24th Annual Folsom Juneteenth Celebration: Reclaiming Our Past - A Stolen Legacy

The first Juneteenth at Negro Bar was not in 2021 as the Federal Holiday was established. Beginning in 2000, Dr. Shirley Moore, CSUS Professor and her husband Joe Moore carried the weight to open a positive new way forward.

Today, powerful and well financed efforts to distort, disparage and destroy the authentic 175 year old history, with the new name Black Miners Bar showcasing familiar values and beliefs of "Manifest Destiny" with new paid collaborators leading the way.

Many Californians like to think of their state as a freewheeling, tolerant place, one that entered the Union back in 1850 without the stain of slavery, but Joe Moore says there’s just one problem with that sunny vision of the past — it isn’t true.

Though it was admitted to the Union as a “free state,” slavery still existed in 1850s California, and Moore is lead a project to shed light on its contradictory history. His proof is in print: in an 1852 ad announcing the public auction of a black man valued at $300; newspaper accounts of fugitive slaves who were arrested; and county records certifying formerly enslaved Sacramento county residents bought their freedom from their owners.

Moore and a team of researchers have uncovered these and other, often overlooked pieces of California’s past after months of digging through the archives of museums, historical societies and libraries across the state.

Moore and researchers at California State University, Sacramento have been converting the documents into digital files, and plan to post them on the Internet at next week. When completed, the new online archive will provide insight into the challenges blacks faced in California of the 1800s.

“The story that’s being told is the diversity and richness and the determination of a small community in the 19th century,” said Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, a history professor at Sacramento State who is supervising student researchers and is married to Joe Moore.

After gold was discovered near Coloma and taken to Sutter’s Fort for validation in 1848, free born and runaway formerly enslaved Pan Africans joined a stampede of others migrating West, hoping to strike it rich.

For those early black pioneers, the state’s policies appeared promising. California’s first constitution, adopted in 1849, dictated that: “Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in this State.” A year later, under the Compromise of 1850, California was admitted to the Union as a free state.

This 175th Anniversary of 1849, we are reclaiming our Stolen Legacy, California Pioneers of Pan African Descent along the American River Parkway begins to quantity and qualify our authentic story, fabricated at today's Black Miners Bar given the "need" specifically at Juneteenth.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna4251957