DC’s Emancipation Day celebrations Sunday mark the long push for enslaved people’s freedom
D.C.’s celebration of its own Emancipation Day will be marked with a festival, parade and concert Sunday at 13th and Pennsylvania Ave. in Northwest.
The events will commemorate the date — April 16, 1862 — when President Abraham Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act.
The law abolished slavery in the District. But as the name suggests, it also compensated slave owners for freeing the people they held in bondage.
As a result of the act, Emancipation Act, more than 3,000 formerly enslaved residents of D.C. were freed.
Lincoln went on to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, freeing more enslaved people — but only those in states that had seceded from the Union.
Years before Lincoln acted, there were efforts to abolish slavery in the District. The White House Historical Association says in April 1848, abolitionists William Chaplin and Daniel Drayton hired Edward Sayres, the captain of the Pearl schooner, to carry out an escape plan for 77 enslaved men, women and children.
The three had joined with three freed Black men — Daniel Bell, Samuel Edmonson, and Paul Jennings — who are credited with coming up with the plan to bring the large group to freedom by sailing down the Potomac into the Chesapeake Bay, and ultimately north.
While the 77 people were able to slip out of their homes to the schooner moored at what is now D.C’. s Wharf, weather, and by at least one historical account, human actions, would scuttle the plan.
Judlyne Lilly-Gibson, a playwright — and a former news anchor at WTOP — wrote a play, “The Pearl” that told the story of the ill-fated escape. The play was staged at DC’s Source Theatre in 1992.
Lilly-Gibson drew on historical accounts of a Black freedman, Judson Diggs, being pushed by furious slave owners to tell them where the fugitives were headed.
Lilly-Gibson went to every performance, and she said the moment Diggs gives up the escapee’s plans drew the same reaction, without fail.
“The audience just went ‘Ugh!’ You know, they were so upset.” Lilly-Gibson said.
The Pearl made it as far as Point Lookout in Southern Maryland before a ship carrying a posse bent on capturing the escapees overtook the fleeing vessel.
The enslaved people were captured and returned to the District. They were shackled and paraded through the streets of D.C.
Days of rioting followed, with abolitionists attacked for their opposition to slavery, and many of the escapees people placed back in bondage and sold to plantations in the South.
Abolitionists tried to buy the freedom of some of the original 77 escapees, among them Ellen Stewart, who is described by the White House Historical Association as a teenager and one of former first lady Dolley Madison’s slaves.
Lilly-Gibson said reading the histories of the enslaved people and telling the story of freedom snatched away from the passengers on the Pearl provided plenty of gut punches.
“I was like, oh my God, this is horrible,” she said.
After researching the play, Lilly-Gibson said she looked at D.C.’s landmarks differently.
For example, the figure on top of the U.S. Capitol included the labor of Paul Reid, an enslaved man whose training as an artisan was cited in the casting and mounting of the statue.
“Her name is Freedom. That’s the irony,” Lilly-Gibson said.
While those stories may seem long ago and far away, the days of slavery are just a few generations old. Lilly-Gibson’s grandmother was born in the 1880s.
“Her parents were slaves, and she would tell me stories about, you know, what life was like for them,” she said.