In January 1863, Black New Yorkers celebrated the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation with a jubilee at Cooper Union, just as African Americans did in Chicago and other cities across the North that year. But in New Orleans, they held what may be the first recorded mass celebration—the first Juneteenth—organized by formerly enslaved people rejoicing at the end of their own enslavement. Other such celebrations followed. In April 1865, for example, thousands of Black South Carolinians paraded through Charleston, celebrating the evacuation of Confederate forces and their own emancipation. And in June 1866, of course, Galvestonians began the commemorations that became a national holiday.
Accounts from New Orleans in the summer of 1864, in a city that was once the country’s largest slave market, confirm that the moment of liberation was America’s second Independence Day—and as in 1776, it marked the beginning of a fight, not the end. New Orleans’s celebrations were the first battle cry in African Americans’ struggle to achieve something more than freedom.
At the end of the summer, 10 formerly enslaved men decided to publish a history of the summer’s events, the story found in the thin volume. Their pamphlet was a direct rebuke of state laws banning enslaved people from learning to read or write, much less voicing their demands in print. This specific volume—which demonstrated the authors’ educational accomplishments and their skills as printers and editors—was designed to inspire a man they considered an ally, though sometimes a reluctant one. We don’t know how many copies of Emancipation Celebration they printed in 1864; few exist today. But this one, expensively bound in red leather with silver edging, likely survived because, as the brass plate on its cover reveals, it was a gift to His Excellency A. Lincoln from the Free Colored People, New Orleans.
The largest of the events it recorded started on June 11 in Congo Square—a Black space used for generations for celebrations, commemorations, and markets—and then expanded with a parade through the French Quarter. It drew soldiers from the Louisiana Native Guard and U.S. Colored Regiments, who marched alongside children from multiple African American schools, followed by members of Black trade and charitable organizations. The speakers’ platform featured educators from the city’s Black schools and African American veterans of the War of 1812. They were seated alongside two white leaders, General Nathaniel P. Banks and Louisiana Governor Michael Hahn, who both arrived late. This was not simply a celebration of emancipation. The planners had organized demonstrations of the role that African Americans had played in destroying slavery and their fitness for the responsibilities of citizenship that should follow.