Emancipation celebrations in the United States have been important and complicated moments of celebration and commemoration. Since the end of the slave trade in 1808 and the enactment of the British Emancipation Act in 1834 people of African descent throughout the Atlantic world have gathered, often in festival form, to remember and use that memory for more promising futures. In the United States, emancipation celebrations exploded after the Civil War, when each local community celebrated their own experience of emancipation. For many, the commemoration took the form of a somber church service, Watch Night, which recognized the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Juneteenth, which recognized the end of slavery in Texas on June 19, 1865, became one of the most vibrant and longstanding celebrations.
Although many emancipation celebrations disappeared after World War I, Juneteenth remained a celebration in most of Texas through the late 1960s when it disappeared from all cities in the state. However, because of the Second Great Migration, Texans transplanted in Western cities continued the celebration in their new communities far from Texas. In Texas, Juneteenth was resurrected in 1979 when state representative, later Congressman, Al Edwards successfully sponsored a bill to make Juneteenth a state holiday and campaigned to spread Juneteenth throughout the country. This grassroots movement brought Juneteenth resolutions to forty-six states and street festivals in hundreds of neighborhoods. Juneteenth’s remarkable post-1980 spread has given it great resonance in popular culture as well, even becoming a focus of two major television episodes in 2016 and 2017.
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Juneteenth and Emancipation Celebrations
Emily Blanck
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Southern Textile Worker Struggles in the 20th Century
Joey Fink
The rise of the southern textile industry in the early 1900s shifted the center of American textile production from the northeast to the Piedmont and created a new class of southern industrial workers: the “cotton mill people.” Throughout the 20th century, larger economic and political forces changed the industry and its people. Technological innovations, wars, and the diversification of the southern economy affected how textiles were made, the consumer demand for them, and mill workers’ wages and working conditions. The labor, civil rights, and women’s movements produced federal laws and legal victories that desegregated the mills, drew attention to the particular vulnerabilities of women workers, and provided protections for all workers against exploitation and poverty. Continuity, however, was as significant as change for mill workers. Women’s labor was always crucial in the mills, and women were key leaders in strikes and organizing drives. Unionization efforts were consistently undermined by technological innovations that replaced human labor, the global movement of capital, and the united power of mill owners and political leaders. Throughout the 20th century, cotton mill people struggled to resist the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization and insist on the dignity and value of their labor. The story of their struggles reveals important dimensions of 20th-century southern labor and life. With the movement of textile manufacturing from the American South to the Global South, their 20th-century struggles offer insights into the 21st-century struggles of textile workers worldwide.
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The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Freedom Struggle of the 1960s
Charles M. Payne
The only youth-led national civil rights organization in the 1960s in the United States, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), grew out of sit-ins, with the base of its early membership coming from Black colleges. It became one of the most militant civil rights groups, pushing older organizations to become more aggressive. Under the tutelage of the experienced activist Ella Baker, it emphasized developing leadership in “ordinary” people. Its early years were dominated by direct action campaigns against White supremacy in the urban and Upper South, while internally, SNCC strove to actualize the Beloved Community. Later it specialized in grassroots community organizing and voter registration in dangerous areas of the Deep South. Its Freedom Summer campaign played a significant role in radicalizing young activists. SNCC, in general, acted as a training ground and model for other forms of youth activism. Notwithstanding its own issues with chauvinism, SNCC was open to leadership from women in a way that few social change organizations of the time were.
