Michelle has become a prolific author of nine books about Jefferson City’s history, including he one that debuted that evening, February 5 (another anniversary: the 115th of the burning of the Capitol that led to the construction of the magnificent building we have today). First to Freedom; Cole County U.S. Colored Troops, is a tribute to several of the Jefferson City black soldiers who were in the 62nd and 65th Colored Infancy of the Union Army whose financial contributions led to the creation of Lincoln.
One of the officers of the 62nd noted in his farewell speech that 99 of the 4312 men had learned to “read, write and cipher.” In all, he noted “200 read and write understandingly, 284 can read, 377 can spell in words of two syllables and are learning to read.”
Jefferson City offered a ramshackle school building for the new institution. Classes began in the fall of 1866, nineteen year after Missouri passed a law making it illegal for black people to be taught to read and write.
I was asked to emcee the event that included an Abraham Lincoln reenactor reading the “Proposition 95—Regrading the status of slaves in states engaged in rebellion against the United States.” Most people speak of it as the Emancipation Proclamation—which I believe should be pronounced with emphasis on the first word: EMANCIPATION proclamation—and another reenactor portraying Robert Foster, the founding officer. Missouri became the first slave state to have its own EMANCIPATION Proclamation. By the end of the war, one-in-ten Union soldiers was black—179-thousand in the army and another 19-thousand in the Navy.
Part of my remarks between presentations and to end the evening said:
“We have many great statues and bronze tableaus in and at our Capitol, but I think the finest, and most inspirational one in Jefferson City is just up the hill, the “Soldier’s Memorial Plaza” tableau. It recalls the sacrifices made by members of the 62nd and 65th United States Colored Infantries, men who knew full well a way of life they fought to leave behind.
“They are symbolized in bronze now. But they were symbols FOR millions of people in their time and remain in bronze as symbols of hope for all of us today and tomorrow—-life and freedom are only a hand-grasp away, and they are a reminder that an open hand is always better than a closed fist in maintaining the nation whose 250th birth anniversary we celebrate this year.
“The first slaves were brought to Missouri to help mine lead in the 1720s.
“When Lewis and Clark went upstream past the bluff that is now the site of our city, a black man named York was part of the group, the slave of William Clark. When they came back from the Pacific Ocean in 1806, a black man was part of the explorers. His name was York. York was William Clark’s slave. He endured with them all of the dangerous times, saw all of the glories of the great mountains, and was the equal of all on that perilous trip. He believed he would become a free man on the return and could not adjust to being nothing more than a slave again. Eventually Clark shipped him off to Louisville Kentucky where he was reunited with his enslaved wife.
“If York and his wife had children, they would have been part of the freedom movement after the Civil War. We don’t know what happened to him. History seems to have obscured him. But the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment gave his descendants the freedom he dreamed of.
“When the first black member of the legislature, Representative Walthall Moore of St. Louis took office in 1921, almost sixty years after the proclamation, he had to room in Jefferson City with a black family, had to eat at a black restaurant, travel in black-owned taxis, and drink from water fountains for the colored.
“But it was Moore who got the half-million dollar appropriation that transformed Lincoln Institute into Lincoln University. .
“Forty-seven years later, I watched as the Jefferson City council, in 1968, passed an ordinance that said black legislators no loner had to stay in Lincoln University dormitory rooms and private homes, and that black people could live anywhere in the city where they could afford to live.
“One-hundred-and-sixty years after the founding of Lincoln University, many people of color still struggle to be considered “people” and there are those who judge some to be unequal only because of their color, their faith, their identities—-and the country where they were born.
“In this year when we celebrate the 250th anniversary of a document that proclaimed that all men are created equal, we again find ourselves wondering meaning the meaning of those words. Some interpreters believe Jefferson meant that all of us are BORN equal in nature. It is in nurture that divisions are made, distrust develops, and hate can take hold.
“We learn these lessons through the honest study of history and if we are free to learn that history, we can be the ones who bend the arc of the moral universe a little more toward justice.
“Let us go forth from this good evening in the hope that history gives us for peace.”
The event concluded with a fine prayer from Rev. Dr. Adrian Hendricks II of the Joshua House Church in Jefferson City.
Heavenly Father: Tonight as we take a moment and pause to celebrate the history of African Americans, we pause to celebrate American history, giving you thanks and praise, O God, for this nation; giving you thanks and praise or i’s foundation and for its forefathers and for its Declaration to uphold the high ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And yet In this hour, even as this nation struggles to uphold its identity, we give you thanks and praise for its potential, a potential that still has the opportunity to demonstrate love for our fellow man, a potential that still has the opportunity to pick up the poor and stabilize the impoverished, a potential that still has the opportunity to right historical wrongs, heal historical wounds, and to be the first global power that’s unafraid to let freedom ring!
Lord, go before us, as WE navigate a new pathway. Stand beside us, as we rediscover our moral compass and move within us as we continue to define what it means to be an American.
It’s in your mighty and matchless name that we pray,
Hallelujah & AMEN!
Amen, in deed.
(Photo credits: Jefferson City Convention and Visitors Bureau; Lincoln University)
