Black Shapings of Freedom and Emancipation Celebrations in Saginaw, Michigan, 1839–1915

On August 4, 1885, people from across Michigan gathered for Saginaw's fifty-first annual commemoration of West Indian emancipation. The event commenced at the "elegant" home of William Q. Atwood on South Jefferson Street—a prominent address in the city.¹ Atwood, a well-known orator, intellectual, and activist as well as affluent Saginaw businessman, hosted the celebration's guest-of-honor: sixty-seven-year-old Frederick Douglass.² Despite intermittent rain and storms, the large crowd, Douglass and other orators, Civil War veterans from the 102nd United States Color Troops (USCT), and bands from Kalamazoo, Lansing, and Detroit, marched along prominent Potter, Washington, Genesee, and Janes streets to Arbeiter Hall where Douglass was to speak.³

At the hall, Douglass, Atwood, and other eminent men like Detroit-based civil-rights activist William Lambert provided words. Lambert introduced Douglass, who spoke to over two hundred of "the most intelligent people of the city [who] listened attentively to an address" described as "scholarly and deeply interesting."⁴ In his speech, Douglass referenced examples of antebellum self-liberation like the attempted abduction of escaped enslaved peoples Sarah and Adam Crosswhite from their Marshall, Michigan, home in 1847.⁵ Douglass, who had previously lectured in East Saginaw in 1868, also explained the meaning of timing of the Saginaw observance:

The months of August and September are connecting links in point of time and events by which colored people in all countries have been happily affected both for the present and the future. It was the sunny month of August that brought emancipation to the toil-worn, whip-scarred and imbruted slaves of the West Indies, and it was the month of September that brought to the same class of sufferers in the United States the first note or intimation of President Lincoln's famous emancipation proclamation.⁶

Such words pointed to a long-standing tradition in Saginaw, greater Michigan, and beyond of celebrating various moments of the freedom of enslaved peoples—including the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in the 1830s, the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in the U.S. in September 1862 and January 1863, and the enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865. As an Afro-American Journal and Directory from Kalamazoo, Michigan, explained, "it has become a custom among the Freedman generally, in this country, to observe" such dates, with August and September being preferred since they were during "a more suitable and appropriate season of the year," especially in midwestern locations. These "commemorations," or "protests" as historian Benjamin Wilson has termed them, celebrated "liberation from nearly 300 years of the most cruel bondage."⁷

The 1885 event was one of the many ways Saginaw's Black citizens honored and celebrated Black freedom, illustrating historian Melissa Stuckey's assertion that Black Midwesterners' "presence and experiences in this space brought forth some of the most critical debates, conversations, and issues that gripped the nation in the nineteenth century"—especially questions of slavery and freedom.⁸ From well before slavery ended in the U.S. through the early twentieth century, Black activists in central Michigan figured prominently in and shaped local, state, and national dialogues on Black freedom and emancipation. They were part of local, national, and international discourses that sought to commemorate many moments of freedom and emancipation in a long and diasporic history of Black empowerment. In this way, Black men and women in smaller midwestern cities like Saginaw demonstrated that they, too, were part of broad networks of resistance to slavery and commemorations of emancipation.

Early Michigan was the site of multiple emancipationist acts of resistance to slavery, with Black people participating in antislavery conventions, protests, and legal battles that often linked Michigan's small but evergrowing Black and abolitionist communities. Before and after Michigan statehood in 1837, legally free, enslaved, and formerly enslaved Black people were shaping economic and racial dynamics in the state and beyond while creating enduring and intersecting roots for themselves and their communities in Michigan. As early as 1807, enslaved and formerly...