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Juneteenth became a recognized holiday in Iowa 21 years ago, when Iowa became the seventh state to officially recognize June 19, 1865, as the date the enslaved people of Galveston, Texas, finally learned that slavery had ended. While Americans have rallied around Juneteenth as a fitting and important date to commemorate the end of slavery, Black Iowans have celebrated and commemorated the end of slavery for at least 166 years.

Dr. Leslie Schwalm talks about the beginnings of Black Emancipation Day celebrations in Iowa, and explores with the audience how and why Emancipation Day was so important to Iowa's Black communities, especially in the nineteenth century.

Schwalm is a historian of Civil War America and Professor Emeritus of History and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. Schwalm writes and lectures on how the wartime destruction of slavery shaped the lives of Black and white Americans, North and South. Schwalm is the author of " A Hard Fight For We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina." (2006 Willie Lee Rose Book Award from the Southern Association of Women's Historians.) Chosen for inclusion in The History E-Book Project of the American Council of Learned Societies, "Emancipation's Diaspora: The Politics of Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest" (2010 Benjamin Shambaugh Book Prize from the Iowa State Historical Society), and more recently "Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America".

This presentation is part of the Lens series, sponsored by the City of Iowa City's Office of Equity and Human Rights.