2024 JUNETEENTH IN APPALACHIA

Compiled and curated by Marie T.Cochran,

founder of the Affrilachian Artist Project

Toolkit Outline

Overview        2

History & Context        2

Black Union Soldiers        2

Historical Highlight: The Story of The Kingdom of the Happy Land, North Carolina        3

Self-Determination & Juneteenth: Freeing Ourselves        3

BLAC Juneteenth Jubilee: Conversations with Black Appalachian Community Leaders        4

SELF-AFFIRMATION: Juneteenth Celebrations Around the Region        5

ALABAMA        6

GEORGIA        6

KENTUCKY        6

NORTH CAROLINA        7

OHIO        7

PENNSYLVANIA        7

SOUTH CAROLINA        7

TENNESSEE        8

WEST VIRGINIA        8

Overview

In 2016, retired educator Ms. Opal Lee set out on a mission to make Juneteenth a national holiday. Read the Story of the “Grandmother of Juneteenth.” On June 17th, 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law, establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday.

“Juneteenth celebrates a belated liberation. Enslaved people in the Confederacy who didn’t manage to escape across Union lines or find themselves in “occupied territory” were not all made free by Lincoln’s proclamation and had to wait until the end of the Civil War to take their first free breaths. In many ways, Juneteenth represents how freedom and justice in the US have always been delayed for black people.” — From an essay titled, “The Quintessential Americanness of Juneteenth.

History & Context

Many enslavers, especially those from Louisiana and Mississippi, refugeed, or hid their slaves in Texas to keep them from Union forces. Enslavers refused to emancipate their slaves or acknowledge that the war was over. Union Brigadier General Gordon Granger and 1,800 federal troops arrived off the coast of Galveston in mid-June 1865. Though many enslaved people had already learned through the “grapevine telegraph” and from African American dockworkers and U.S. Colored Troops that they were free. On June 19, 1865, Granger made news of freedom official. He stepped onto the balcony of Ashton Villa, the former headquarters of the Texas Confederate Army, and read General Orders No. 3. — excerpted from Why Juneteenth Matters by Shennette Garrett-Scott for ASALH (Association for the Study of African American Life and History)

Black Union Soldiers

"Once they let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship." —Frederick Douglass

Roughly 200,000 Black men enlisted among the Union ranks in the months before Confederate General Robert E Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Virginia on April 9, 1865.

Liberation finally reached the edges of the U.S. western frontier on June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. Many formerly enslaved soldiers were among their ranks. They marched onto plantations and across cities, reading small copies of the Emancipation Proclamation, spreading the news, and enforcing the law. Only through the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was chattel slavery officially ended throughout the United States.

Historical Highlight: The Story of The Kingdom of the Happy Land, North Carolina

The Kingdom of the Happy Land was a Black communal society in Western North Carolina during Reconstruction. Nestled in the valleys and ridges along Lake Summit near the small town of Tuxedo, North Carolina, The Kingdom embodied a larger history of Black, rural place-making and an early vision for Black settlement in the southern mountains. According to The Kingdom of the Happy Land, published by Sadie Smathers Patton, it reigned for roughly 50 years, from the 1860s to the 1910s.

Self-Determination & Juneteenth: Freeing Ourselves

Slave-era Rebellions

• Harper’s Ferry Black Heritage Tour (WV)
• https://facebook.com/events/s/harpers-ferry-black-heritage-g/1433645943945707/

• Underground Railroad sites in Appalachia

Black Soldiers in the U.S. Military During the Civil War

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Juneteenth Digital Toolkit

SELF-AFFIRMATION: Juneteenth Celebrations Around the Region

2024 Juneteenth Celebrations in Appalachia, compiled and curated by BLAC Narrative Organizer, Marie T.Cochran

We have included events that are:

• Celebratory and Educational
• Black and grassroots-led and/or in partnership with municipalities and other organizations
• Established before the Federally-designated Juneteenth Holiday (2021)

Appalachia is a mountainous region in the eastern United States that stretches from New York to Mississippi. It includes the Appalachian Mountains, divided into three sections: northern, central, and southern. The region is known for its diverse landscapes, which include rolling hills, wooded areas, and river valleys.

It stretches from the western Catskill Mountains of New York state into Pennsylvania, continuing through the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Great Smoky Mountains into northern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

ALABAMA

GEORGIA 

KENTUCKY

NORTH CAROLINA

OHIO

PENNSYLVANIA 

SOUTH CAROLINA 

TENNESSEE 

VIRGINIA

WEST VIRGINIA