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

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.

Kachun groups each chapter by a dating sequence, and then fully explores how local, regional, state, and national festivities impact each other. For instance, he identifies early 19th-century celebrations that became ritualistic procedures. Starting from oral announcements of Negro Election Day events made to a mostly illiterate African American population and extending through published media at midcentury, Kachun illuminates an evolving format and gradual formalizing of festival notices. For most events, planners had to consider participants' needs in terms of site locations, parades, sideshows, museum exhibits, platform agendas and speakers, content and style of speeches, crowd responses (cultured or unrefined), and white oversight. In Chapter 1, "Foundations, 1808-1834," for example, Kachun examines the popularity of slave festivals in the Northeast where African Americans were excluded from 4th of July celebrations. These early festivities were discontinued, and Freedom Day inaugurated, when slavery was abolished in northern states in 1808. The impact of Great Britain's abolishment of slavery in the West Indies on August 1, 1834, is significant to the freedom-questing black psyche, and in Chapter 2, "Maturation, 1834-1862," Kachun argues that this event marks a major shift in African American cultures when the freedom festival, by 1850, becomes institutionalized, and thereby creates a bond between the black middle class and its illiterate counterpart. In Chapter 3, "Expansion and Fragmentation, 1862-1870," Kachun notes another turning point in African American festivals after the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Not only does the Proclamation link blacks nationally in both the North and the South (for the first time) to a similar freedom celebration, but also over time, it signifies their cultural polarizations at local or regional levels as their calenders shift the date from January 1 to June 19, August 1, September 22, or April 23, depending upon local, not national, convenience.

At this juncture, Kachun makes a significant topical shift: He pauses to demarcate eruptions in the mindset of African Americans as they redefine the purpose of freedom festivals. In Chapter 4, "Remembrance and Amnesia, 1870-1910," Kachun explores the sudden drives, on the one hand, to forget the stigma of slavery, but on the other hand, to insure permanent records of cultural history through erection of public monuments that commemorate African American heroes and the respective formations of diverse historical societies, black self-help organizations, and race uplift groups. In Chapter 5, "Reorientation, 1860s-1900s," the historian resumes examination of festivals of freedom in context of Reconstruction/post-Reconstruction hostile white backlash against blacks through physical violence and entrenched Jim Crow policies, partially sanctioned and/or alleviated by Booker T. Washington's 1895 concession to whites in the Atlanta "Compromise" and successfully imposed by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson court's rule of de jure segregation. Thus, Kachun, in Chapter 6, "Contestation in Washington, D.C., 1860s-1900s," turns to the social dynamics of politics to critique definitions of nationhood at one site relevant to the theme of "community," and the way that theme works out in conflicting space as race relations. Ironically, African Americans have remained marginalized and factionalized at the heart of the nation's political voice, its ideologies, and its consciousness. In his concluding Chapter 7, "Dissolution, 1900-1920," Kachun explains the dissolution of these freedom festivals by 1920 and the impact of World War I, especially after the semi-centennial celebration of Emancipation Day in 1915. By then, black Americans had become more focused than ever before on assimilation and homogeneity in America. With this obsession, they adopted the dominant culture's definition of "citizen" and willingly shirked the badge and shame of slavery as they sought to overcome Jim Crow segregation and other violence by effacing themselves and accepting the 4th of July as their own major holiday, despite Douglass's antebellum caution.

The significance of this American festive past had remained buried until Kachun restored these definitive celebratory markers to African American history and culture, and noted that these festivals of freedom not only defined the hybrid nature of African American culture but also the syncretic contours of American society as a whole. His historical study is well researched and highly detailed, but not easily graspable at the first reading since so much data is generalized as ritual. The author frequently digresses in his critiques of historical events, and thus is often repetitive. It behooves the reader to read the "Introduction" first, and the chapters in turn (not my usual style). The 15 illustrations are reproductions, and too often indistinct, but valuable nonetheless. Kachun should be commended for making a major contribution to black culture by filling in a historical gap about African American festivals of freedom that have too long escaped our calendar of celebrations.

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" 1852. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Eds. William L. Andrews and William S. McFeely. New York: Norton, 1997. 116-27.

Virginia Whatley Smith

University of Alabama, Birmingham