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PDFFrom Institute for Southern Studies:
On May 20, 1865 United States General Edward M. McCook gave the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in the state of Florida. It was a moment that African Americans had fought for. During the Civil War, over 1,000 black Floridians had joined nearly a quarter of a million African Americans across the nation to serve in the Union Army and Navy.
Many more worked as scouts, spies, and laborers in a struggle to end the long nightmare of slavery. Henceforth, black Floridians observed May 20 as a sacred day of remembrance of the Peculiar Institution’s many victims, and in hope that the nation would nevermore place property rights above human rights.
African Americans understood however, that slavery continued to exist in our hemisphere. In the decades after May 20, black churches and conventions organized to protest slavery in Latin America, particularly in Brazil and Cuba. One mass meeting, chaired by the great abolitionist Henry Highland Garnett at Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church in Philadelphia, led to the formation of the American Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1877.
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Courageous voices spoke against the insidious new slavery. Foremost among these was Florida’s Stetson Kennedy. In 1952, Kennedy risked life and limb to gather testimony about slavery in the South, and he presented this evidence before the United Nations Commission on Forced Labor in Geneva.
Modern day slavery continues to exist in Florida. Barry Estabrook notes in his recently published book Tomatoland, that, “In the last fifteen years, Florida law enforcement officials have freed more than one thousand men and women who have been held and forced to work against their will in the fields of Florida, and that represents only the tip of the iceberg. Most instances of slavery go unreported.”
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