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INTRODUCTION Sixty years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, black Savannahians gathered together for a public remembrance. The first spectators began marking their places along West Broad Street in the heart of the city’s black business district some three hours before the parade was to begin. The skies were overcast that morning but did not discourage black Savannahians, who congregated at a steady pace until there were so many cramming the sidewalks that they might not have even noticed the cooler than usual temperatures. As half past ten drew near they jostled among themselves , each trying to secure a position from which to catch a glimpse of their fellow Savannahians marching by. The sizable turnout reflected the buoyant effervescence of black political activity that followed the ratification of the Woman’s Suffrage Amendment to the United States Constitution. After nearly two decades of de jure disfranchisement in Georgia, 1923 marked the third year of a partially successful black foray into political affairs in Savannah . According to the Savannah Tribune, the city’s black weekly, this was “one of the most spectacular demonstrations seen in this city for many a day.”1 The parade wound its way through the “principle streets of the city,” past the now stately squares that recalled the genesis of James Oglethorpe’s Savannah as a military outpost defending against Indian and Spanish adversaries. It coursed past the splendid handsome homes on the avenues and streets where the white aristocratic gentility resided, and behind which stood the far more modest simple-framed cottages, a story and a half high, the steeply pitched gable roofs lining the narrow alleyways—where members of Savannah ’s black working classes had settled. Black and white and poor and rich continued to dwell in close proximity, a reminder of the not too distant era of slavery when the slaveholding elite kept their chattel nearby and behind them in order to supervise them in work and play. This built environment, a pervasive metaphor for the status of descendants of the enslaved and the free, was passed down for generations, through slavery and its end, during the interregnum years, and finally the rise of Jim Crow. On that New Year morning , the remarkably solemn parade marking the storied decree that ended slavery suspended the ideological regime, if only for a few hours, as black Savannahians streamed en masse through the wide avenues and the streets in front of the mansions and houses that conveyed affluence and influence. First came the beating of the drums. Necks craned to glimpse the source, and before long Middleton’s Band, turning left on West Broad from Gwin1 nett, appeared in the distance. Donning his colonel’s cap, Nathan Roberts, a deacon at First Bryan Baptist Church and a prominent business and civic leader, led the First Georgia Regiment Knights of Pythias. Next came five more companies of the Knights, followed by the Weldon Lodge of Elks, the Savannah Home Association, and the Georgia Elks. Sol Johnson, the outspoken publisher and editor of the Savannah Tribune, and a member of the elite First Congregational Church, led the Knights of Damon. The World War veterans, the Union Brotherhood Benevolent Association, the Young Adelphia Aid and Social Club, and the Evening Aid and Call Social Club followed in formation.2 Women were not absent from the parade. The Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, which by 1923 had become affiliated with the Georgia State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs and the National Association of Colored Women, marched in front of the “ladies and children of the free clinic” and various drill corps, which the Tribune did not see fit to enumerate. This all but cursory mention of women’s participation as compared to the full listing of men’s groups reflected not women’s limited involvement in civic or sacred life but a striking paradox in the arrangement of the sexes: marginalized from leadership in their faith communities, which until then was what mattered most in black public life, and longing for men to assume their Godgiven mantle of protection and provision, black women were at the forefront of a remarkable struggle for black inclusion in the body politic. Although many elements of black Savannah were represented in the parade , no one group was more prominent than the clergy. Like kings on their way to a coronation, members of the Interdenominational Ministers Union and the Baptist Ministers Union sat in horse-drawn...

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