SALISBURY —  What you do on New Year’s Day, you’ll be doing the rest of the year.

Many have heard the adage, but less know the history behind the saying. That history was the focus of “Legacy of January 1: The Day They Walked Free,” an event hosted on Wednesday by the Salisbury-Rowan NAACP in partnership with the Rowan Museum.

“Today, we’re going to talk about our history, because the only way that we can learn and truly be educated is by learning about the past as a way to not repeat it and as a way to learn from it,” said NAACP member Kaisha Brown.

The event focused on the history surrounding Lease Day, where up until 1865, people would come from across the area to the steps of the Rowan County Courthouse, now the Rowan Museum, on New Year’s Day to rent slaves for the upcoming year.

“New Year’s Day was always called Hiring Day by the slaves. Slaves went to a place called the hiring grounds to hire their labours out for the next year. That’s where that sayin’ comes from that what you do on New Year’s Day you’ll be doin’ all the rest of the year,” said Sister Harrison, a former slave interviewed as part of a Federal Writers’ Project work in Virginia in the 1930s.

The event on Wednesday was held on the steps of the museum, where people would gather to lease and buy slaves.

“There have been, at least in one year, 250 enslaved African-Americans who would have come up here on these steps and they would have been auctioned off to be leased. They weren’t sold, but they were auctioned off in a lease. You could actually come here on Jan. 1, and leave with an enslaved person that you would use in any way that you wanted to use for the next year. Once that was up, they would come back and the whole process would happen again,” said Rowan Museum Director Aaron Kepley.

Kepley said that the day was one of the most dreaded by slaves, because they knew that being leased out would mean being separated from their families and homes and being sent to an unfamiliar place for a year.

“In my research and in other historians’ research of slavery, the one thing enslaved people feared the most, was being separated, being sold. And most of the time, in most other places, that may only happen once or twice during their life. Here in Salisbury, it would happen every single year to some people. Just think of the trauma of that,” said Kepley.

Both Kepley and Brown said that they did not want the event to focus on the negative of the day, but to fully explain the cultural impact of Jan. 1, 1866, they felt they needed to explore the dark history of the day.

“Why do we tell these tragic stories? It’s not tragic. As Aaron started off, he said ‘it’s going to be sad, but that is so we can tell the positive.’ But as we go through, you see the glory, how they came forward on Jan. 1, 1866. Us being here today, that’s how we move forward,” said Brown.

Kepley spoke about an article written in the Salisbury newspaper The Carolina Watchman, which said that on New Year’s Day of 1866, Black people from all over town took to the streets and “just walked around.” The author wrote about how the “elephant that brought the circus” into that day had “changed its vocation,” meaning that the crowd and event that typically surrounded Lease Day had changed, and now Black residents took the opportunity to simply go out into town. 

“I think that is a really heartening thing to think about. They took a day that for them had meant so much heartbreak, so much trauma, and then turn it around,” said Kepley.