Lincoln College Hosting Virtual Juneteenth Program

 

[June 18, 2020] 

Lincoln College and Lincoln Heritage Museum will host a virtual celebration for “Juneteenth,” this Friday, June 19, featuring a series of presentations over social media throughout the day.

Juneteenth is an annual celebration dating back to the 19th century to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. Although President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1862, it had been difficult to enforce during the Civil War and many slave owners had concealed word of the emancipation from enslaved people in the south.

On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers led by Major General Gordon Granger, arrived in Galveston, Texas to announce that the war had ended and the enslaved were now freed. This event was two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, but marked the first time many African Americans learned they had been freed.

In the more than 150 years since that date, Juneteenth has grown into a major celebration, with 47 states, including Illinois, recognizing it as either a state holiday or a special day of observance.

Interviews for the celebration will include a variety of keynote speakers and include topics on Martin Delany, Criminal Justice Reform, Black Civil War Soldiers, Reconstruction Era Black Politicians, Juneteenth and other Black Commemorations, and Personal Experiences (1960s to present day).

Persons interested in the event can go to the Lincoln College or Lincoln Heritage Museum Facebook Page at https://www.
facebook.com/LincolnCollege1865  or https://www.facebook.com/Lincoln
Heritage/  throughout the day. The Lectures will remain available on the Facebook page for anyone who is unable to view them on Friday.

Speakers and topics include:

Donna Bradley: Personal Experiences (1960s to Today)

Dr. Bradley is lead faculty of the Lincoln College Criminal Justice Department. She has more than 19 years of teaching and training experience and more than 20 years of experience as an attorney with a private firm, the Defense Department and the National Labor Relations Board. In 1969, when she was 12 years old, Bradley became the first African-American student to attend the all-white St. Mary’s Episcopal School in Memphis, Tenn. Bradley’s mother was an active civil rights leader in the Memphis area and decided to enroll her daughter at the all-white school just one year after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in the city. Like many private schools, St. Mary’s had attracted white students whose parents did not wish to have them attend integrated public schools.

James T. Campbell: Martin Delany

James T. Campbell is a professor of History at Stanford University where he focuses on African American History. Campbell is a 2020 Guggenheim fellow, and author or editor of several books, including: Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa; Race, Nation, and Empire in American History; Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies; Mississippi Witness; and Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005, which was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Roscoe Jones Jr.: Criminal Justice Reform

Roscoe Jones Jr. is an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and lecturer at the University of Michigan, currently a counsel in the Washington, D.C., office of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, formerly senior counsel to Sen. Cory Booker, where he led the Senator's criminal justice reform work, and was counsel and later senior counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee for then-Chairman Patrick Leahy.

Joesph P. Reidy: Black Civil War Soldiers

Joseph P. Reidy is professor emeritus of History at Howard University, author of “Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery,” which was the winner of the Columbia University Bancroft Prize, “From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South, Central Georgia 1800-1880,” and Coeditor of The black military experience, part of “Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867.”

Philip Dray: Reconstrucation Era Black Politicians

Philip Dray is author of “At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America”, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His book “Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen” was a New York Times Notable Book and received the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship. Dray is also an associate professor at Eugene Lange College of Liberal Arts.

Keith Mayes: Juneteenth and Other Black Commemorations

Keith Mayes is a professor of African American and African Studies at the University of Minnesota. Mayes is author of “Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African-American Holiday Tradition” and most recently “Civil Rights and Black Power : The Struggle for Black Equality in the United States, 1945-1975.”

[Lauren Grenlund
Director of Public Relations
Lincoln College]