African Americans and Thanksgiving

By Onwubiko Agozino

"The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and even soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God." – Abraham Lincoln, 1863.

Thanksgiving was first proclaimed as a national public holiday by Lincoln in 1863 soon after the emancipation proclamation to end slavery and to mobilize over two hundred thousand African Americans to help defend the Union. Was Lincoln thanking the Africans for helping to save the Union? During the 2024 Thanksgiving Holiday, I asked colleagues if President Abraham Lincoln was paying tribute to the contributions of people of African descent when he proclaimed the first national holiday for Thanksgiving Day in October 1863. 

    One response came from a Political Science Professor who stated: ‘No; I don't think Lincoln used the Thanksgiving proclamation to celebrate Black folks. But it's an interesting thought! ‘. Another from an Emeritus Professor of History said: ‘I think Lincoln was unifying the nation by superseding state Thanksgiving days with a national one. Virginia had a Thanksgiving in 1619, before the Massachusetts one that figures in the US’s historical myth of Thanksgiving. And there were sporadic, impermanent national Thanksgivings in the years between. 

    Many American Indian Natives do not celebrate Thanksgiving Day, they commemorate the Day of Mourning Genocide. Some African Americans and White liberals do not celebrate it either perhaps because of the commercialization of the holiday with Black Friday shopping frenzy. Do African Americans have any reasons to celebrate Thanksgiving Day even while also mourning the millions that were lost? Yes, everyone has something to be thankful for. We are not going back to the evil old days!

     See the transcripts of Lincoln's Thanksgiving Day Proclamation (epigraphed above) archived by the Obama White House. The proclamation came 9 months after the Emancipation Proclamation and after the freed Black men and women  changed the battle of the civil war fought over slavery. 

    The proclamation started by urging Americans to show some gratitude for the sources of the food they took for granted. What were the sources of the food and comforts of Americans? The land of the indigenous American Indians, their food crops and their animals deserve all the gratitude that Americans could express, American Indian Natives have continued to contest the mythology that their ancestors peacefully surrendered their land to the invaders and taught them how to grow food to save them from starving to death and from engaging in cannibalism to survive. The natives did not surrender their land and vanish, they were subjected to genocide by the ungrateful conquistadores. The US has since recognized the rightful owners of the land by reserving land for some of the surviving native tribes and nations while others still fight for recognition. 

    Women deserve thanksgiving too for they also provided, and prepared the bulk of, the food Americans took for granted. One of the early advocates of a national Thanksgiving holiday was the slavery abolitionist feminist writer, Sarah Hale, who allegedly wanted to recognize it as a whites-only holiday, probably to avoid opposition from white-supremacist men and women who wanted freed Africans to 'go back to where they came from'. The emancipated Africans defiantly stated that they and their descendants were here to stay, come what may, no matter what others say. 

     Lincoln made his historic proclamation at a conjuncture in history when the survival of the Union was in doubt due to the pro-slavery rebellion of the confederate states over the so-called ‘state right’ to expand slavery to the whole of the United States to end the dilemma of hunting for run-away enslaved people in the land of the free. Initially, Lincoln refused to allow people of African descent to join the Union army and stated that if he could keep the nation united without emancipating a single person from enslavement, he was prepared to do so. 

    He also proposed to repatriate the emancipated Africans to a colony island near Haiti. Eventually, he was forced by the circumstances of confederate battle victories to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, to weaken the economies of the confederate slave states and he welcomed formerly enslaved Africans to join the union army and help to defeat the confederacy. 

    Nine months later, the bravery of the former enslaved Africans in battle had turned the tide of the Civil War in favor of the Union Army and that was the context of the Thanksgiving Day proclamation. Two years later, in 1865, Lincoln made the Gettysburg Address to honor the troops who were wasted in the battlefield towards the end of the war.

"Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom." Lincoln, 1863.

At the time of the proclamation, the labor of the enslaved Africans and the poor working class Whites was the main source of the food and industry that Americans took for granted. Lincoln did not make this explicit in his proclamation, of course not. He was saying Graces and giving thanks to ‘Providence’ the way you do even when you know that it was your papa and mama that produced and reproduced the food, goods, and services for your survival. 

     It might be a coincidence rather than a causation that X came before Y, Emancipation before Thanksgiving Day Proclamations in the same year during the Civil War, but there is absolutely no reason why Americans would not give thanks for the sacrifices that people of African descent made to build the nation in chains and defend it since then. 

     Every Day is Thanksgiving Day, let all Americans remember the sufferings of people of African descent in the country, say thanks to Providence for providing their livelihood, offer apologies to the descendants of the enslaved for the crimes against humanity that the country visited on them, and offer them a significant package of reparative justice. 

     The Obama White House, by archiving the transcripts of this proclamation by Lincoln, may have been calling for reflections on the centrality of African Americans in Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of 1863. 

    There is no justification for the consensus that erased the African presence from the Thanksgiving narratives by the media, historians, sociologists, and poets. Congress should use every Thanksgiving Day celebration to authorize appropriations for the long overdue Reparations Proclamation and apology to people of African descent for the crimes of hundreds of years of enslavement that built the United States and defended the Union against pro-slavery rebellions.

