the multiple functions and contested meanings surrounding African American emancipation celebrations from the abolition of the slave trade to the fiftieth anniversary of U.S. emancipation.

Excluded from July Fourth and other American nationalist rituals for most of this period, black activists used these festivals of freedom to encourage community building and race uplift. Kachun demonstrates that, even as these annual rituals helped define African Americans as a people by fostering a sense of shared history, heritage, and identity, they were also sites of ambiguity and conflict. Freedom celebrations served as occasions for debate over black representations in the public sphere, struggles for group leadership, and contests over collective memory and its meaning.

Based on extensive research in African American newspapers and oration texts, this book retraces a vital if often overlooked tradition in African American political culture and addresses important issues about black participation in the public sphere. By illuminating the origins of black Americans' public commemorations, it also helps explain why there have been increasing calls in recent years to make the "Juneteenth" observance of emancipation an American—not just an African American—day of commemoration.

"Kachun has a sophisticated understanding of the significance of public rituals, parades, commemoration, and memorialization in both the nineteenth-century black community and the country at large. He succeeds in showing the multiple layers of contested memory, as some black leaders embraced national reconciliation, and others did not."

David W. Blight, author of Beyond the Battlefield:
Race, Memory, and the American Civil War
"Kachun's main contribution is his painstaking tracing of the various means by which black people celebrated their role on the nation's stage and used the past in contemporary political developments. Kachun does a particularly nice job of describing the divisions within the black community, indicating that the leaders were not always happy with the behavior of participants at freedom day celebrations and showing how these celebrations lost their force after the turn of the century."

William Blair, author of Virginia's Private War:
Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861–1865
"Mitch Kachun has written an important book on African American traditions of historical commemoration, a topic that has escaped the attention of historians for too long. . . . It is a testament to the quality of this book that it raises and answers so many important questions about black historical consciousness during the nineteenth century."

Civil War Book Review

Mitch Kachun is assistant professor of history at Western Michigan University.

American History / Black Studies
360 pp., 15 illus.
$39.95s cloth, ISBN 978-1-55849-407-7
September 2003
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