One-hundred and fifty years ago on May 8, Union troops entered Columbus and effectively freed the remaining slaves.
At 6 p.m. Friday, students from Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science will commemorate this event with a program at Sandfield Cemetery that celebrates African-American history in Columbus.
The Eighth of May Emancipation Celebration in Columbus began the year after the Civil War ended with a celebration by African Americans and some whites who commemorated the day shortly after the Civil War. The majority of the population in Lowndes County then were freed slaves, according to Chuck Yarborough, a history teacher at MSMS.
“By the eighth of May, 1865, people in Columbus knew that Lee’s armies had surrendered,” Yarborough said. “They knew Abe Lincoln had been assassinated, and they knew their Confederate cause was for all intents and purposes dead. They knew things were about to change. And when Union troops arrived, what that change would look like began to reveal itself, most markedly with the freeing of the slave population.”
A year later, the former slaves of Lowndes County celebrated freedom with a feast that lasted in the night, Yarborough said. The festival came only days after white supremacists in the community threatened to hang Columbus teachers who educated blacks, a threat that caused local freedmen to stand guard at the school and at the homes of threatened teachers, according to one teacher’s diary.
Following that first year, the Eighth of May was celebrated in churches in the community into the 1990s, Yarborough said. In recent years, it has been somewhat eclipsed by Juneteenth. But in 2005, the Voices in Harmony, a student-led choir at MSMS, began an annual celebration of African American history with a May 8 performance in historic Sandfield Cemetery, which is located at the intersection of College Street and Martin Luther King Drive.
The presentation is put together by the Voices in Harmony choir and Yarborough’s African-American history class, with help from the Columbus Visitors Bureau, the Columbus Cultural Heritage Foundation, the Columbus-Lowndes Recreation Authority and the Columbus-Lowndes Library.
The performance
In the last few years, the Voices in Harmony’s performance has been joined by students from Yarborough’s class. This year, Columbus High School students have joined the choir.
Aiyana Gordon, a sophomore at Columbus High who will attend MSMS next year, is one of those taking part. She met Yarborough during her application process to MSMS and he asked her to sing with Voices in Harmony. She has been practicing with them for the last week.
“I think it’s important to shed light on the past and how far we’ve come as African Americans,” Gordon said.
She pointed out many people ignore history and do not understand what African Americans had to endure to get where they are today. She added that she hopes the performance at Sandfield Cemetery inspires others to stand up for African American rights.
For the performance, the students stand in a semi-circle and sing gospels and spirituals interspersed with spoken performances, skits and spoken word poetry. Students with speaking roles play black leaders and educators buried in Sandfield Cemetery.
Learning more about those people who made a difference is what made the project appealing to MSMS senior Matthew Sarpong, who plays Sen. Robert Gleed, a freed slave who served as a Lowndes County representative in the Mississippi State Senate. Sarpong, who next year will attend Harvard, wrote the monologue he performed himself after getting more information on Gleed.
It was exciting for Sarpong to learn about African American leaders few people have heard of. Everyone knows about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, he pointed out, but there are others, like Gleed, who made just as important contributions in smaller communities.
“All the people in all these different areas advocating for African American freedoms and African American rights makes the whole difference,” Sarpong said.
It was students from Yarborough’s African American history class who decided which classmates should play what role. The students understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses well enough to know who could play which characters and who would be the right person to recite poetry or spoken word.
“If you give teens the responsibility to serve their community, they will not fail you and they won’t fail the community,” Yarborough said.
The celebration is at 6 p.m. Friday at Sandfield Cemetery.
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