 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/transcript_for_abraham_lincoln_thanksgiving_proclamation_1863.pdf

Listen to President Joe Biden on 3 December, 2024 at the National Museum of Slavery in Angola as the first US president to visit the country. The US should be encouraged to use their bully pulpit to announce a reparative justice package for people of African descent and invite European states to contribute regarding what Biden called 'the original sin' (it is a crime against humanity and not simply a sin) of the US (and European countries, not the US alone), the enslavement of millions of Africans for hundreds of years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a891uu1dqZA

Native @ Virginia Tech Pow Wow 2019

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By Biko Agozino

After many years of community organizing, The students, faculty and staff active in Native@VT succeeded in securing an office and community meeting room in the students' Center and got the University administration to pass a resolution honoring the Indigenous Peoples who own the land on which the institution was built. 

During the 2019 third annual Pow Wow, April 6, 2019, the students, staff, and faculty collectively read clauses, one after the other, from the resolution passed by the University to recognize American Indian Native Day every October 1 to honor those who own, heal and protect the land. 

Music is a part of the healing, said the announcer who remarked that some of the dances were known as Indian aerobics. None of the dancers, from little children to adult men and ladies, showed any signs of obesity. Indigenous Peoples came from far and near to mark the event.

I heard the wailing mournful singing and heart-thumping drumming before I reached the Graduate School front court to behold the fancy dancers. Although some of the displays were called Inter Tribal dances, they were not wars or competition to see who danced better than others; they were opportunities to see different dance and dress styles without judging the taste to see which one beats others, the announcer said while insisting that he did not see himself as the Master of Ceremony.

‘To walk in beauty is to celebrate the Sacred Dance of Life, to join the Circle with an open mind and an open heart, and to move at our own pace with clarity, kindness and a sense of calm. To walk in beauty is to understand and to practice the way of right relationship and to appreciate all the beauty that exists both within and all around us.’ – Garrett and Garrett (1996), Medicine of the Cherokee: The Way of Right Relationship, Santa Fe, Beers & Company. One of the vendors sold this book to me and I said that it was priceless.

The maintenance of social equality in styles of dressing, housing, and in Indigenous law, despite having princesses and chiefs, was dismissed by Andrew Carnegie in his ‘Gospel of Wealth’ as evidence that they were uncivilized compared to hierarchical capitalist societies. According to him, it is best for a wealthy man (always a man) to use 'his' wealth to build a library for the benefit of ‘the race’ (his white race, since libraries were for whites only though poor whites did not use them either) while founding a Trust for the modest support of his heirs and leaving slightly more for his widow and heiresses.

A colleague commented as follows: 'It is ironic and fitting that you would mention Andrew Carnegie.  In the 1920s the Carnegie Foundation funded a major eugenic study that targeted the Monacan Tribe.  The investigators (Estabrook and McDougal) came into the community under the guise of friendship, and even though they used thinly disguised pseudonyms, they produced a horrible work entitled "Mongrel Virginians," characterizing the community as a degenerate population as a result of rising races.  When I first came to VT in 1999 it was still in the regular stacks.'

Indigenous nations demonstrate that human beings produced surplus wealth for thousands of years without creating a single beggar nor a single millionaire because all hands were joined together to manage the resources of the society for the equal benefit of all, according to Julius Nyerere. 

When the Indigenous dancers join hands and go round and round in a shifting circular motion that is deliberately kept open, they are not simply building a human chain but demonstrating human unity: there is neither master nor servant and no gender, generational, religious or racial hierarchies.

The music was haunting and there were not many smiling faces among the dancers who trotted at their own paces as if still on the Trail of Tears while the big drum shared by multiple drummers hammered out the rhythm of the march as constant reminders of the oppressive history being commemorated. 

But it was not only sadness that was being remembered, there was also a constant rhetorical question from the announcer to the audience, ‘Are you all enjoying yourselves?’ And the response was always a yell of something between joy and moaning.

I recognized some of the dance moves as those of warriors lobbing off the heads of invisible monsters to the beat of the drums because I come from a culture that also has a warrior dance. The name of one of the tribes, Chikohmimi, also sounds familiar to my Igbo language and their symbol, the turtle, is also symbol of wisdom in my culture where the turtle outlives the predator species by many years through wisdom and not through violence.

Some of the native names near the university such as Ironto, Chilhowie, Shenandoah, and Kanawah have literal Igbo meanings to support archeological and linguistic evidence from Catherine Acholonu that all the world languages originated from one mother language and remain similar to such an extent that there is no language that is not related to others. 

Douglass Chambers documented evidence in Murder at Montpelier that the 'Igbo Africans' were the group most enslaved in Virginia. On the campus of Virginia Tech, there is still a slave plantation now used as a tourist attraction and there are still buildings named after slave holders and after Confederate generals who fought to keep slavery going. Following concerns by students, the administration set up a committee on historical names which resolved to retain the names but proposed to add plaques on the biographies of the individuals honored with such place names.

Gregg McVicar, host and producer of NPR UnderCurrents on Native Voice One wrote that the history of Native American Indian music, Blues music, Jazz and Rock and Roll flows like a great river sharing traditions and styles of tributes by the oppressed Indigenous Peoples, enslaved Africans and the poor working-class men and women in the US and around the world. 

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies and also Affiliated to American Indian Native Studies, Women and Gender Studies, ASPECT, and the Criminology Major programs, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061.