Freedom Facts and Firsts. Jessie Carney Smith
decades later, the Virginia Assembly indirectly provided statutory recognition that blacks were to serve durante vita, or for life. Virginia was evolving into a slave society with a racially based system of thralldom subjugating all aspects of slaves’ lives. In 1705 Virginia’s planter-dominated House of Burgesses codified slave laws that sought to accomplish three things: confirm the perpetual and inherited bondage of people of African decent; establish an entirely separate penal code and judicial system for enslaved people; and create mandatory service in slave patrols by non-slaveholders to force them to protect the property rights of those who owned blacks. This last provision was designed to segregate the colony’s black and white labor forces. The effort to accentuate racial diversity to the detriment of class unity was also manifested in the terms used by legislators to explicate and substantiate why the 1705 slave code was considered necessary. Imbued with racially slanted language, it sought to debase humans of African descent and repudiate their humanity.
Linda T. Wynn
Rock Hill, South Carolina
This South Carolina community was the scene of several civil rights initiatives, beginning with the 1955 desegregation of St. Anne Catholic School, making it the first integrated school in the state. Rock Hill also launched a successful bus boycott in 1957 that was led by the Reverend Cecil A. Ivory, an African American Presbyterian minister and activist affiliated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Ivory provided leadership and guidance to local students participating in civil rights activities in sympathy with the Greensboro, North Carolina sit-in on February 1, 1960. The Rock Hill sit-in was the first in the state of South Carolina. It began on February 12, 1960, with 100 black students, mostly from Friendship Junior College. At the city’s Woolworth’s and McCrory’s stores demonstrators were subjected to violent responses by unsympathetic whites. One black student was knocked off a stool at a lunch counter, and whites threw ammonia to cause eye irritation and further discourage other protesters. The stores closed the lunch counters down temporarily rather than change their policies, but when they reopened on February 23, the protesters returned to continue the demonstrations. Ivory coordinated mass meetings, organized and directed the demonstrations, and made national headlines when he was denied service at McCrory’s despite being in his wheelchair. Demonstrations expanded to the bus terminals, resulting in 70 arrests, and continued into the following year. More student arrests resulted in the 1961 Rock Hill “Jail-In” (in which the students involved made a pact not to accept bail and to do hard time rather than submit to further discrimination) but the protests ultimately achieved success.
Fletcher F. Moon
Ruleville, Mississippi
Located in Sunflower County, Ruleville became the target of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an umbrella organization of national and regional groups engaged in the freedom struggle in Mississippi. Established in 1962 to capitalize on the efforts of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the NAACP, it focused on voter registration and education. The COFO targeted Ruleville, a town of approximately 1,100 people, because black Rulevillians were drawn to the Mississippi freedom struggle there that was the result racial oppression. It was also the target of the COFO because Ruleville was the home of Senator James Eastland, the ranking Democrat in the U.S. Senate.
As early as 1960, blacks attempted to register at the Ruleville courthouse, but the highway patrol turned them away. In 1962 local resident Celeste Davis started citizenship classes under the sponsorship of the SCLC; Ruleville’s mayor quickly suggested that those attending the citizenship classes would be given a one-way ticket out of town. True to his word, Mayor Charles M. Dorrough fired Davis’s husband, Ruleville sanitation worker Leonard Davis, because of her attendance at the citizenship classes. In addition, Marylene Burks and Vivian Hillet of Ruleville were later severely wounded when an unidentified assailant fired shots through the home of Hillet’s grandparents, who were active in the voter registration drives.
Notwithstanding threats and physical abuse, women were prominent in the Mississippi freedom struggle. Fannie Lou Hamer, for one, is the best known woman leader out of Ruleville. On August 31, 1962, Hamer was fired from her timekeeping job on the Marlow Plantation outside of Ruleville, the same day she attempted to register at the Sunflower County Courthouse. After enduring a brutal jail beating, Hamer became the county supervisor for citizenship training and later an SNCC field secretary. In 1964 Hamer helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention.
Linda T. Wynn
Freedom Celebrations
Black History Month/Negro History Week (est. 1926)
Negro History Week was first introduced in 1926 as a means of commemorating African American history when American history included primarily slavery as the participation of African Americans. Carter G. Woodson and several other colleagues saw a need to preserve the culture of their race and to make sure that persons were informed of the many contributions and accomplishments that were a part of their history. In 1912, Woodson formed the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Shortly after the formulation of the group Woodson began publishing, in 1916, the Journal of Negro History. As Woodson worked on matters for the organization and served in various roles in academia, he acknowledged that the average African American knew very little about their history and culture. He also knew that whites saw little value in knowing African American history and African Americans also had little interest in their past due to the indoctrination of inferiority and the humiliation surrounding the experiences of slavery. To resolve this glaring concern, Negro History Week was initiated in 1926 as a time to celebrate and commemorate African American leaders. Because Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Booker T. Washington all had birthdates in February, a week was selected that was in close proximity to those dates. Materials were published by the association to support lectures, exhibits, and curriculum development for Negro History Week. The celebration was so well received that it gained national acclaim. In 1976, during the nation’s bicentennial, Negro History Week was expanded to Black History Month. The annual celebrations focus on a specific theme; it 2008, that theme celebrated multiculturalism—a key concern that Woodson had early on.
Lean’tin L. Bracks
June 19 celebrations reinforce the idea that the Emancipation Proclamation did not bring immediate freedom to American blacks.
Juneteenth
A portmanteau of the words June and nineteenth, Juneteenth is considered one of the oldest known celebrations commemorating the end of the peculiar institution of slavery in America. Two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, also known as the Day of Jubilee, that became effective on January 1, 1863 (which theoretically freed only those slaves in states under the control of the Confederacy), Union General Gordon Granger’s General Order Number Three finally emancipated approximately 250,000 slaves from thralldom in Texas. In addition to the slaves in Texas, those held in involuntary servitude in the states of Kentucky and Delaware were among the last to gain freedom. The few hundred slaves in Delaware and the tens of thousands of slaves in Kentucky had to wait until the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in December 1865 before they were freed. This tardy emancipation gave rise to the enduring American black celebration of Juneteenth.
The news of their freedom was slow to reach many slaves; plantation owners read the proclamation to their slaves over the course of several months following the end of the Civil War. The news evoked a range of celebrations. In Austin, the state capital of Texas, Juneteenth was first celebrated in 1867 under the direction of the Freedmen’s Bureau; it became part of the calendar of public