By Tameka Bradley Hobbs, Ph.D.
I am a native of Live Oak, Florida. It is the seat of Suwannee County, named for the river made famous by Stephen Foster’s minstrel song. It is a relative stone’s throw away from Georgia’s southern border. It is not the Florida that pops into most people’s imaginations when they think of Florida, but it is Florida nonetheless. My ancestors have been in the area, between Suwannee, Madison, and Jefferson counties, for generations dating back to slavery. According to our genealogy, my enslaved ancestors were brought to Florida by way of South Carolina; my elders were proud of our Gullah-Geechee roots.
As a girl growing up in Live Oak in the 1980s, I have vivid memories of May Day celebrations. It was the one occasion when there was a multigenerational community celebration that wasn’t necessarily connected to a church. We would gather at the site of the local middle school, which had historically been the segregated Douglass High School. There would be good food–barbeque, lemonade, and all of our favorite cakes. There would be games–baseball, sack racks, and other competitions. Most of all, there was joy.
At the time, I had no idea that the occasion was the remnant of the 20th of May celebrations that had taken place for over a century, Florida’s Emancipation Day. It was on that date in 1865 in Tallahassee that Union General Edward McCook, surrounded by a contingent of Union soldiers, probably with some U.S. Colored Troops among them, read President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on the steps of what is today the Knott House Museum. Afterward, they lowered Florida’s Confederate flag, and raised the U.S. flag over the Florida Capitol, marking the end of a bloody civil war, and the final defeat of the Confederacy.
Most importantly, the 20th of May in 1865 marked the beginning of new possibilities for the approximately 62,000 people of African descent enslaved in Florida. The news of emancipation was met with immediate jubilation. Spontaneous celebrations erupted. Each year after that the celebrations continued, both in Tallahassee and other locations in Florida’s Black Belt counties (between the Apalachicola and Suwannee Rivers) where most of the state’s Black population resided. The occasions included speeches by prominent Black elected officials like Representative John Wallace and Secretary of State Jonathan Gibbs, parades, games, and feasts.
Traditions matter. I have had the privilege of experiencing May Day as a girl in my community, and working to preserve the history of the holiday in Tallahassee when working with Althemese Barnes at the John Gilmore Riley Center and Museum in Tallahassee as a young public historian. The work continues today to make sure this unique part of Florida’s Black history isn’t completely overshadowed by the national recognition of Texas’s Emancipation Celebration.
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