JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – As the clock nears midnight on New Year’s Eve, many African American churches and households across the country gather not to just ring in a new year, but to honor a powerful tradition rooted in freedom.
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The Watch Night Service links New Year’s Eve to the official end of slavery.
Historic Mount Zion AME Church has a video that talks about the very first African American churches. They were made by salves out of brush and trees where they secretly praised and worshipped God.
While they weren’t allowed to practice religion, they did through songs, poems and dance by holding Watch Night Services awaiting the adoption of the Emancipation Proclamation, which would take effect on Jan. 1, 1863.
“It was pretty much the outdoor sanctuary in the woods,” Pastor Victor Cole said. “And to my understanding, they would have wet blankets around in the woods to capture the sound so that the slave owners and people would not hear them.”
He said they would have poems, sing songs, and praise God.
On Watch Night, enslaved and free Black Americans watched and prayed because at midnight, the proclamation would become official. It declared freedom for enslaved people in Confederate states -- a monumental, though incomplete, step toward liberation.
Jacksonville native Saundra Morene recalled attending a traditional Watch Night Service as a child, where church members paid their respects to those who passed away that calendar year.
“There were always the deacons who stood on the four corners of the church with usually black suits and white gloves, and they made it a very formal ceremony of calling the names out of the deceased from that year moving into the next year and it was a calling of the ancestors,” Morena said.
The emancipation didn’t immediately reach all enslaved people, with those in Texas not hearing the news until June 19, 1865, now commemorated as Juneteenth.
“We could not celebrate Juneteenth openly in the City of Jacksonville, and now to be able to celebrate Juneteenth in Jacksonville in the way that we do it has been so important because there’s only been a few people that’s carried the tradition of Juneteenth on, which brings it into the holiday that it is today,” Morena said.
Black Christians said the same spirit that carried African Americans through slavery, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights marches shows up every Watch Night.
A reminder that freedom was fought for and it’s still worth protecting.
Over time, the Watch Night Service has evolved and now has connections to other African American traditions, like Kwanzaa.
Watch “Tracing the Roots: The Story of Juneteenth” on News4JAX or News4JAX+ at 7 p.m.
