ST. CROIX — The streets of Cruz Bay fill with calypso music, masqueraders, and colorful parade troupes every July 4 as Love City marks its annual St. John Celebration.
For many who line the route, however, the event is more than a carnival. It is a remembrance of freedom — and of a people who did not learn they were free until one day after emancipation was proclaimed on St. Croix.
Ian Turnbull, director of the Division of Festivals within the Department of Tourism, said the parade originally celebrated three things at once: Emancipation Day, the end of World War II, and American Independence Day.
“It’s a celebration that showcases our identity as a people,” he said, adding that the parade is both a commemoration of freedom and a celebration.
Turnbull said St. John residents began linking Emancipation Day with the end of World War II in 1945, the year the war ended. He said the celebration, held around Emancipation Day, began that year.
“Soldiers were already coming back home in June and July, and so they adopted it because they were already hearing whispers that, ‘hey, the war is over. It’s going to be coming to an end. Let’s celebrate,’” he said.
Although World War II did not officially end until Japan signed the surrender documents on September 2, 1945, Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945, ended the war in Europe and was widely celebrated at the time as a major Allied victory.
Turnbull said the celebration was held off and on since 1945 and in 1954 it officially became recognized as St. John Festival. This year marks the 72nd anniversary. When the Division of Festivals took over organizing in 2019, it was renamed St. John Celebration.
Malik Sekou, a history and political science professor at the University of the Virgin Islands, said ancestral St. Johnians always honored July 3, 1848, as Emancipation Day but taught their children that July 4, 1848, was the actual date the news arrived on the island. He said the early parades began as an Emancipation Day observance and grew to include Independence Day as American influence deepened over time.
“Beginning in the 1950s there were events that were geared towards honoring the July 4 American independence period, and by the 1960s people merged the two traditions,” Sekou said.
St. John Historical Society board members Priscilla Hintz Rivera Knight and Enrique Corneiro stated that it is believed that festival celebrations may have been held in Cruz Bay as early as 1945 although documentation of this event is limited, however, by 1960 St. John had clearly established a Fourth of July Celebration that centered on American Independence Day and community festivities. They wrote that beginning in the 1970s a broader cultural shift occurred throughout the Virgin Islands with communities seeking to celebrate local history, culture, and heroes. Public schools that had once been named from American presidents and political figures were renamed to honor distinguished Virgin Islanders. Over time, the commemoration of Emancipation Day became intertwined with the Fourth of July festivities, transforming the celebration into something uniquely St. Johnian.
Alecia Wells, a longtime St. John resident, said the July 4 tradition did not start as patriotic at all.
“It started off as a day when persons from Coral Bay and Cruz Bay will get together to just mix and mingle when they were free from work for that day, especially way, way, way back when the slaves or the indentured servants were able to get the day off,” she said.
Over time, she said, that day of rest merged with the American holiday and eventually became today’s parade.
Most residents tie the deeper meaning of the date to July 3, 1848, when Governor-General Peter von Scholten proclaimed the immediate emancipation of all enslaved people in the Danish West Indies after a slave rebellion.
The proclamation came after Moses “General Buddhoe” Gottlieb, identified in Danish documents as John Gottliff, born March 19, 1820, in Estate LaGrange, organized and led thousands of enslaved Africans to surround Fort Frederik on St. Croix and demand their freedom, according to the Danish National Museum.
The Danish ban on the transatlantic slave trade in 1792 marked the beginning of the end of slavery. Fifty years later, in 1847, the state of Denmark ruled that slavery be phased out over a 12-year period, beginning with all new-born babies of enslaved women. This was far from enough for the enslaved population. Many of them feared that they would not live long enough to experience freedom, and at the beginning of July 1848 this culminated in a revolt.
General Buddhoe prevented the uprising from ending in violent confrontation. He is a celebrated freedom fighter in the Virgin Islands today, though his own story did not end in freedom. Danish colonial authorities arrested him after the uprising, accused him of instigating it, and exiled him to Trinidad, where he lived the rest of his life. Although he appears in historical and archival sources under multiple name variations, he is most commonly memorialized in the Virgin Islands as General Buddhoe, including on public busts.
The news of emancipation did not reach St. Thomas or St. John until the next day.
On July 4, 1848, St. Thomas Governor Fritz Oxholm signed an order instructing the posting and distribution of 25 copies of the Emancipation Proclamation on St. Thomas.
The schooner Vigilant sailed early on July 4, 1848, into St. Thomas Harbor, bringing news of the uprising and subsequent pronouncement of emancipation on St. Croix. Later that evening, Captain Ingjald Mourier, owner of Estate Lameshur, arrived on St. John to spread the news, according to research by historian and archival researcher David Knight Sr. published by the St. John Historical Society.
Marcia George, a St. John resident, said that one-day delay is exactly why the celebration falls on July 4.
“St. John didn’t get the news until the next day,” she said. “That’s why we celebrate the Fourth.”
George said she wants parade spectators to sit with what that means.
“It matters to me that they understand the true meaning of this day, because we were actually freed on the third, but we didn’t know,” she said. “We kept on working, we kept on working and working until we got the news the following day, late in the afternoon.”
Lucinda Jurgen, of St. John, said she hopes the parade stirs something in the people who watch it.
“I hope they reflect on our ancestors; what we are now and what we came through,” she said. “Our history is very important, and we don’t want to be forgotten because [if] history’s forgotten, we are forgotten so we don’t want that to happen.”
Kurt Marsh Jr., St. Thomas/St. John Historic Preservation Committee territorial chair and St. John resident, said many residents simply call July 4 “Emancipation Second Day.” He said the holiday means something different to many St. Johnians.
“We’re really not fans of celebrating U.S. independence, especially since we do not have full self-determination,” he said. “So, we prefer to celebrate our own emancipation story.”
Andrew Rutnik said an annual emancipation play tries to put that story in front of as many people as possible. He portrays von Scholten in the play, “Cry for Freedom: When St. John Got the News.” The program will begin at 1 p.m. on Friday with a symbolic parade featuring Amerindians and enslaved people to the parking lot at Slim Man’s Jeep Rental, where the play will follow.
“I think it’s important for people to understand that July 3 is significant in Virgin Islands history, and that the world should know about it,” Rutnik said.
WTJX will provide live coverage of the St. John Celebration parade on the morning of July 4 on television and online.
