CARL ADAMS
presents
"March to Juneteenth"
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About the Video:
Carl Adams presents: "March to Juneteenth." He gave the talk via Zoom on June 15, 2022, to the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia following a ceremony to present the "Ed Bearss Preservation Award" to the African American Civil War Museum (accepted by Executive Director Dr. Frank Smith) and the "Ed Bearss Legacy Award" to Ms. Wendy Swanson. A video of that ceremony is available at [TBD]. Kurt DeSoto, President of the CWRTDC, introduces Mr. Adams. Questions and answers follow his presentation.
About the Topic:
CWRTDC member Carl Adams discusses how his research into the
lives of Nance and her son Pvt. William Henry Costley expedited non-partisan
action on a Congressional Bill to make Juneteenth a national holiday.
Mr Adams explains that before his involvement, the narrative reported to Congress was the inaccurate "Legend" of Juneteenth that had Gen. Grainger 'marching' into Galveston at the head of a column of two thousand Union soldiers with the General Order #3.
Mr. Adams covers the true story, which includes the 1st Rgt IL Colored Volunteers (29th USCT), a ship that had been sent to Texas from Union headquarters at City Point, VA, and the remarks in the column of the Adj. Gen. Report of IL that a burial detail took place in Galveston.
The sudden realization that African-American soldiers recruited from all of the northern states were represented at the original Juneteenth in 1865 helped the Bill sail through both Houses of Congress in less than a week. Such action was totally unprecedented, and Pres. Biden signed the Bill to make Juneteenth a national holiday the same week!
About the Speaker:
Carl Adams, biographer of Nance, was raised in Alton, IL, along the “color line” with mostly white folks to the south and minorities to the north near two racially segregated public schools. He started writing journalism in high school during the Civil Rights movement and reported news for NPR radio at Southern Illinois University. He moved to Peoria after graduating from SIU and worked on TV news, Channel 19.
In the spring of 1993, he read about an unknown Black woman “… a Negro girl name Nance” a slave from Tazewell County. His curiosity led to the revelations about the trials and tribulations of Mrs. Nance Legins-Costley, depicted in his book.
Those revelations also include the events of Nance’s children, who played a role in the “March to Juneteenth.”
Mr. Adams’s affiliations include the CWRTDC, the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia, and the Illinois State Historical Society. Mr. Adams was also inducted into the African American Hall of Fame Museum in 2020, and he serves as a historian for the Education Committee of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation.
Mr. Adams now resides in Bethesda, MD, but continues to be
heavily involved in events in Illinois.
