‘A message of racial advancement’

Georgia State University professor Wendy Venet, who specializes in 19th century U.S. history, teaching courses about the Civil War and Reconstruction, chimes in via email that “annual occasions often took place in local churches or sometimes on one of the black college campuses. Ceremonies included reading of the Proclamation by a prominent member of the community, speeches and music.”

“Sometimes these occasions began with a parade,” she continues. “Often the festivities focused on a message of racial advancement, especially when the celebrations took place at black colleges and universities. Sometimes they were occasions for getting a message out, such as news about the lynching of three black men in south Georgia during the last week of December 1889, (which was a focal point for the Emancipation Day Celebration held Jan. 1, 1890).”

In other communities like Galveston, Emancipation Day celebrations took place annually on or around the day African Americans in those areas learned of the Emancipation Proclamation. For Thomaston, a predominantly white town over an hour’s drive south of Atlanta in Upson County, May 29, 1865, is that day. And until this year, Thomaston, according to multigenerational native the Rev. James McGill, who wrote “The First One Hundred Years of Upson County Negro History,” published in 2017, that milestone had been celebrated each year around Memorial Day since 1866. It’s widely considered the longest-running consecutive celebration of its kind.

William A. Guilford, a businessman and early black state legislator born in 1844, says McGill, was key in organizing that very first 1866 Emancipation Celebration. “William Guilford,” says McGill, “wrote there were five speakers,” including James Milton Smith, who later served as Georgia’s 48th governor from 1872-77. The next day, May 30, white Thomaston resident James W. Greene wrote, “The freed people had a brilliant celebration on yesterday” in a letter.

Over time, the Emancipation Celebration grew. In 1921, according to McGill’s book, “it was estimated that from 3,000 to 5,000 Negroes were present.” Early 20th century photographs of the Emancipation Celebration confirm a sizable crowd. “The Central of Georgia Railway,” McGill states at one point in the book, “ran four special coaches for colored people for this occasion, three from Macon and one from Atlanta.”