I was watching TV one time and MLK was marching. And it might not have been as bad as 'Bloody Sunday' on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, but it was close. I mean the amount of yelling screaming hate and rock throwing was just astounding to me. And especially the women and kids. They were some of the worst. And I thought where in the south is that because it looks dangerous. Turned out to be an all white Chicago suburb where they were matching for equal housing.

 

“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.” Prologue – Gone With The Wind

 

Military bases removing names of Confederates
50

Sun, May 28, 2023 at 7:16 AM MDT


In this article:

• 
  

• 
  

• George Pickett
  Confederate Army general

The U.S. Army is stripping the names of Confederate generals from bases like Fort Pickett in Virginia, named after George Pickett, who led the rebels' final charge at the Battle of Gettysburg and was later accused of war crimes. The names of nine Army bases now will be changed to those of American heroes and heroines, including people of color. Fort Pickett is now Fort Barfoot (after Col. Van Barfoot, a World War II Medal of Honor recipient). CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports on the surprising history of bases like Fort Benning (named after a charter member of the Ku Klux Klan).


https://news.yahoo.com/military-bases-removing-names-confederates-131600726.html

 

About bloody time too. Confederates were not even Americans. They were traitors. Only after they were thoroughly defeated, did they come crawling back into the union.

 

Supreme Court declines appeal from North Carolina group seeking Confederate flag license plates

The North Carolina chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans sued over the decision, claiming in part that the decision curbed the speech of private individuals. A lower court ruled that the license plates represent government speech, since the state controls the messages on the plates.

The Supreme Court declined to review the decision Monday without explanation.

 

This was an interesting read to me at least because I had never heard of it.


The Devil’s Punchbowl: Debunking the social media myth of a Civil War massacre
Experts say the curious story of a concentration camp for African Americans along the Mississippi River isn’t just inaccurate — it’s built on lies.
1.4k

Marquise Francis
·National Reporter
Sat, June 17, 2023 at 3:00 AM MDT



A stereoscope photograph of the Devil's Punchbowl in Natchez, Miss., circa 1900. (Norman C. Henry/New York Public Library Digital Collections)
There’s a harrowing story about African Americans fleeing to the newly liberated city of Natchez, Miss., in 1863. These formerly enslaved people, the narrative goes, expected that the Union soldiers occupying Natchez would welcome and protect them.

Instead, the Union forces put them into a concentration camp. Some 20,000 perished. The story has a name: “The Devil’s Punchbowl,” referring to an imposing pit along the Mississippi River where the refugees were supposedly walled in and left to die.

It’s a story that pops up regularly on social media. But the truth is far more complicated.

“Most of the information that is being promoted out there simply is not true,” Roscoe Barnes, a local historian, told Yahoo News. Instead, he said, years of exaggerations have created a myth built on misunderstandings and pro-Confederate propaganda.



“Yes, there were people that died, but there were Blacks and whites who died because of an epidemic. It was nothing like a concentration camp,” he said. “There were a lot of people that suffered because of the conditions. But nobody was being tortured or punished because of their race.”

The truth about the Devil’s Punchbowl

What’s not up for debate, according to Barnes, is the fact that thousands of newly freed African Americans from the South traveled north, seeking out Union soldiers at the end of the Civil War in search of refuge and protection from Confederate forces.

Mimi Miller, the executive director emerita at the Historic Natchez Foundation, told Yahoo News that thousands of these African Americans chose to go to Natchez because it was the largest city in Mississippi at the time and an important river port.

It was also, crucially, controlled by Union forces, while most of the state remained in Confederate hands.

The war was still raging in 1863, even as the Union effectively took control of the Mississippi River that July. Thousands of formerly enslaved people streamed into Natchez and other towns and cities now freed from Confederate rule, creating further complications for the occupying Northern troops.

“Natchez had a huge influx of self-emancipated enslaved persons, and the Union was not equipped to handle that, so they established refugee camps,” Ser Seshsh Ab Heter-Clifford M. Boxley, an activist and Natchez scholar, told the Natchez Democrat last summer.


Boxley, a leading authority on the Devil’s Punchbowl, says many did die in the crowded camps. Sanitation was substandard. Drinking from the Mississippi River could lead to disease or death. The administration of the newly occupied territory was haphazard at best.

But, he says, the deaths weren’t unique to African Americans. Union soldiers and white residents of the town also died during this time, albeit in smaller numbers.

