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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 104.1 | The History Cooperative
104.1  
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March, 2008
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Reviews

Festivals of Freedom
Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808–1915

By Mitch Kachun
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 339. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.)

Mitch Kachun draws on a rich collection of primary sources to explore the ways in which African Americans sought to "create and perpetuate" a usable past through public celebration and commemorative ritual (p. 7). Beginning with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and ending with the fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of slavery, Kachun explains how African Americans sought to use such public displays both to celebrate emancipation and to commemorate their distinctive past. Kachun also argues that the scope and nature of freedom festivals changed in the wake of emancipation. In addition to the traditions of activism and protest that had characterized antebellum celebrations, African Americans also sought to foster race pride and uplift as Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow. In the author's hands, these freedom festivals become a vehicle for understanding how African Americans strove to agitate for emancipation, to create a coherent racial identity and history, and to combat the postbellum proliferation of racist caricatures (p. 6). . . .
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