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Thanksgiving celebration for Blacks leaves both warm, regrettable memories

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African-Americans have strongly embraced Thanksgiving Day, even during slavery. At that time, those held in bondage took the time to be thankful for what they had which, of course, was not very much.

In 1777, when the Continental Congress delivered a decree for the 13 colonies to give thanks for reaching a victory over the British at Saratoga, the Africans also took part in the celebration throughout the region stretching from New England down to Georgia.

What is often forgotten, however, is that Thanksgiving began as a church-oriented celebration for the Black community. Black pastors then would often give sermons that could be heard loud and clear through the small Black churches. These sermons would be about struggles, hopes, fears and triumphs. The sermons usually grieved the institution of slavery; the suffering of Black people, and often pleaded for an awakening of a slave-free Americas that they believed would come soon.

Thanksgiving and Christian faith

Similar to the Puritan practice of setting aside time for fasting and giving thanks, for many African-Americans any notion of Thanksgiving existed alongside the Christian faith. There is an often-perceived conundrum of Black slaves in Colonial America giving thanks. This has encouraged historians to point to justification—and just maybe—validation which became more tangible after the U.S. Constitution outlawed the importation of slaves into America and its territories by January 1808.

The difficulty may lie in Blacks observing a tradition that mimics their specific plight of subjucation and bondage.

During the Colonial Period, field slaves observed Thanksgiving by catching and preparing wild game that was often accompanied by a serving of cornmeal, while house servants would  dine on leftovers from the “big house” after slave-owners and their families finished their meal.

In 1876, for instance, roughly 13 years after President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving Day as a  national holiday, African Methodist Episcopalian cleric Rev. Benjamin Arnett stirred a predominantly Black congregation with the following Biblically inspired words:

“…we call on all American citizens to love their country, and look not on the sins of the past, but arming ourselves for the conflict of the future, girding ourselves in the habiliments of Righteousness, march forth with the courage of a Numidian lion, and with the confidence of a Roman gladiator, and meet the demands of the age, and satisfy the duties of this hour.”

Confronting America’s ‘original sin’

But ceasing the importation and sale of African slaves in America did not end what is commonly referred to as the nation’s “original sin.” It continued for more than a half century later. That’s one reason why many free slaves migrated to Africa to the newly founded colony of Liberia. These persons took the tradition of Thanksgiving there, thanking God for their freedom and for the establishment of Liberia.

It may not be difficult to conjure a delightfully sublime mental picture of Africans—at last free from slavery and colonial plantation life—celebrating Thanksgiving in the equatorial heat of Liberia. Perhaps they ate yams and collard greens, or jollof rice and fufu (portions of cassava and green plantain flour drenched in hot water), with a pounded melon stew. Perhaps they danced to indigenous rhythms and sang hand-clapping, foot-stomping spirituals.

With slavery having been officially abolished since 1863, those captives prior to the Emancipation Proclamation often viewed Thanksgiving Day as a time to escape. They took advantage of relaxed work schedules and the holiday travels of slaveholders who were often too far away to stop them.

While some slaveholders treated the holiday as any other workday, history has revealed a number of traditions that Black people would adhere to including the infrequent suspension of work for celebration and family visits. Because many slaves had spouses, children and family who were owned by different masters—and lived on other properties—many slaves often requested passes to travel and visit relatives and acquaintances.

Reference to scripture

In the North, before the Civil War, Blacks celebrated their own Thanksgiving Day. It was usually held on Jan. 1—the first occasion in 1808—as a day of commemoration with sermons and song about the greatness of the African past and the evils of slavery. The elders within the Black community would traditionally tell stories about their lives in slavery and the promise of freedom, based partly on Old Testament narratives found in the Book of Exodus.

After the deliverance from American chattel slavery, by 1876 more African-Americans had realized that the United States was their true home. This may have inspired Arnett’s aforementioned sermon as he pressed for continued, unyielding faith while instilling a willingness to endure even more hardship with utmost courage and hope.

For some Black people, obviously, the transformation of the historic day into a traditional celebration of “thanks” is yet another way that America hoped to sweep its ugly history under the rug. The day’s history can be traced back to a tale that sounds all too familiar to many people of color—White conquerors invading a land, claiming it as their own, and engaging in wanton slaughter of the land’s indigenous people for their own gain.

Slaughter of Pequot people

A few years ago, the Atlanta Blackstar conducted a random survey of 130 Black people and discovered that more than 60 did not celebrate Thanksgiving because they felt it would be a celebration of what some referred to as the “genocide” of Native Indians. But for some families, however, the holiday was about “redefining” its dark past and turning it into something more positive. Out of the 62 participants who said they did not celebrate Thanksgiving, more than 40 admitted they still gather each holiday for the traditional family dinner.

As well, many participants said they had no problem referring to the holiday as Thanksgiving, as long as they knew they were not commemorating the Pilgrim’s 1621 slaughter of the Pequot men, women and children near Plymouth, Mass. More than 90 persons within the survey admitted that the holiday’s bloody history does cross their mind at least some point during the day.

To some, according to Pilgrim Hall Museum, the “First Thanksgiving” may present a distorted picture of history of relations between the European colonists and their descendants, and the Native Indian population in the New World. When Gov. John Winthrop (Massachusetts Bay Colony) proclaimed a “thanksgiving” for the successful massacre of the Native Indian tribe, it was essentially part of a long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders. The pattern repeated itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of the original Native Indian population had been exterminated and the remainder were left to assimilate into White society—or die off on reservations—supposedly out of the view of “polite society.”

Many persons of color have since viewed Thanksgiving Day as the point when the dominant White culture (and most of the rest of the non-White but non-indigenous population) celebrated the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men Americans hold up today as their historic founding fathers.

Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and author of the Declaration of Independence, was known to romanticize Native Indians and their culture, but that didn’t stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war, Henry Dearborn, that in a doming conflict with certain tribes “[We] shall destroy them all.”

‘Lift Every Voice And Sing’

As the genocide was winding down in the early 20th Century, President Theodore Roosevelt defended the expansion of Whites across the continent as an inevitable process “due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct,  and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where barbarian peoples of the world hold sway.”

Roosevelt also once said: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of 10 are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the 10th.”

In 1905, something distinct happened to the Black celebration of Thanksgiving. James Weldon Johnson’s landmark song, “Lift Every Voice And Sing”—often called the “Black National Anthem”—helped to inspire more African-Americans to accept the Thanksgiving tradition as more of a spiritual response to their continued plight, and this song was heard universally in big and small Black churches on each holiday. And even though the tradition of going to church on Thanksgiving Day is not as commonplace as it once was—particularly after the mass migration of African-Americans to the North following World War I—the practice is still a cherished memory in the minds of many people.

Those candied yams

There is a particular association between the historical African-American Thanksgiving dinner and the Afro-Caribbean Diaspora. The word “yam” is from the West Atlantic languages of West Africa where the word “nyam” means “to eat.” The sweet cassava root and “yam,” “yami,” and other words refer to forms of what we call today—the tropical yam in its wild form. The sweet potato was brought from the Caribbean where it was grown by the Arawak and Carib peoples, and later by enslaved Africans brought there.

The sweet potato would cross the Atlantic early on via Spanish and Portuguese explorers who took it to West and Central Africa, often in exchange for slaves. Africans adopted the crop, appreciating its edible leaves and tubers. However, in the sugar-drenched Caribbean during the Thanksgiving period,  enslaved African men and women minding the sugar cane fields would boil a sugar substance through the night and would bring pots of sweet potatoes to the sugar house where they would pour the molten hot sugar water on top to cook it and…“Voila!”…candied yams were invented.

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