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| Celebrate Emancipation. June, 2007 |
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Party in the Park! And a whole lot more! |
Juneteenth Celebration of Central PA – June 23, 2007
 This is Williamsport’s 8th Annual Juneteenth event. The date is June 23rd, 2007 (rain date is the 24th), at Brandon Park in Williamsport, PA. The time is from 1pm until 5pm. The featured musical band is "Burning Bush" from Maryland. (Juneteeth is a national festival held in various cities to celebrate the emancipation of slaves and the end of the Civil War.)
The featured speaker is Mitch Kachun, PhD, from Western Michigan University. He has uncovered the earliest known novel written by an African-American woman in the United States. Julia C. Collins, a Williamsport resident, wrote “The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride." It was published in the AME Christian Recorder in 1865. Dr. Kachun co-edited the reprinted novel and will autograph it for sale at the event.
The dance troupes to perform are "Billy Ross Dance Techniques" and Valerie Taylor's "Expressions". Planners of the event will have other recording artists, speakers, the Underground Railroad Exhibit with Dr. Mamie Diggs, a children's carnival, a petting zoo, pony rides, vendors and their first blood drive.
For more information contact Conni at 570 322-1198.
First novel by an African-American woman.
 In 1865, The Christian Recorder, the national newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, serialized The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, a novel written by Mrs. Julia C. Collins, an African American woman living in the small town of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The first novel ever published by a black American woman, it is set in antebellum Louisiana and Connecticut, and focuses on the lives of a beautiful mixed-race mother and daughter whose opportunities for fulfillment through love and marriage are threatened by slavery and caste prejudice. The text shares much with popular nineteenth-century women's fiction, while its dominant themes of interracial romance, hidden African ancestry, and ambiguous racial identity have parallels in the writings of both black and white authors from the period.
Begun in the waning months of the Civil War, the novel was near its conclusion when Julia Collins died of tuberculosis in November of 1865. In this first-ever book publication of The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, the editors have composed a hopeful and a tragic ending, reflecting two alternatives Collins almost certainly would have considered for the closing of her unprecedented novel. In their introduction, the editors offer the most complete and current research on the life and community of an author who left few traces in the historical record, and provide extensive discussion of her novel's literary and historical significance. Collins's published essays, which provide intriguing glimpses into the mind of this gifted but overlooked writer, are included in what will prove to be the definitive edition of a major new discovery in African American literature. Its publication contributes immensely to our understanding of black American literature, religion, women's history, community life, and race relations during the era of United States emancipation.
Dr. Kachun dug through property records, probate records, tax records, birth and death records, and countless newspapers. “I found a couple of scattered references that don’t tell us much,” he says. We do know that Collins was from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and that she was one of about five hundred African Americans in a rapidly growing city of ten thousand people. We know that Collins was her married name, and that she was literate. And we know that she had a strong social conscience and cared passionately about the education of women.
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For more information on "Julia C. Collins" go to:
Oxford University Press
For more information about Dr. Mitch Kachun. Go to:
http://research.unc.edu/endeavors/fall2006/collins.php
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