Boxley believes that the myth of what happened in Natchez has more to do with “anti-Union Army sentiment” still prevalent in the city. “What I’ve been saying for years is this is concocted Confederate propaganda,” he told the Natchez Democrat — a statement he reiterated to Yahoo News.

A social media phenomenon
In 2014, WJTV, a news station in Jackson, Miss., aired a segment about the Devil’s Punchbowl that helped fuel the idea that Union forces had built a concentration camp in Natchez. Although a post about the report remains on the station's Facebook page, the report itself has since been deleted and gained a new life on social media. Now it continues to spread misinformation about what happened in Natchez.

The segment features two Mississippi residents promoting the myth: a “paranormal researcher” named Paula Westbrook and Don Estes, a former director of the Natchez city cemetery.

“They were begging to get out: ‘Turn me loose, and I’ll go home back to the plantation!’” Estes says in the segment.


Several years after the news report aired, Jim Wiggins, a history professor at Copiah-Lincoln Community College in Natchez, described the WJTV segment as “a disgrace.”

The story of what happened to the African American refugees in Natchez “is genuinely heart-rending,” Wiggins wrote, “but calling this a ‘concentration camp,’ and multiplying the fatalities by 10 to add zing to a breezy human-interest story is an insult to the actual victims.”

Estes and Westbrook did not return Yahoo News’ request for comment.

Kaitlin Howell, the digital executive producer of WJTV, told Yahoo News that the reason the original report is no longer on its website is that “the story probably got lost” as the site moved from one hosting service to another over the last few years. She added that she cannot confirm anything in the original post.

The one remaining story on the station’s website about the Devil’s Punchbowl is a feature story from 2020 with no mention of a concentration camp.

A very real tragedy
Although conditions in the refugee camps were difficult, Barnes said, the freed African Americans were not forced to stay. Union soldiers were so overwhelmed by refugees, he said, that they encouraged some to return to their plantations and try to forge new relationships with their former slaveholders.

In his book “The Black Experience in Natchez,” Ron Davis, a professor emeritus of history at California State University, recounts how Union soldiers were totally unequipped to deal with the “tidal wave of humanity” arriving in Natchez after they occupied the town in July 1863.


An 1864 Union Army map of Natchez. (Historic Natchez Foundation)
Some of the formerly enslaved were recruited to the Union Army. Others would work on plantations as paid workers.

The plan for the refugee camps, Davis wrote, was to have them “operate as temporary shelters and employment agencies, as much as welfare centers. … Northern schoolmarms, moreover, would be recruited to teach in the camps.”

“Tragically, almost nothing that happened to Natchez Blacks during the war went according to plan. The leased plantations were poorly managed, subject to Rebel raids, and beset with all the horrors of a Civil War. … Army barracks and refugee camps were poorly equipped, undermanned, and overwhelmed by sickness, disease, and racism. It is a wonder that any of the Black participants in the above ventures lived through them.”

The main refugee camp in Natchez, Davis wrote, “contained as many as 4,000 refugees in the summer of 1863. … In the fall of 1863, 2,000 had already perished.”

But as squalid as the conditions were for refugees in Natchez, this was, Wiggins wrote, “not a concentration camp (with all that is implied by that term).”


“Throughout history, those fleeing war and oppression have been channeled into makeshift sites providing inadequate shelter and wretched sanitation. As a result, from ancient times to recent times, refugee camps have frequently been incubators for epidemic disease.”

As Boxley noted, the collapse of the Confederacy and the start of Reconstruction brought some relief for the refugees: “Natchez, by 1865-66, was still under the control of the Union Army. Natchez was well on its way to Reconstruction. We had Black elected officials, Blacks on the Board of Aldermen.”

Why the Devil’s Punchbowl myth lives on
Emmitt Y. Riley, a Mississippi native and an associate professor of political science and Africana studies at DePauw University, says one reason that Civil War myths like the Devil’s Punchbowl live on is “the Eurocentric nature of our education system,” which he said has undervalued and twisted Black history.

Given the horrific treatment of African Americans, Riley argues, it makes sense that people would believe that the Devil’s Punchbowl was a real event.


“What slavery, Jim Crow and anti-Blackness has really meant across time — it was primarily predicated on torture, on fear, on marginalization, on dehumanization,” Riley said. “And so, for Black people who grew up in this particular environment, who witnessed lynchings, who witnessed the degradation of Black bodies on a daily basis, these are the stories that were handed down to their children.”

Local historians like Barnes, however, also blame the rise of social media apps for spreading misinformation.

