Newly freed slaves took classes and listened to the first Southern reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 under this oak tree. During the Civil war, enslaved people fled their plantation seeking freedom behind Union lines in Virginia. When Gen. Benjamin Butler declared in 1861 that three enslaved people were “contraband” of war, and therefore would not be returned to slave owners, many more enslaved people joined them.

 African Americans’ new status as freed people intensified their desire to acquire an education. They had been denied this right for thirty years under Virginia law, which outlawed “all meetings of free negroes or mulattoes, at any school-house, church meetinghouse or other place for teaching them reading or writing, either in the day or night, under whatsoever pretext.” Virginia law also made the compensation of any white person for teaching enslaved people to read or write unlawful.

 Mary Peake, free African American woman, helped meet the demand for education behind Union lines in Virginia. She taught classes to newly freed slaves under this oak.

 African Americans’ demand for education intensified after they heard the Emancipation Proclamation. Several schools were later established for African Americans in Hampton.

 The National Geographic Society has designation Emancipation Oak as one of the 10 Great Trees of the World. Its limbs are more than a hundred feet in diameter.

 African Americans’ determination to acquire an education in the face of significant obstacles is most evident within NMAAHC in the Making a Way out of No Way exhibition. As one of five institutional pillars of African American life, the museum shows that African Americans believed that education was vital for socioeconomic mobility. There is a sign, pot-bellied stove, and desks from the Hope School, a two-room school in Pomaria, South Carolina that Black people constructed with aid from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Also on view is a 1918 photograph of Regina Egerton Wright with a Colored Training School diploma, and the Industrial Education Award from Prairie View A&M University from circa 1960.

 In the Slavery and Freedom exhibition, a miniature pamphlet with the text of the Emancipation Proclamation that Union troops carried with them to read to slaves is on display.

Credits and Sources:

“Emancipation Oak: ‘Thirst for Knowledge.’”  Virginia Civil War Trails.

“Emancipation Oak.” Hampton University website. http://www.hamptonu.edu/about/emancipation_oak.cfm.