Concerned that black history locally is at the edges of the sesquicentennial observance, I am among those Blacks calling for a commemoration of the Fall of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863.

In my youth, most black people knew that the city fell to Union forces on the Fourth of July, and were quietly celebratory of the event and the irony. My father used to say it showed God had a sense of humor.

The date concurrence of this event with the one celebrating independence from England is one of the most striking, but least known ironies in history. And though the Civil War raged for another two years, it was the fall of Vicksburg that ensured the South’s defeat. President Abraham Lincoln had said, “Vicksburg is the key.”

This observance of “the 4th” by the black community is not to wound or preen, but to restore the connection and significance between the fall of Vicksburg and the end of slavery. To blacks, that’s not a re-enactment, but a fact of history and one that, with another outcome, would have prolonged enslavement. Failure to mark this day, especially this year, would assent to a four-year cycle of romanticized remembrances that largely favor the Confederacy and ignore what the war was about.

But the main motivating factor for this commemoration is a proper recognition of the 1,300-plus black Union soldiers who fought and defeated Confederate troops at Milliken’s Bend and aided Grant’s subsequent victory at Vicksburg; the nearly 250,000 black Union troops who served during the Civil War, and vigorously participated in their own emancipation; and the 5,000 black troops who aided the Union in its occupation of Vicksburg after the fall.

Such salient facts are often overlooked in the pageantry that threatens at times to overwhelm the War’s observance.

This commemoration does not try to displace the traditional “4th of July” — the date on which the Declaration of Independence was signed, and Americans became a free people.

Parades and homecomings, speeches and picnics will all stay a part of that.

But especially this year, with the country beginning a four-year observance of The Civil War (1861 to 1865), it’s time that black people in Vicksburg celebrate their own independence which occurred almost nine decades later — in Vicksburg on the 4th of July.

Yolande Robbins

Vicksburg