by Ellen Shubart, Class of 2006
On June 19th, CAC will offer free tours of Oak Woods Cemetery in honor of Juneteenth, the national holiday that commemorates the day slavery truly ended. Four docents will lead tours on this special day that follow the path of our regular Civil War to Civil Rights tour. This tour has proved popular with many audiences, including many neighbors of the cemetery that is located at 69th Street off of Stony Island Avenue.
Juneteenth commemorates the events of June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Ranger, from his Galveston headquarters, announced the end of legalized slavery in Texas. This came two months after Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. Despite that surrender, Confederates had continued to fight until mid-May. Gen Ranger issued what is known as General Order Number 3, announcing the end of legalized slavery. This is what is being remembered and commemorated on Juneteenth.
Oak Wood Cemetery is one of three pre-Civil War cemeteries created just prior to the war. Just as Rosehill Cemetery became important in the preserving the history of the Civil War because so many Union officers are buried there, Oak Woods became a part of the Civil War story as the resting place of more than 4,000 Confederate troops who had been held in a Chicago prisoner of war camp. They died of sickness, injury, and malnutrition. These soldiers are buried in the Confederate Mound, a national cemetery established within Oak Woods in 1896.
While the Oak Woods tour features the Confederate Mound, it primarily focuses on individuals who worked to overcome Chicago’s unwritten segregation laws in the fight for civil rights. The tour features gravesites of activists Ida B. Wells and her husband Frederick Barnett, former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, publisher John Johnson, and many others. The tour is a fitting tribute to those who fought for civil rights on a day that commemorates the legal end of slavery in the United States.
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