Parties and proclamations: Juneteenth across the diaspora

Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. I’m Adria R Walker, a Mississippi-based race and equity reporter for the Guardian US, and I’m excited to be taking over this week.

I’ve been working on a story about the ways Black American communities have celebrated – in many cases, for centuries – the formal end of slavery, which is variously called Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, Jubilee Day and, perhaps most famously, Juneteenth.

My article will be published on 19 June, Juneteenth, a federal holiday that was enshrined into law four years ago. In doing this reporting, I’ve learned a lot about the holiday that I grew up celebrating.

For this week’s edition of the newsletter, I’ll guide you through what Emancipation Day can look like in the US and its legacy.

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In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation, which abolished slavery in the states that had seceded during the civil war, though slavery was abolished nationwide when the 13th amendment was ratified on 6 December 1865.

News of the proclamation spread varyingly. Some southern enslavers attempted to outrun the order and the Union soldiers who brought news of it, moving the people they had enslaved farther and farther west until the army caught up with them. In Galveston, Texas, it was not until 19 June 1865 that people who were enslaved found out about the declaration. News of that freedom was enshrined in Juneteenth, celebrated annually by Galvestonians and nearby Houstonians.

While Juneteenth has become the most famous emancipation celebration, it is far from the only one. I had the idea for the story a couple of years ago, on 8 May 2023, when I became curious about how communities across the south celebrated emancipation historically and in the present day. On that day, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, one of the Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson, my home town, had shared a newspaper clipping on Instagram about a historic Emancipation Day celebration on 8 May.

The 8 May celebrations, which are still observed by the Mississippi School of Mathematics and Science and the local community, began in 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Columbus to inform the enslaved people that they were free.

Elsewhere, 8 August commemmorates the day the former president Andrew Johnson manumitted (freed) the people he had enslaved – the emancipation proclamation had not applied to Tennessee or West Virginia. William Isom, the director of Black in Appalachia, tells me that Samuel Johnson, a formerly enslaved person, is credited with the spread of 8 August celebrations.

In Florida, the day is celebrated on 20 May, honouring that date in 1865 when Union troops read and enforced the emancipation proclamation at the end of the civil war. In Gallia County, Ohio, they have marked 22 September 1862, the day on which Lincoln drafted the emancipation proclamationsince 1863 – making it one of the longest-running emancipation celebrations in the country, Isom says.

Some communities have celebrated 1 January since 1863, when Lincoln signed the proclamation, while others celebrate 31 December, or Watch Night, when enslaved and freed Black Americans gathered to hear news of the emancipation proclamation.

Watch Night is still observed in Black communities across the south, including in the Carolinas, where Gullah Geechee people observe Freedom’s Eve, and elsewhere. As a child, I attended Watch Night services at church in Mississippi, though I didn’t appreciate the significance at the time.

Freedom without reparations

Whenever and wherever slavery was abolished, formerly enslaved people observed and celebrated the day – this is consistent across the African diaspora. I knew about Emancipation Day festivities in the Caribbean and in Canada, for example, though they are different from those in the US, but I didn’t know such celebrations extended to the northern US.

In Massachusetts, Emancipation Day, also known as Quock Walker Day, is on 8 July. Quock Walker, born in 1753, sued for and won his freedom in 1781. His case is considered to have helped abolish slavery in Massachusetts.

In New York State, the Fifth of July was first celebrated in 1827, an event first held the day after full emancipation was achieved there. After the British empire ended slavery in 1838, many areas in the north began to observe 1 August.

In Washington DC, on 16 April, people commemorate the anniversary of the 1862 signing of the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which abolished slavery and freed about 3,000 people in the capital. Under the act, former enslavers were compensated for the people they had enslaved, a common practice during efforts to end slavery around the world. However, the people who had been enslaved did not receive compensation.

Emancipation Day goes global

I vaguely remember attending my first Juneteenth celebration as a little girl. Farish Street, a historic Black district in Jackson, was abuzz with people. Despite it being the middle of summer in Mississippi, the heat didn’t stop folks from coming out to eat, dance and socialise. The state is relatively close to Texas – it is about a six-hour drive from Jackson to Houston – so we have quite a bit of cultural overlap. It made sense that we would share holidays.

Like many other cultural traditions, Juneteenth spread across the country with the arrival of southern people during the great migration. In the decades since, Juneteenth has been catapulted from a local or regional event to a national and international one – last year, for example, I was invited to attend a Juneteenth event in Toronto, Canada. Other emancipation commemorations travelled, too. The 8 August celebrations, for example, moved throughout Appalachia, through coal country and into urban metropolises such as Chicago, Indianapolis and Detroit.

Historically, the holiday included celebratory aspects – eating traditional foods, hosting libations, singing, dancing and playing baseball – but also a tangible push for change. Celebrants would gather to find family members from whom they had been separated during slavery, attend lectures and advocate for education, and practise harnessing their political power – something that was particularly relevant in the reconstruction days.

For Isom, Juneteenth can become a day that the entire country comes together to celebrate freedom, while communities’ specific emancipation celebrations can be hyper-local and hyper-specific. “Even in [places] where there’s not necessarily many Black folks at all, they’re having the Juneteenth events,” he says. “And so the local celebrations – like for here, 8 August or 22 September – that’s where I feel like communities can showcase and celebrate their own cultures and traditions around Emancipation Day. We need both.”

The late poet and writer Margaret Walker was born 110 years ago next month. To celebrate, Jackson State University’s Margaret Walker Center is hosting its annual Jubilee picnic, which is free and open to all. While travelling to Mississippi may not be feasible for everyone, it’s a timely opportunity to read her poetry, epic novel Jubilee, or even pick up something by Zora Neale Hurston – it was Walker who first spoke Hurston’s name to Alice Walker (no relation), The Color Purple author and poet who would bring about the resurgence of Hurston’s works.