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Juneteenth commemorates the date when Major General Gordon Granger informed all Texans that, in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all enslaved people were free.
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By that date, June 19, 1865, Africans and African Americans had been seeking freedom from enslavement and dehumanization for over two hundred years. African Americans celebrated Freedom and Emancipation Days in Texas and in cities throughout the nation. This presentation will explore how African Americans not only celebrated Freedom and Emancipation Days throughout the nation, but also how African Americans celebrated, experienced and defined individual and communal life and strategically took charge of their own lives with self-determination, agency and creativity.
Dr. Lillie Johnson Edwards is Professor Emerita of History and African American studies at Drew University. She was the founding Director of Pan-African Studies and received awards for excellent and distinguished teaching. She received her doctorate in history from the University of Chicago.
As a public intellectual, Dr. Edwards has lectured and consulted for libraries, corporations, historical societies and museums including the Garden State Coalition of Schools; the New Jersey Council for Social Studies; the National Jewish Museum in Washington; Apple, Inc; the National Park Service; the National Endowment for the Humanities; and the Ford Foundation. She is currently the vice chair of the Oberlin College and Conservatory Board of Trustees and was appointed by Bishop John Schol to the Board of Ordained Ministries of the New Jersey Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. She is a life member and former National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians and is a life member of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History which presented her with the Mary McLeod Bethune Award.
Appointment by Governor Phil Murphy and serving as chair of New Jersey’s Amistad Commission since July 2022, Dr. Edwards is guiding the Commission’s strategic initiatives that will support New Jersey educators as they infuse African Americans into the K-12 curriculum.
At the conclusion of the program please feel free to take a brief online survey here:
https://www.projectoutcome.org/responses/69801
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