Emancipation Day. Natasha L. Henry
Templar led the street parades with their bands and drill squads. As noted, speeches were delivered by political and religious leaders like the member of parliament Eccles. J. Gott for Essex South and the Reverend A.D. Burton of the local AME church.
The North American Black History Museum consists of various buildings. It includes the museum and cultural centre, the Nazrey AME Church, and the Taylor Log Cabin, once the home of George Taylor, an escaped slave.
By the 1930s August First celebrations were more relaxed and less formal. No speeches were given and there was no structured program. The day became a more social affair of getting reacquainted with old friends and extended family members. “With the passing of the years much of old-time formality and ceremony has passed from these emancipation celebrations and they have become big, colourful, informal picnics, attended by both colored and white people in large numbers.” “Emancipation Day in Amherstburg has come to be just a happy reunion, with lots to eat.”23 Family and friends barbecued, picnicked, participated in organized games like baseball, and gambled.24
Essentially, this more leisurely format of August First celebrations in Amherstburg carried through the next few decades. Citizens of the town who wished to celebrate on a grander scale attended the colossal events held in Windsor between 1931 and 1966. When the Windsor commemorations died down and the revitalization efforts by Edmund “Ted” Powell, Walter Perry’s successor as the organizer for Windsor’s Emancipation Day, in the 1970s were unsuccessful, the North American Black History Museum (NABHM)25 in Amherstburg carried on the tradition of marking August First with a community observance, beginning in 1983.
Emancipation Day celebrations in Essex County moved to Amherstburg’s Centennial Park for a four-day festival. Henry White of the NABHM took over the planning of the event with the blessings of Ted Powell. White planned to reintroduce Emancipation Day to Amherstburg with the recreation of the photographed 1894 parade, a move deemed fitting because of Amherstburg’s long African-Canadian history. The featured guest speaker for the occasion was Ovid Jackson, the Black mayor of Owen Sound. Since that time, the NABHM has organized annual events on a regular basis and has incorporated a variety of activities to appeal to a wide audience. The holiday weekend includes museum tours, presentations, and special displays, along with the usual family activities at a local park. In 1992, a yearly golf tournament was introduced.26 The celebrations have continued annually into the twenty-first century.
The first African pioneers in Sandwich (initially known as l’Assomption) were the slaves owned by French and English colonists. Antoine Descomptes Labadie, a French fur trader, held several slaves; a member of the Legislative Council of Upper Canada James “Jacques” Baby considered about thirty slaves as his personal property; and William Dummer Powell, chief justice of Upper Canada, possessed a number of slaves as well.27 Other Black settlers included Loyalists who were members of Butler’s Rangers. They obtained land grants in and around Sandwich, a community about twenty-four kilometres north of Amherstburg. The first major wave of fugitive American slaves to arrive in Upper Canada between 1817 and 1822 chose to settle in Essex County, including the village of Sandwich, now a suburb of the city of Windsor.
By the early 1850s there was a steady influx of escaped slaves coming into the area, many via the Underground Railroad. The village became the site of fugitive settlement and a mission called the Refugee Home Society established in 1851. Under the leadership of Henry and Mary Bibb, the settlement scheme sold land to incoming fugitives and provided support and schooling. The homes of most of the Blacks were found throughout the village, dispersed among the White residents. For the most part they were accepted by their neighbours, except when it came to education. The Sandwich common schools refused to admit African-Canadian children, so the Black community took it upon themselves to secure the future of their children by organizing private schools, such as the small private school Mary Bibb set up in her home to help educate the children of fugitives.
The annual recognition of the freeing of African slaves in British colonies was not always a large group demonstration. Abraham Rex and William Murdoch, both Black men in Sandwich, decided to celebrate the 1st of August at LeDuc’s Tavern in 1843, a place regularly visited by White soldiers from the Stone Barracks, a military base.28 What is interesting about this example is the association of African Canadians with other users of this public space. Some early tavern keepers in Ontario owned Black slaves, primarily women, who worked to keep up the business. In other instances, free Black women were hired as servants to work in bars. In some cases Blacks were denied service or were subject to restricted seating, and so at times the tavern also became as site of resistance when individuals of African descent challenged these unjust practices. Another intriguing aspect is that some well-known taverns in places such as Toronto, St. Catharines, and Chatham were owned by Black men.29
Earlier communal Emancipation Day celebrations in Sandwich took place at Park Farm between 1838 and 1856, located on what is now the city-owned Prince Road Park. This property was the estate of Colonel John Prince who had received support from the local Black inhabitants in his successful bid for a seat in the Legislative Council. Apparently they believed he ordered the execution of four American rebel supporters of William Lyon Mackenzie because they killed a man of African descent during the course of an attack in the Rebellion of 1837. Annual festivities ceased being held on his estate after Prince voiced racist beliefs over the steady stream of escapees from American slavery, which estranged his Black voters and contributed to his political defeat.30
By this time Sandwich had become a centre of fugitive-led abolition activity. Henry Bibb founded the Voice of the Fugitive, Canada’s first antislavery newspaper, in Sandwich in 1851. Bibb, like hundreds of other self-emancipated slaves, relocated to this area because of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Along with several community-building initiatives, he and his wife Mary were instrumental in organizing Emancipation Day observances in Sandwich. The celebration in 1851, held at the Stone Barracks, was attended by hundreds “parading up” from Amherstburg, “many of whom were dressed in the red jacket uniform, who marched into Sandwich after a band of military music looking as bold and courageous as John Bull himself.”31 Visitors from Detroit sailed across the Detroit River in the steamboat Alliance. Participants in the long parade included the Fugitives Union Society, whose anniversary and annual meeting was held that afternoon. The county’s high sheriff opened the assembly, followed by regional speakers including J.J. Fisher of Toronto, George Cary of Dawn, Samuel Ringgold Ward,32 and other American lecturers. The committee passed two motions, the first being to publish the days’ proceedings in the Voice of the Fugitive and the second to hold the next year’s event in Malden, but it was held in Windsor instead.33
Proceeds of the sales of admission tickets as well as the purchases of lunch, dinner, and refreshments went towards the construction of a brick building for the Baptist church on Crown-designated land located on West Peter Street. The building project for the Sandwich First Baptist Church, initially organized in 1840, was completed in 1851. Mary Bibb was one of the fundraising managers: “Dinner will be furnished by the Ladies for twenty-five cents per ticket. — Refreshments may be had during the day and supper in the evening. The proceeds will be appropriated towards erecting a Baptist church.”34
Sandwich Baptist Church was one of the community institutions that were created by fugitives. The church not only provided spiritual assurance, but physical security as well. Sandwich Baptist was a terminal on the Underground Railroad. There was a secret room beneath the church where escapees were hidden whenever the arrival of bounty hunters was announced by the ringing of a bell. Church parishioners kept lookout during services, as that was when bounty hunters liked to make surprise invasions. If alerted, fugitives escaped through a trap door in the floor of the church. Additionally, a tunnel running from the end of an underground passage connected the secret room to the nearby banks of the Detroit River.35
The August First commemorations also exposed the vast network