NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) —The Amistad Research Center is one of the country’s most extensive repositories of black history. In it’s collection there are letters from teachers that visited contraband camps, that existed during the Civil War.
In confederate states closer to the Union Border, freed slaves would flee to these contraband camps. In Washington D.C. & in the Gullah Islands of South Carolina, two letters in particular were written by teachers that were part of the American Missionary Association. These teachers were witnessing hundreds of the formerly enslaved, graduate to into citizenship, after almost two hundred and fifty years of American slavery. They were celebrating freedom.
Phillip Cunningham is the Head of Research at the Amistad Research Center and says, “these teachers felt it was their Christian duty to do the Lord’s work and help provide for these newly freed people. They traveled down to sites all across the south, in a war zone, to help provide food, clothing and education.”
Some of the letters read:
“The proclamation of the President was read and people were inspired by the spirit of the occasion. They sent forth their glad shouts of joy and their cheers for General Rufus Saxton. The joyful sounds were saying, we are free, we are free! They echoed far and wide over the sea islands of South Carolina.”
“The first day of January was indeed a happy day for the many thousands of the colored people in the camp. There was so much joy from their freedom. They cried, we are no more slaves and no more contrabands.”
Juneteenth celebrates June 1865, when the enslaved in Galveston, Texas were freed. It took two and a half years for the effects of freedom’s wave to carry across the south. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in January 1863.
“Texas was one of the most remote states in the confederacy and that is why it took so long for Union Forces to move there and capture that land to free those slaves. The emancipation of slavery took federal enforcement in the 1860’s. There’s a parallel, because one hundred year’s later, it took federal enforcement to enact integration in areas in the south that were reluctant to change,” says Phillip Cunningham.
How do you define freedom? Is freedom the same as equality? For the newly freed people of 1865, freedom meant they were now allowed to legally marry, open up bank accounts, seek education and learn to read and write.
Phillip Cunningham reflects on his research and reading of the freedom letters saying, “as I would read about the echoes of people saying they were free, the first thing I thought of was Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. You see the beginnings of this movement, that reaches it’s peak in the 1960’s. This is the Civil Rights Movement. The same thing that the people in South Carolina are celebrating in 1865 at the end of the Civil War, are the same things that were celebrated after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, one hundred years later.”
