Why Black New Yorkers Once Celebrated the Fifth of July

When New York joined other Northeastern states in abolishing slavery on July 4, 1827, African American community leaders knew they had a major decision to make: How could they celebrate this landmark moment?

Prior to Independence Day 1827, there were around 4,600 enslaved Black people in New York. After statewide emancipation, they joined the existing community of some 30,000 free Black Americans in the Empire State, according to the 1820 census. For many in the Black community, the ban’s passage was a clear opportunity to send a message to Americans of all backgrounds with a public and proud celebration.

“They wanted to claim not only, of course, their freedom [and] the end of slavery, but also their place in the nation,” says historian and Northwestern University professor Leslie M. Harris, who wrote In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863.

What emerged from the community-wide debate was an annual commemoration on the Fifth of July. Observance combined parades, speeches and festivities with calls for state and federal leaders to extend civil rights to all Black people in the United States.

Back in 1817, when Governor Daniel Tompkins and the New York State Legislature symbolically picked Independence Day as the day slavery would finally end in New York, it was a move that “linked the end of slavery to the nation’s founding, to this idea of freedom [and] that all men are created equal,” Harris explains. But while white lawmakers were eager to embrace the connection between abolition and the Fourth of July, many in New York’s Black communities were more wary.

As the first Emancipation Day approached, Black newspapers like Freedom’s Journal—the country’s first antislavery newspaper founded by Black Americans—were filled with columns and editorials about how the day should be commemorated. In addition to fearing the unwanted attention and violence that too often accompanied Black celebrations, many ministers and Black church leaders were concerned that public parades and parties would encourage drinking, dancing and other behaviors that they believed would besmirch what was ultimately a solemn occasion. “It was a mix of respectability politics and wanting people to stay physically safe,” Harris says.

July 4 and other public holidays could be dangerous for Black people, Harris points out, especially when they tried to share in boisterous celebrations alongside white people where alcohol was often present. “There would be parades and things that celebrated the Fourth of July by the white majority, but Black people often found those times to be...perilous...in terms of anti-Black violence,” Harris notes.

Despite those fears, many Black New Yorkers were determined to celebrate abolition publicly. Community leaders decided on the day after Independence Day as the best day to honor the momentous occasion. The day would soon be known in New York State as the Fifth of July or Emancipation Day.

On July 5, 1827, the state’s first Emancipation Day, 4,000 Black New Yorkers marched down Broadway in celebration, led by a grand marshal proudly wielding a drawn sword. The procession ended at the historic African Zion Church, then on Church Street, where the famed abolitionist William Hamilton declared, “This day we stand redeemed from a bitter thralldom,” a phrase historically used to describe the cruelty of chattel slavery.

Fifth of July celebrations were also held in other cities and towns throughout the state. In Rochester, businessman, author and abolitionist Austin Steward, who had escaped slavery years earlier, delivered the city’s inaugural Fifth of July address to acclaim.

Celebrating the end of enslavement on the Fifth of July became a beloved annual tradition that inspired community members to turn out in full force. A travelogue published by an anonymous Englishman who witnessed the 1830 celebration described the joyful crowd of hundreds as “extremely well dressed, and wearing sashes and ribands, paraded the city in martial array, with the accompaniments of bands of music.”

As the Fifth of July became a more established holiday, the festivities became a prime opportunity for Black New Yorkers to highlight the needs of their community. In speeches at churches and during parades, speakers spotlighted systemic injustices that Black New Yorkers were facing.

“They would call out racist practices in employment, in schools,” Harris notes. “What we would call K-12 elementary and high schools…continue[d] to refuse to have integrated settings, and then, of course, many of the elite universities would not accept Black people.” The antislavery movement pushed back on such policies and the false biological notion that Black people were intellectually inferior.

Public calls for change on the Fifth of July weren’t solely focused on New York, either. Participants urged for the abolition of slavery worldwide. Alongside the Fifth of July, Black communities in New York and across the North began celebrating emancipation on August 1 after the United Kingdom’s Slavery Abolition Act took effect throughout the British colonies on that day in 1834.

“When these Emancipation Day celebrations were occurring, people celebrated that the North had ended slavery,” Harris says. “Of course, they marked that that was only the beginning. They also had to end slavery in the South.”

Calls for nationwide emancipation intensified in the 1830s and further still after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act permitted the arrest of any Black person who was suspected of having escaped enslavement. The flimsy requirements of the law and the fact that all free states were required to comply meant that Black Americans everywhere were at risk.

It was in this climate of extreme fear that abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass gave his famed speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York. In the address, Douglass detailed how the United States had failed to live up to its ideals, particularly when it came to human rights and freedom for all.

The speech “aligns with antislavery activists really calling out the hypocrisy of the stated goals and ideals of the American Revolution versus the practices,” Harris says. “I don’t think there’s a better or stronger statement of the conflicts between those ideals and the lived experiences of Blacks and whites in America at that time.”

Fifth of July commemorations continued into the early 1860s. After Washington, D.C., abolished slavery in 1862 and President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, nationwide abolition celebrations began to overtake New York’s decades-long tradition. Its legacy remains in today’s Juneteenth observances.