“There are a lot of urban legends that will not die, and in the age of TikTok and YouTube, they go viral,” he said. “One reason why people believe it is because it’s on the internet, and once it’s there, it doesn’t die.”


https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-devi...a-myth-of-a-civil-war-massacre-090017590.html

 

As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery

As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery
6.3k
John Blake
Sun, June 18, 2023 at 6:33 AM MDT




Temple “Tempie” Cummins stoically stares at the camera with her arms folded in her lap, sitting stiffly in a chair in her dusty, barren backyard with her weather-beaten wooden shack behind her. Her dark, creased face reflects years of poverty and worry.

The faded black and white image of Cummins from 1937 was snapped by a historian who stopped by her home in Jasper, Texas, to ask her about her childhood during slavery. Cummins, who did not know her exact age, shared stories of uninterrupted woe until she recounted how she and her mother discovered that they had been freed.

She said her mother, a cook for their former slave owner’s family, liked to hide in the chimney corner to eavesdrop on dinner conversations. One day in 1865, she overheard her owner say that slavery had ended, but he wasn’t going to let his slaves know until they harvested “another crop or two.”

“When mother heard that she say she slip out the chimney corner and crack her heels together four times and shouts, ‘I’s free, I’s free,’ ” Cummins told the historian, who recorded her story for a New Deal writers’ project that collected the narratives of the formerly enslaved during the Great Depression. “Then she runs to the field, ‘gainst marster’s will and tol’ all the other slaves and they quit work.”



That story is one of the first recorded memoires of an experience that would inspire the creation of Juneteenth, an annual holiday celebrating the end of slavery that the US will commemorate this Monday. It marks the moment in June of 1865 when Union troops arrived in Texas to inform enslaved African Americans that they were free by executive decree. Many people like Cummins in remote areas of Texas and elsewhere did not know that they were free as their White owners hid the news from them.



Juneteenth has since become known as “America’s Second Independence Day.” Now a federal holiday, it will be celebrated by parades, proclamations, and ceremonies throughout the US. Though it commemorates a moment when enslaved African Americans were freed, the US is still held captive by several myths about slavery and people like Cummins.

One of the biggest myths that historians and storytellers have successfully challenged in recent years is that enslaved African Americans were docile, passive victims who had to wait until White abolitionists and “The Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln freed them. Black soldiers, for example, played a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. This new understanding of slavery has led to a rhetorical shift: It’s no longer proper to refer to people like Cummins as simply “slaves.”

“There’s been a shift in the historical community attempting to not define the period or the people by what was done to them in the sense that their identity becomes a noun, a slave, but rather that they are that they were in the process of being enslaved,” says Tobin Miller Shearer, a historian and director of African American Studies at the University of Montana.

“There were slavers who did that to them,” he says, “but there’s more to their identity than what was being done to them.”

Yet other myths about slavery persist, in part, because of the sheer enormity and brutality of slavery.

“The enslavement of an estimated ten million Africans over a period of almost four centuries in the Atlantic slave trade was a tragedy of such scope that it is difficult to imagine, much less comprehend,” Albert J. Raboteau wrote in “Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South.”

Here are three other myths about slavery that historians say persist:

Myth No. 1: African Americans were ‘freed’ after the Civil War ended
There is a popular conception that the formerly enslaved were freed after the Civil War ended. But many had to continually fight for their freedom because so many Whites still tried to keep them in captivity and were willing to use deceit and violence to do so.

The author Clint Smith described this dynamic in his New York Times bestselling book, “How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with The History of Slavery Across America.” Smith said the Juneteenth jubilation didn’t last for many formerly enslaved people. Former Confederate soldiers still tried to round up Black “runaways” to return them to their owners though that term no longer had any legal merit. And White vigilantes tracked down and punished formerly enslaved people.

Smith unearthed the narrative of a woman named Susan Merritt of Rusk Country, Texas, who recounted what happened when some people like Cummins in Texas tried to claim their freedom:

“Lots of Negroes were killed after freedom…bushwhacked, shot down while they were trying to get away,” Merritt said. “You could see lots of Negroes hanging from trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom. They would catch them swimming across Sabine River and shoot them.”



And then there was the practice of taking away Black freedom through other means, like convict-leasing programs and a corrupt justice system throughout the South that the historian Douglas A. Blackmon documented in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Slavery By Another Name.”

