Riverfront Historical Society Presents Juneteenth Celebration

Riverfront Historical Society commemorates the Sesquicentennial Juneteenth Celebration of the end of slavery with a lecture by noted women’s historian, Susan Klepp, Professor of History, emerita, Temple University, on Alice of Dunk’s Ferry: The Life and Images of an Enslaved Woman.

Alice was born in the late seventeenth century and died in 1802, over one hundred years old. For decades she collected tolls and navigated the Delaware River from Dunk’s Ferry, Pennsylvania, to Dunk’s Ferry, New Jersey (now Beverly).

As such, she was witness to much of the history of Philadelphia and became celebrated as a local oral historian.

It has been said, “ She remembered it all: working the boats of Dunk’s Ferry to help white passengers across the river during the day. And working secretly at night to help fellow slaves disappear across the water to freedom. When Alice died, she was mourned and eulogized as the keeper of the city’s memory, a long-lived resident whose life was intertwined with the lives and deaths of the city, a teller of history who saw much and forgot little and passed it all down to eager and younger listeners.”

She was exploited and reviled as a lowly slave, both in her lifetime and after, but came to earn the respect of many.

In our own times, Alice has become an internationally revered figure whose life, achievements, and beliefs have inspired people, not only in the United States, but in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere.

Never freed, her anti-slavery views help to inform our knowledge of race and slavery in Early America.

Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day or Freedom Day, is the oldest nationally celebrated African American Holiday in the United States.

News of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (effective Jan. 1, 1863) finally reached Galveston on June 19, 1865, when Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger read a general order stating that all slaves are free.

Immediate celebration in the local black community ensued. Since then, June 19th, which was dubbed Juneteenth, was treated much like an African-American Fourth of July, and the holiday spread throughout Texas and into nearby states.

Today, 43 states recognize Juneteenth as a state holiday or state day of observance. A movement is currently underway to make Juneteenth a national holiday.

Susan Klepp, Ph.D., is a two-time Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship recipient and a past president of the Pennsylvania Historical Association.

An expert on colonial and Revolutionary America and the Atlantic World from 1680 to 1820, she has served as editor of the Journal of the Early American Republic and is the recipient of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women’s History for her book, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820.

The event is free and open to the public. Conklin Hall, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, 158 Warren Street, Beverly (Dunk’s Ferry), NJ 08010. Saturday, June 20,  1 p.m.-3 p.m.