It is impossible to celebrate a national holiday that marks the emancipation of Black people in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, without confronting the history of slavery and the role of education in freedom.What is Juneteenth and who helped make it a federal holiday? When did the last enslaved people in the United States learn they were free?
Other colonies followed South Carolina’s example, even up North. In 1835, George Kimball, a white abolitionist, created the interracial Noyes Academy in Canaan, N.H. The first class had 28 white students and 14 Black students. Outraged by integrated learning, a 300-resident mob wrapped chains around the school and pledged to “drag the n— school off its foundation and through town.” They did, using more than 90 oxen to drag the school into the river.
Northerners sent teachers akin to missionaries to the South with the goal of educating formerly enslaved people. Those teachers included Black abolitionist Charlotte Forten Grimke, who traveled from Philadelphia to South Carolina’s Sea Islands to teach newly freed African Americans at the Penn School. Grimke declared, “The long, dark night of the Past, with all its sorrows and its fears, was forgotten; and for the Future — the eyes of these freed children see no clouds in it.