Festivals in the United States, African American

By: Aaron Myers

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Festivals in the United States, African American

Celebrations that express African American identity.

There are three main types of African American festivals—coronation festivals, emancipation festivals, and commemoration festivals. These festivals took place primarily in the North during the antebellum era. They served as occasions for challenging past and present assumptions about African Americans as well as opportunities to build solidarity between peoples of African descent in the United States. On these occasions, people attended dances, fairs, parades, picnics, and religious services. Many African American festivals originating in colonial times have provided models for more recent marches and demonstrations, such as those of Marcus Garvey and the Civil Rights Movement.

One of the earliest African American celebrations was the coronation festival, or Negro election. It emerged in mid-eighteenth-century New England and was modeled after the white community's state elections. In the Negro elections, which were organized by slaves and financially supported by masters, blacks elected a leader, preferably African born and of known royal descent. Slaves of wealthy masters were also favorable candidates because of their potential access to a greater pool of material resources and because slaves referenced status in their own community by the status of their master. Slaves and masters usually regarded the elected leader as a dignified, authoritative official. The multiple roles of the elected individual included negotiating in the interest of the slave community and resolving tensions between slaves and masters. By electing their own leaders, African American slaves performed roles they had always been denied, thereby preparing themselves for participating in public affairs. Negro elections continued through the mid-nineteenth century.

Another festival in which slaves united around a black leader was Pinkster. It derived from a Dutch celebration of the same name, which African Americans adopted in the mid-eighteenth century. Pinkster took place on top of a hill in Albany, New York, close to an all-black cemetery and the place where several African Americans had been executed in 1793 for attempting to set fire to the city. Although a dark symbolism loomed over the festivities, it was attended by Dutch, French, German, and Native American peoples, and therefore presented a rare opportunity to entertain the utopian notion of a harmonious, multiethnic society. This festival was especially popular in the early 1800s.

Between the American Revolution (1775–1783) and the Civil War (1861–1865) in the United States, slaves established a tradition of emancipation festivals in which religious and secular black leaders, free and enslaved, publicly evaluated African Americans' progress toward liberation and their capacity for self-government. These were occasions for remembering the contributions of blacks to the development of the United States and for fostering racial pride and racial memory. Emancipation festivals involved major associations, such as churches and temperance societies, and were hotly debated in the press. They were relatively sober events often accompanied by vehement protest. Over the years, the orations of black speakers became increasingly aggressive in demanding freedom and the redressing of past grievances.

Although an emancipation celebration for most white Americans, the Fourth of July became a date of rebellion for many African Americans. Black leaders who spoke at early Independence Day celebrations encouraged free and enslaved blacks to seek moral improvement in order to become more worthy citizens. As the abolitionist movement grew, however, the Fourth of July became an opportune time for black leaders to remind the nation how the concept on which it was founded, liberty, was contradicted by the existence of slavery. In his famous address of 1852 (titled “What, to the American Slave, is your Fourth of July?”), Frederick Douglass said, “Your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” In several northern cities, the Fifth of July became a black alternative to the Independence Day holiday and an opportunity to advance the antislavery argument.

For one short period of time, from 1808 to the 1830s, the date of the official end of the slave trade, January 1, was to slaves what the Fourth of July is to white Americans. At festivals celebrating this anniversary, black leaders stressed the common origins of enslaved and freed blacks in the New World and debated the colonization of Africa. New Year celebrations were held mostly in New York City and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the northern cities with the largest number of blacks. Although January 1 acquired new significance after 1863, when American slaves were emancipated, it never became a black national holiday. Some African Americans, such as those living in Boston, Massachusetts, held emancipation festivals on the date slavery was abolished in their state, July 14, as opposed to national or international dates of emancipation.

Beginning in 1834, African Americans celebrated August 1, the date of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. On that date, the British Parliament emancipated approximately 670,000 slaves, renewing enslaved African Americans' hope for general emancipation. At that time England, which had set an example for the United States to follow, and Canada, which accepted fugitive slaves and protected them from slave catchers, became important symbols of liberation for African Americans. August 1 was observed in thirteen different states and, like many emancipation festivals, was characterized by the contradictory moods of hope and despair, praise and denunciation.

The concept of freedom is central to both emancipation and commemoration festivals. Yet unlike emancipation festivals, which are associated with dates of liberation, commemoration festivals are associated with individuals who worked to achieve liberation. In 1814 slaves in Wilmington, Delaware, created a commemoration celebration called the Big Quarterly, which continues to be observed. It is a celebration in honor of Peter Spencer, who was the founder of the Union Church of Africa, and is both religious and musical in character. Before emancipation, slaves had to secure passes from their masters in order to attend, since Delaware was heavily policed against Underground Railroad activities. The Big Quarterly spread to other parts of the country and became a celebration in honor of all religious black leaders and their determination to found autonomous churches.

Another commemoration festival in honor of a particular individual is called Jerry Rescue Day. In 1851, the year following the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law, slaves in Syracuse, New York, staged a protest to commemorate the rescue of a slave named Jerry who ran away, was captured, and then imprisoned temporarily while arrangements were made to return him to his master. Abolitionists broke him out of prison and set him free in the North.

African Americans celebrated other individuals during the antebellum era. The African American community in Cleveland, Ohio, commemorated the 1831 rebellion led by slave Nat Turner, while blacks in Boston, Massachusetts, paid tribute to Crispus Attucks, the first man killed during the Boston Massacre, through the 1850s. The John Canoe (also Junkanoo or Jonkonnu) festival is still celebrated today in North Carolina; it is believed to have originated as a celebration of a West African leader or chieftain named Junkanoo. In all of these commemoration festivals, black revolutionaries, rebels, and fugitives were exalted as exemplars of the relentless spirit that characterized the African American fight for freedom.

Unlike these localized, predominantly black American festivals, Carnival is internationally celebrated and attracts a racially mixed crowd. In the Caribbean and in South America, the European Carnival tradition of the colonizers mixed with the African festival traditions of the slaves to create a vibrant Creole celebration. Carnival traditionally takes place during the week before Lent. On this occasion, people from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds come together to indulge in food, drink, music, and dance. Carnival, which was for many slaves the only opportunity for revelry, has been interpreted as a “safety valve” that allowed poor and oppressed peoples to vent their pent-up frustration.

Although the largest and most famous Carnivals are held in Trinidad and Brazil, New Orleans, Louisiana, hosts an equally renowned Carnival celebration featuring the Mardi Gras and Zulu parades. In the Mardi Gras parade, some African Americans dress up as Native Americans, a motif also popular in the Brazilian Carnival, to celebrate the indigenous population's fighting spirit and ancestral worship tradition. The Zulu parade emerged in the mid- to late nineteenth century as a separate Carnival event, since blacks were not allowed to participate in Mardi Gras. Although it is intended as a parody of the white paraders' royal parade, the Zulu parade's African and minstrel motifs, such as blackface painting, has been criticized by members of the African American community as too burlesque.

Caribbean traditions continue to have an impact on African American culture through celebrations such as the West Indian festivals of Toronto, Canada, and Brooklyn, New York. As more and more Caribbean peoples immigrate to the United States, their festivals grow in scope and influence, fostering a Pan-West Indian consciousness among African Americans.

See also Abolitionism in the United States; Carnivals in Latin America and the Caribbean; Creoles; Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment; Slavery in the United States.

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