The lesson from history: Slavery didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation. Black people still had to literally fight for their freedom long afterward. Smith quotes the historian W. Caleb McDaniel who wrote:

“Slavery did not end cleanly or on a single day. It ended through a violent, uneven process.”

Myth No. 2: Enslaved Africans came to America without any culture or civilization
Mention slavery and it still evokes images of half-naked Africans stumbling onto the American shores, struggling to learn to read and write in a strange and alien land. The focus of many stories about the formerly enslaved is what was taken from them. But they gave plenty to America in ways that are still not appreciated.

Captive Africans who came here didn’t need to be civilized. They came to the US as fully formed individuals, not blank canvases, with their own cultures and specialized knowledge, says Leslie Wilson, a historian at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

The thumbprints of the culture that formerly enslaved people created are now stamped on virtually every facet of American culture, Wilson says. By the Civil War, Black people had already changed American concepts of architecture, burial, music, storytelling and medicine, Wilson says.

“Much of Southern culture is nothing more than blackness,” Wilson says. “It is the blues and jazz of the 19th century and the rock and roll of the 20th. It is the chicken and grits, the way that people rock in church or the cadence of the pastor.”

If that sounds like hyperbole, consider how much of Americans’ contemporary landscape is shaped by the legacy of the formerly enslaved:

• The Statue of Liberty was originally created to commemorate freed enslaved people, not the arrival of immigrants.
  

• An enslaved person called Onesimus changed the way Americans treated epidemics, pioneering a technique to prevent the spread of smallpox that he had learned from his native West Africa.
  
  
• Country music owes much of its musical legacy to the influence of the formerly enslaved. The banjo, for example, is a descendant of an instrument that was brought to America by enslaved West Africans and many of the genre’s earliest hits were adapted from slave spirituals.
  
  
• Bugs Bunny cartoons and other stories like Brer Rabbit featuring clever, talking animals were originally inspired by African folktales first told by enslaved people.
  

Black and White culture is so intertwined that the cultural critic, Albert Murray, declared in his book, “The Omni-Americans,” that “American culture is “incontestably mulatto.” White and Black people in the US “resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

“The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people,” Murray wrote. “Any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way or another.”

Myth No. 3: Enslaved Africans were brainwashed by a White man’s ‘pie-in-the sky’ Christianity
In the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, there is a special exhibit of an artifact that is so rare that there are only a handful now in existence. It is what historians call a “Slave Bible.” It is a copy of a Bible that was used by British missionaries to convert enslaved African Americans. Published in 1807, the Bible deletes any passages that may inspire liberation – about 90% of the Old Testament is missing along with half of the New Testament.

“They literally blacked out, portions of the Bible that had anything to do with freedom, anything to do with equality, anything to do with God delivering folk,” says Leon Harris, a theology professor at Biola University in California.

There is misconception that Christianity was successfully used to create docile slaves who were conditioned to heed New Testament passages such as “slaves obey your earthly masters.” Malcolm X derided Christianity as a White man’s religion used to brainwash Black people to “shout and sing and pray until we die ‘for some dreamy heaven-in-the-hereafter’” while the White man “has his milk and honey in the streets paved with golden dollars right here on this earth!”

But historians like Harris say most slaves disdained the type of Christianity that was taught to them. Many instead discovered those missing passages in the Slave Bible, such as the Old Testament stories of God freeing the Israelites from Egyptian captivity. It’s no accident that many Black leaders who have led freedom struggles, from Nat Turner to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were Christian ministers.

“Instead of Christianity being a religion of African oppression, many interpreted it as a religion of freedom,” Harris says.


A "Slave Bible" published in 1808, right, with all references to freedom from slavery removed, is displayed at an exhibition in the Lambeth Palace Library in London. - Kin Cheung/AP

The historical record shows that enslaved African Americans revitalized Christianity in other ways, historians say. They injected emotionalism and an emphasis on ecstatic worship into evangelical Christianity that can still be seen in how many White Pentecostal worship today. And Negro spirituals, often called the nation’s first musical form unique to America, continue to be sung throughout churches of all races and ethnicities today.

Former slaves remade Christianity – it didn’t remake them, says Raboteau, author of “Slave Religion.” He wrote that it had a “this-worldly” impact:

“To describe slave religion as merely otherworldly is inaccurate, for the slaves believed that God had acted, was acting, and would continue to act within human history and within their own particular history as a peculiar people just as long ago he had acted on behalf of another chosen people, biblical Israel,” Raboteau wrote.

