Jubilee Juneteenth: how our people celebrated freedom time

Black Issues Book Review, May-June, 2003 by Angela P. Dodson

Emancipation Proclamation

Breakfast Cake

(Serves 6.)

2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup butter
1 large egg
1/2 cup (more or less) milk
1 to 2 cups washed blueberries
1/4 cup honey
Grated rind of one orange
Grated rind of one lemon

Cream sugar and butter, add egg and beat. Sift dry ingredients, add blueberries then add alternately with milk to the butter, egg and sugar mixture. Make a dough stiff enough to handle. Par out to 1/2 thickness on a floured bread board. Cut with a biscuit cutter and arrange in greased pie pan in tilted fashion. Spread with honey and sprinkle with orange rind and lemon rind and bake for 15 to 20 minutes in a hot oven. Serve hot or cold.

--(The Newark Council) New Jersey. The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro: The Classic Year-Round Celebration of Black Heritage From Emancipation Proclamation Breakfast Cake to Wandering Pilgrim's Stew by National Council of Negro Women (Creator) Beacon Press, October 2000, ISBN 0-807-00964-4

   Go down Moses
   Way down in Egypt land
   Tell ole Pharaoh
   To let my people go
   When Israel was in Egypt land
   Let my people go

--Traditional African American spiritual, www.negrosprituals.com

SECRETARY STEWARD CONVINCED LINCOLN TO postpone his proclamation until after the Union achieved a significant victory. The defeat of the Confederate troops at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, gave Lincoln the opportunity he had been waiting for. Lincoln would later call the Emancipation Proclamation "the central act of his administration" and "the greatest event of the nineteenth century" and "the one thing that would make people remember he lived." Of course everyone did not get the news of emancipation at the same time. Even though the proclamation appeared in the New Year's Day edition of the Evening Star, illiterate whites and blacks would have to be told of its existence. Some owners informed their slaves and gave them the option of leaving, but others did not.

--First Freed, Washington, D.C. in the Emancipation Era edited by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Howard University Press, May 2002, ISBN 0-882-58207-0

NOT ALL THE WHITE HAIRSTONS TOOK A KINDLY view of their former slaves when they abruptly claimed their freedom. Ann [Hairston] bitterly harangued the departing Hairstons, telling them they `They would never be as free again as they had been here.' That declaration summed up the deepest belief of many slaveholders--they had been good masters, and under them, slavery was freedom. The blacks left anyway, in what seemed to Ann to be the ultimate act of disloyalty. The shock of Emancipation rippled through the white family. To see their former servants walk off and start a new life left them stunned. `There has been almost a perfect revolution among the Negroes' one Hairston mistress wrote, as if the servants had pillaged the house and set it afire, when in fact all they had done was leave.

--The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White by Henry Wiencek, Griffin February 2000, ISBN 0-312-25393-1