MSMS students and Columbus High School prepare for 2026 8th of May Emancipation Celebration
COLUMBUS, Miss. (WCBI) – While Juneteenth is celebrated nationally as Freedom Day, the African American community in Columbus for generations had a month’s head start.
For more than 100 years, Columbus residents celebrated the 8th of May as Freedom Day.
That was the day in 1865 that Union Troops arrived in Columbus with word that enslaved people in the area were emancipated.
In recent years, Columbus has reclaimed the holiday thanks to the African American History class at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science.
Students from MSMS and Columbus High School are putting the final touches on this year’s Eighth of May Emancipation Celebration at the city’s historic Sandfield Cemetery.
The celebration will feature music, a step performance, a spoken word performance, and dramatic presentations of the lives of some of Columbus’s leading Black citizens, past and present.
“What it has brought to me is more of a curiosity as well as this sort of marvel towards, like, the previous generations, and what they did, because, currently, as you may know, we are in a time where this sort of history is getting wiped away. It’s getting blurred. It’s getting seen as not really useful, not valued enough, and I think that the Eighth of May and other events like this are ways of preserving it as well as holding on to what they can’t take from us,” said MSMS Junior Marley Hill.
“I also learned some other things that, like, the racial diaspora, that was way bigger during slavery. I learned that too, that ‘Black is Power’ and all of us being black hasn’t always been around. But, I think that very much helps me with going on in life, because knowing history can help you not repeat it,” said MSMS Senior Jolanna Jackson.
The Eighth of May Emancipation Celebration begins tomorrow at 6 pm in Columbus’ historic Sandfield Cemetery on College Street.
