Juneteenth and Daisy Lampkin

​Very much belatedly, in 2021, the federal government finally recognized Juneteenth as a national holiday, a day in which all Americans should take pride. On June 19, 1865, at Galveston, Texas, some of the last enslaved persons still held in bondage were informed of their freedom.* Juneteenth thus symbolizes the final eradication of chattel slavery in this country, an outcome for which not only hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers and their commander in chief died, but a day for which many thousands of Americans, including many themselves enslaved and those in the abolitionist movement, had worked and struggled, at considerable personal cost.

​Daisy Lampkin was born in 1883 or 1884, nearly twenty years after the 13th Amendment (mostly) outlawed slavery in the US. But her life intersected with the history of the anti-slavery movement in a number of ways, making her an heir to Juneteenth and an important point of connection between nineteenth century abolitionism and twentieth century suffrage and civil rights activism.

Lampkin grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia, and she lived her entire adult life in Pittsburgh. Both of those southern Pennsylvania cities enjoyed substantial abolitionist legacies. Both were urban sentinels of freedom close by the Mason-Dixon Line, the geographical, political, and perhaps spiritual boundary between slavery and freedom. Both were sites of extensive Underground Railroad activities, as detailed by William Switala and Cooper H. Wingert. Both cities also supplied proud regiments to the Union, and many Pittsburghers and Philadelphians lost their lives in the cause of emancipation.
 
Philadelphia was also the home of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in America, a denomination grown from decidedly abolitionist roots. The AME Church was founded in Philadelphia at the tail end of the eighteenth century as a response to the racial segregation that prevailed within most of the region’s Methodist churches. From its early days the AME Church was heavily active in abolition, and many AME churches became safe houses and points of transit along the Underground Railroad. AME ministers strongly advocated for abolition and civil rights for African Americans. AME doctrine thus wove freedom and liberation into its theology to a greater extent than most predominantly white churches then (and now.)
 
Daisy learned this “practice what you preach” ethic from her step-uncle, the Reverend N. D. Temple, who was a prominent AME minister in eastern Pennsylvania. The brother of her stepfather, John Temple, N. D. was ordained in Reading but church officials soon assigned him to Philadelphia to plant new congregations in the region, a task in which he was particularly adept. Temple would travel back to Reading frequently to give guest sermons at Reading’s Bethel AME Church, which Daisy attended; Bethel AME had also been an important safehouse in the Underground Railroad. Temple also delighted weekday evening audiences (including, undoubtedly, a girlishly amused Daisy) with demonstrations of scientific curiosities such as making oxygen, burning magnesium ribbon, and firing a hydrogen gun. Early after the turn of the century Temple and his wife were sent to the Pittsburgh suburbs to plant more churches. Daisy followed them in 1909 when her mother passed away. This is how she came to Pittsburgh.

​Pittsburgh also enjoyed a powerful abolitionist legacy. Like Philadelphia and Harrisburg, Pittsburgh occupied a powerful symbolic role in the trek to freedom, as a first outpost on a perilous road that would eventually take runaways as far as Canada. Pittsburgh is also the source of the Ohio River, the western extension of the Mason-Dixon boundary between slavery and freedom. Readers will recall that it is the ice of the frozen Ohio River on which the slave Eliza and her infant son make their harrowing escape from vicious slave catchers in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s catalytic Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most indelible scenes in all of American literature.
 
During Daisy’s adult life, Pittsburgh would attract many black migrants fleeing the terrors and restrictions of the Jim Crow south during what is known as the Great Migration. Her earliest civil rights work was with black women’s clubs and the Urban League, organizations that sought to increase educational, health, hygiene, and labor conditions for the migrants pouring into Pittsburgh and other northern cities, extending a history of abolition into a broader struggle for progressive reform.
 
There is a related story to tell about Daisy’s encounter with northern and southern racism which I shall post about later.
 
Daisy’s life is thus heir to a great national epic begun by abolitionists, democracy activists, and other reformers, paid in sweat and blood, and symbolized by Juneteenth. This legacy shaped her even before she became politically active. The story of her life is how she carried that legacy forward, contributing her own dynamic energy and talent, contributing vigorously and lastingly to the expansion of democratic and civil rights in the United States.

That is a story in which all Americans can take pride.
 
—David J. Snyder
 
*The Juneteenth proclamation derived its authority from Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which had only applied to the states, like Texas, then currently under Confederate control. Hence enslaved persons in certain of the Union-controlled border states such as Kentucky and Delaware remained in bondage until freed by the 13th Amendment ratified at the end of the year.