This year, Juneteenth comes at a time when White educators and politicians are passing laws that ban the teaching of Black history in schools that could make White students or others feel “discomfort.” How many students will be able to learn about the resilience of the formerly enslaved?

That’s a question that no holiday celebration can answer. But one historical debate has been settled:

Even as the stories of the formerly enslaved are forgotten by history, we live in a contemporary America that was profoundly shaped by how they resisted captivity – whether some of us care to know it or not.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/nation-celebrates-juneteenth-time-rid-080424453.html

 

This is why treasonous conservative/America Hating/Republicans are desperately trying to keep history and race relations taught in schools. They want to be able to rewrite history through ignorance just like the South did over the Civil War. And its also why we need a holiday like Juneteenth. It draws their racism, lies, fa;se propaganda, and ignorance out into the open where it can be exposed.

And right above this you can see a photo of a "slave bible" that was given to slaves after they cut everything out including the Israelite being delivered from slavery and only left the parts justifying slavery in it. That's what kind of "Christians" slave holders really were.


Josh Hawley Gets Holy Hell After Juneteenth Claim About Christianity And Slavery

2.6k
Ed Mazza
Mon, June 19, 2023 at 9:06 PM MDT·6 min read


Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) attempted a little revisionist history on social media on Monday.

It didn’t go well.

As Americans marked Juneteenth, a federal holiday, in a variety of ways ranging from solemn reflection to pre-summer cookouts, Hawley paused his awkward campaign for manliness to tweet about slavery:










Josh Hawley
@HawleyMO
·
Follow
Today is a good day to remember: Christianity is the faith and America is the place slavery came to die
10:02 AM · Jun 19, 2023



2.6k


As Americans marked Juneteenth, a federal holiday, in a variety of ways ranging from solemn reflection to pre-summer cookouts, Hawley paused his awkward campaign for manliness to tweet about slavery:


Critics pointed out that Hawley ― perhaps best known for saluting Jan. 6 protesters with a raised fist before running away from them ― missed the mark in several ways.

Christianity is not the religion of the United States, which guarantees the separation of church and state. The Christian faith was used repeatedly to justify slavery, especially within the United States. And the practice of slavery thrived in America long after it was outlawed by many other Western nations.

Twitter users took the senator to school:



Cori Bush
@CoriBush
·
Follow
1. Today is a good day to remember: America was built on the enslavement of Black people. 2. Our government has never even formally apologized, let alone sought to repair the harms slavery inflicted and perpetuated. 3. So this is a lie.









Michael Harriot
@michaelharriot
·
Follow
There was no race-based chattel slavery here before Christians came England, Russia, Spain, France, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, South Africa, India, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, Uruguay, Mexico & Peru abolished it b4 US America is literally where slavery came to live




Aisha Sultan
@AishaS
·
Follow
The reasons Republicans are banning history books is so that you will believe this is true.





RufusKings
@RufusKings1776
·
Follow

1833 - Britain passes Abolition of Slavery Act 1848 - France abolishes slavery 1851 - Brazil abolishes slave trading 1858 - Portugal abolishes slavery 1865 - 13th Amendment of U.S. Constitution bans slavery Josh Hawley flees on #Juneteenth2023 as well.












Josh Hawley
@HawleyMO
Today is a good day to remember: Christianity is the faith and America is the place slavery came to die
12:27 PM · Jun 19, 2023




https://www.yahoo.com/news/josh-hawley-gets-holy-hell-030629238.html

 

Since it was the despicables who fought to keep slavery, and the despicables responsible for Jim Crow and the despicables responsible for so much discrimination in our history one would think they'd want to have a modified version of history taught in schools.
You know.
To cover their collective asses.




Oh. Wait.

 

Again, nice try comparing the politics of the 18 and 19th centuries to modern times. But at least you have some understanding of the countries racist past. Which is why the GOP's embracing of that racist past is such a travesty.

 

@shootersa And I suppose by your logic. the alt right group that organized the "Unite the right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. And the gathering of white supremacists there, that ended with a white nationalist plowing his car into a group of counter protesters. Vote democrat!

Take your racist spew elsewhere.

 

dismissed

 

Attaboy

 

@shootersa "Trump has dinner with white supremacist Nick Fuentes."
Trump to "Proud Boys" on national TV. ‘Stand back and stand by’

So shooter why were so many alt right groups present on Jan 6th?

 

dismissed

 

Attaboy

 

Hey yeah @shootersa are you saying all the people showing up at right wing political events waving Nazi flags are Democrats?

