Page 26 - July18LivingSCCLmagazine

EMANCIPATIONOAK
By Donna Smith
Reflecting on independence, our July issue’s theme, recalls the many symbols of American freedom-- a proud eagle soaring over treetops, Old Glory waving
her colors, fireworks sparkling and booming over ball fields, amusement parks, and waterways. Another visible symbol of freedom and its cost is the Emancipation Oak, whose limbs sprawl over a hundred feet in diameter. Designated by the National Geographic Society as one of the Ten Great Trees of the World, it is not the largest or oldest, but it may be the most historically significant living tree of any species.
Today, the Emancipation Oak stands near the entrance of the Hampton University campus in Hampton, Virginia, perilously close to Interstate sixty-four
where millions of cars pass every year. Over
a hundred and fifty years ago, during the American Civil War (1861 to
1865), this much younger oak
served as the first classroom for
newly freed men and women eager for an education. Union forces had gained control of nearby Fort Monroe where escaped African American
slaves sought asylum. To avoid returning them to slaveholders, the Union Army defined them as contraband.
In November 1861, the American Missionary
26 LIVING @ SCCL, July 2018
Association (AMA) asked Mary Smith Peake to teach the children of freedmen at the contraband camp connected to Fort Monroe. She started her classes outside, under the branches of this oak tree, three miles from the protective safety of Fort Monroe.
The AMA soon provided a cottage for the classes,
but it was under this oak, in 1863, that the Virginia Peninsula’s black community gathered to hear the first Southern reading of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, leading to its nickname, the Emancipation Oak.
It cannot go unnoticed that this declaration of freedom was read in the middle of a war that
threatened to tear our country apart, but the thirst for education persevered. Although Virginia law previously
forbade education to the rising number of “contrabands” camped in the area, classes continued. Mrs. Mary Peake, daughter of a freed colored
woman and a Frenchman, taught until her death in what became The Butler School.
Countless hardships and untold tragedies followed Lincoln’s Proclamation, but the great
oak tree remains steadfast as a symbol of bravery, daring, and
the human determination to
The oak as it appears today.