Emancipation Day

Today is the first of August, a day that once held incredible significance for many free African American communities in the United States, and in the northeast in particular. On this day in 1834, the British Parliament decreed an end to slavery in the West Indies. In honor of that decision, free African American communities celebrated with picnics, speeches, and processions, in anticipation of the day when lawmakers in the United States would do the same.

It was celebrated in Carlisle, as documented in this news blurb from the Carlisle Herald:
"The colored people of this borough celebrated the Anniversary of British Abolition of Slavery in the West Indies, on the 1st instant, in a Grove adjacent to town, where they listened to several addresses from some of their own number. In the evening they returned to town, both sexes marching in procession and singing as they passed through the several streets." (Carlisle Herald and Expositor, 6 August 1845).

Harrisburg's African American residents also celebrated the holiday.
In 1859, Emancipation Day in Harrisburg was celebrated with speeches, including a notable oration by Jacob C. White, who asked why Black men have "No rights in a land which embosoms the hallowed remains of our ancestors? No liberty in a country which was freed by our own arms?" (Weekly Anglo-African, 13 August 1859)

This holiday held special significance for Blacks for reasons beyond the slavery connection. From The Year of Jubilee: Men of Muscle:
Prior to the end of slavery in the United States, northern blacks had few occasions to celebrate the ideas of freedom and equality. Independence Day rang hollow for most free African Americans, many of whom had family and friends in bondage in slave-holding states. The raucous celebrations of July Fourth also posed a threat to free blacks in large cities, who were often targeted with firecrackers by malicious revelers. As a result, many free African Americans remained indoors or otherwise maintained a low profile during the explosion-filled holiday.
Harrisburg residents, along with blacks in other large Northern cities, chose a different day and a different cause for celebration: The first day of August was Emancipation Day, named in honor of the 1834 act of the British Parliament bringing an end to slavery in the British West Indies. The day was marked by parades and abolitionist speeches, often to the confusion of the local white community, who did not understand the significance of the date. Whites who observed local African American residents commemorating the day paternalistically likened the activities to child-like fun and nonsense.
The earliest documented Emancipation Day celebration in Harrisburg occurred in 1857, on a small scale. Schoolchildren were organized into a parade through the borough's Tanner's Alley neighborhood under the direction of Charles Robinson, an established oysterman and neighborhood patriarch. Though he could neither read nor write, Robinson organized a neighborhood celebration and choreographed an intricate series of marching maneuvers to squeeze the procession smartly through the maze of narrow alleys that constituted the African American portion of the East Ward. A writer for the Harrisburg Daily Telegraph reported the event in its afternoon edition:

Love and Charity. A company consisting of about twenty colored children marshaled by Charley Robinson paraded in Walnut street this morning. They were uniformed in sashes of red, white and blue muslin, with red rosettes, and carried a banner with the words "Love and Charity" imprinted thereon. About every third one of the juveniles were provided with a miniature drum and brass trumpet, which they "tooted" with an earnestness that showed their feelings were strongly enlisted in the cause, whatever it was.
When the company arrived at Tanner's alley, marshal Robinson in true military style advanced before the drummer, and planting his baton of office upon the ground, bade them wheel to the right, and the precision with which this movement was executed drew from even the soldiers themselves loud and repeated bursts of applause. The last we saw of the precious youngsters they were about filing into the colored Masonic Hall, where we presume they were regaled on doughnuts and ginger-bread.

(George F. Nagle, The Year of Jubilee: Men of Muscle, 2010, pp 191-192)

The significance of the event escaped the news reporter, but such celebrations were a cornerstone of community-building, and ulitmately strengthened the anti-slavery resolve of free African American communities everywhere.