 

Dismissed

 

Hey shooter look, democrats at Trump's Jan 6th protest.

 

One thing I like about the Juneteenth holiday is every year I find things I had never heard of. I did not know that Mexico actually outlawed slavery in 1829. And that many American slaves escaped to Mexico to be free.

Close this content


In the mountains of Northern Mexico, descendants of formerly enslaved people have celebrated Juneteenth, or 'Día de los Negros,' for over a century

249
Isaiah Reynolds
Mon, June 19, 2023 at 7:51 AM MDT·4 min read

• 
  Black Seminole tribal members of El Nacimiento de los Negros have celebrated their version of Juneteenth since the 1870s.
  
  
• When Mexico outlawed slavery decades before the United States, thousands of Black Texans found a new route to freedom.
  
  
• Their descendants meet in Coahuila, Mexico, every year for Juneteenth celebrations.
  

Just over 100 miles from the Texas-Mexico border, a small mountain town in Coahuila, Mexico, is preparing for their annual Juneteenth celebrations.

El Nacimiento de los Negros, translating to "Birth of the Blacks," is home to a community of Afro-Indigenous families that trace their roots back to the United States. Known as "Mascogos," the group are descendants of Black Seminoles who found a home in Mexico after fleeing slavery and the threat of slave catchers in the US.

Black Seminoles were formerly enslaved people who escaped the plantations they worked on and aligned themselves with the Indigenous Seminoles of Florida. The joined forces with the Indigenous tribes to fight the US in the Seminole Wars.

In the 1800s, many Black Seminoles were forced to relocate from places like Georgia and Florida to areas designated Indian Territory in Oklahoma. During that time, Black Seminole chief John Horse, who had both Indigenous and Black ancestry, led a group of people to Mexico, where slavery had already been outlawed. A group settled in El Nacimiento in 1852.


The Southern Underground Railroad
When the General Congress of the United Mexican States completely outlawed slavery in 1837, enslaved people in Texas had a viable route to freedom by going southward. Notably, in the 1936-1938 federal Slave Narrative project, emancipated freeman and San Antonio-born Felix Hayward remarked: "There wasn't no reason to run up north… All we had to do was to walk, but walk south, and we'd be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande." By 1849, African Americans began to make the journey into Mexico.

Experts estimate that up to 10,000 people crossed the border to Mexico to secure their freedom and escape slavery, creating what is known as the Southern Underground Railroad.

Contrary to the Union's agreement to return runaway slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Mexican law provided freedom for escaped slaves once they touched Mexican soil. Many of those escaped enslaved people, alongside Indigenous groups of Mexico, helped defend the Northern Mexican border in exchange for acres of land in Coahuila.


Celebrating Juneteenth in Mexico
Juneteenth marks the official end of slavery on June 19th, 1865 when 250,000 Black people in Galveston, Texas were informed of their freedom by executive decree. Historians estimate that as some Black Seminoles traveled back and forth from El Nacimiento to Brackettville, Texas, Juneteenth celebrations spread to Mexico as early as the 1870s.

For more than 100 years, Mascogos in El Nacimiento have celebrated what they call "Dia de los Negros," or "Day of the Blacks," on June 19th. Many Black Seminole descendants still embark on the pilgrimage from parts of Texas to El Nacimiento to celebrate the day. Traditional cuisine includes a sweet potato bread called tetapún and slow-cooked asado pork. The dishes combine Indigenous, Black, and Mexican cultural inspirations.

After generations in northern Mexico, many members of the Black Seminoles in El Nacimiento strictly speak Spanish. However, the hymns passed down from African American descendants are still sung in English on Dia de los Negros, including "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and "This Little Light of Mine."

As more Black Seminole descendants are leaving El Nacimiento to find work in Texas or other parts of Mexico, many Mascogos are worried their culture is waning.


To prioritize preservation, members have established the Museo Comunitario Tribu Negros Mascogos for local art, a hotel, a restaurant, and secured federal funding for community gardens. In 2017, the governor of Coahuila declared the Mascogo tribe as Indigenous people of the northern Mexican state.

As Juneteenth was officially recognized as a US federal holiday in 2021, tribal members are planning to promote cultural tourism as a source of support and revitalization for the enduring town, and prevailing traditions, of El Nacimiento de los Negros.

Read the original article on Insider


https://www.yahoo.com/news/mountains-northern-mexico-descendants-formerly-135133365.html