Many Americans are familiar, at least with the title, with Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” What they are not as familiar with is the changing ways African Americans saw the Fourth. Douglass’s 1852 speech was delivered when slavery was at its height. It threw back in the face of white America its vaunted notions of human equality that also found a secure space for human bondage. By July of 1863, six months after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Douglass was happy to embrace the day as “our” festival of freedom.
In 1875, as Reconstruction was unraveling, Douglass’s Independence Day speech asked his black listeners; “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?” Ominous signs and portents to reflect on.*
In an interesting essay in The Atlantic, historians Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts examine the post-war celebrations of the Fourth of July in black communities in the South. Prior to Emancipation, the Fourth of July had been a celebration only for white people. In fact, a “Black 4th” was celebrated on July 5 by African Americans in the North to symbolize their isolation from the promises of the Declaration of Independence.
Bitterness after defeat in the Civil War left most white Southerners unwilling to celebrate the birth of a country they had fought to leave on July 4th. Conversely, African Americans now enjoyed the pleasures of the Glorious Fourth as a celebration of their own hard-won freedom.
The two historians write:
After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the nation’s four million newly emancipated citizens transformed Independence Day into a celebration of black freedom. The Fourth became an almost exclusively African American holiday in the states of the former Confederacy—until white Southerners, after violently reasserting their dominance of the region, snuffed these black commemorations out.
A myth grew up among whites in the 20th Century that the people of Vicksburg stopped celebrating the 4th of July when the city was surrendered on that date in 1863. The truth is that only the whites refused to observe the holiday. The city’s blacks turned out every year to commemorate freedom until Jim Crow’s yoke grew too burdensome.
Celebrations were also strong in the city where the Confederacy got started. Kytle and Roberts write:
African Americans…embraced the Fourth like never before. From Washington, D.C., to Mobile, Alabama, they gathered together to watch fireworks and listen to orators recite the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery when it was ratified in late 1865. As we document in our new book, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy, the most extraordinary festivities were held in Charleston, South Carolina, the majority-black city where Southern secession and the Civil War had begun. At the 1865 commemoration in Charleston, one speaker noted the altered meaning of the holiday for black Americans, who could at last “bask in the sunshine of liberty.”
The martial displays at this and subsequent celebrations underscored his point. Each year, thousands of black South Carolinians lined up early to watch African American militia companies march through city streets. Led by mounted officers, some of whom were ex-slaves, these black companies were often named for abolitionists and other black heroes. The 1876 Fourth of July parade included the Lincoln Rifle Guard, the Attucks Light Infantry, the Douglass Light Infantry, and the Garrison Light Infantry.
The Charleston parades typically ended at White Point Garden, a beautiful park at the base of the city peninsula, where enormous crowds bought peanuts, cakes, fried fish, and sassafras beer from vendors camped out in shady spots. “The whole colored population seemed to have turned out into the open air,” reported the Charleston Daily News on July 5, 1872, “and the gardens were so densely thronged that it was only with the utmost difficulty that locomotion was possible amid the booths, stalls and sightseers.”
…At Charleston’s White Point Garden, freedwomen joined freedmen in annual performances of songs and dances, including one called the “Too-la-loo” that had subversive meaning. About two dozen participants—evenly split between men and women—formed a ring, into which one of the female dancers would move while the others sang and clapped. “Go hunt your lover, Too-la-loo!/Go find your lover, Too-la-loo!” they urged the lady in the center, who eventually chose a suitor to join her. The Too-la-loo allowed ex-slaves to poke fun at the elite courtship rituals of their former masters while also engaging in a raucous celebration of their own emancipation. In 1876, 50 groups danced the Too-la-loo from early morning until after midnight. The dance was so popular among the freed population in Charleston, in fact, that Too-la-loo eventually became shorthand for the Fourth of July there.
In Charleston and elsewhere, whites deeply resented their former slaves turning the Fourth into a commemoration of black liberty. What “a dreadful day” it was, complained one Charleston planter in a letter to his daughter. A local merchant lamented in his journal that the nation’s holiday had become “a nigger day”: “Nigger procession[,] nigger dinner and balls and promenades,” and “scarcely a white person seen in the streets.”
While you enjoy your fireworks tonight, imagine the pleasure of African Americans looking up at the night sky on July 4th 1865 and seeing the explosions for the first time as free people.
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