Mitch Kachun. Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by Virginia Whatley Smith

Mitch Kachun. Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2003.360 pp. 15 illustrations. $39.95.

Available now is an abundance of critical works and history books that address questions of identity, nationhood, and citizenship of the African American subject arising from the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and connecting to the contemporary cultural studies that it spawned in the academy. To these, Mitch Kachun has added another dimension: black America's recording of its own strides for freedom and equality. He has recovered silenced festivals of freedom that have been too long suppressed and/or too long ignored. On the one hand, due to his status as race leader, ex-slave orator Frederick Douglass's Independence Day speech of July 5, 1852, entitled "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?," and presented in Rochester, New York, on Monday after the conventionally celebrated date rather than on the Sunday religious services day, easily comes to mind today as a specific example of civil activism in the black historical memory. On the other hand, Kachun draws our attention to a gap in African American cultural memory of collective activism by excavating silenced slave festivals and emancipatory celebrations held in the North and later in the South between 1808 and 1915. These politically-driven events emanating from social, civic, and cultural endeavors simultaneously solidified and/or polarized both blacks and whites in contestorial spaces when African Americans were pursuing citizenship or celebrating emancipatory gains in a nation resisting their progress.

Focusing on a 107-year period that starts when freed and enslaved blacks in the North began celebrating abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in 1808, Kachun has retrieved and microscopically examined hundreds of archival records-newspaper files, government records, religious documents, slave tracts, and photographic exhibits-to compile a dense historiographical study of the legacy of "public commemorations" by African Americans endeavoring to insert their voices into the national consciousness. These festivities, once begun, enabled freedman and ex-slaves to inaugurate "a firm foundation of history and tradition" or what Kachun, following Van Wyck Brooks, calls a "usable past." One is reminded of Douglass's allusion in his July 5th speech to continental Africans' cultural awareness that their individuality was subordinate to the collective consciousness of the tribe and that the ancestral past was a continuum of the present and future. Now, like others generationally-distanced from Africa, they have reforged a New World ideology, hybridized of history, culture, and African American subjectivity. This ultimate syncretism of African customs and American mores is signified in Douglass's remarks: "We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motive, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome" (Norton ed. 123). From the stance of this hybridized "past" borne of American slavery, African Americans received Great Britain's and America's banishments of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in 1808 with a welcoming signature of celebrations. And from this historical moment in 1808, Kachun commences carefully to re-assemble and re-interpret discontinuous history from the disruptive impact of that year on the national psyche and its impact on the present and future goals of black Americans to assimilate into American culture. He reconstructs his data into a linear narrative of "continuous history" by tracing patterns of Freedom Day festivities in order to signify a cohesive thought process and "collective" identity of African Americans "between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."

Using his recovered materials to "pass on" a story of African American memory through the metanarratives of freedom arising from these public festivities, Kachun the historian, following Africanist traditions, subverts the individual "I" in favor of the collective "We" consciousness to capture these disparate and definitive moments. Individuals of the rising middle class who play distinctive roles in these events, including Samuel Cornish, Daniel Payne, Benjamin Tanner, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Frances E. W. Harper, do not go unremarked, nor do the working poor or the rustic folks. And with this collective representation of African American consciousness in mind as his approach to reprising history, Kachun lays out seven chapters. The total study responds to three landmark political events that sparked national celebrations: the end of slave festivals and ascension of January 1, 1808, commemorating Britain's and America's abolishments of the Transatlantic Slave Trade; August 1, 1834, celebrating Great Britain's abolishment of slavery in the West Indies; and January 1, 1863, heralding Lincoln's issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation prohibiting slavery in America.