The first great struggle for black Americans was to see the end of slavery.

The second great struggle was to regain in the 1960s and 70s rights that were granted to them after slavery ended but were later taken away.

This year’s Black and Blue Civil War Living History Camp will try to connect the two struggles, linking the stories of black soldiers who fought for the Union during the Civil War with those of activists and advocates who helped organize the civil rights movement in Natchez a hundred years later.

“The significance of this program is about Civil war soldiers, nurses and cavalryman of African descent who fought for the United States and decisively helped to destroy the South’s chattel slavery system and the confederacy, thereby helping make it possible for the first mass freedom for African Americans or blacks,” Friends of the Forks of the Road Coordinator Ser Seshs ab-Heter C.M. Boxley said.

“This was the first greatest generation of African Americans, enslaved people, to gain freedom in Natchez.”

Not long after the Reconstruction period ended, however, “through violence and other trickery, some worked to take away the first civil rights that benefitted black people,” Boxley said.

“The second greatest generation led a prolific struggle to regain those civil rights that were lost in the 1960s and 70s.”

This year’s Black and Blue program will recognize both of those struggles starting with a reception starting at 5:30 p.m. Friday at the Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture.

The special guests at the reception will be Dorie Ladner, who worked with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Ballot project in Natchez in 1964 and 1966, the Rev. Al Sampson, who was an activist during the era, and Natchez native and photographer Roy Lewis.

The Friday events will also include a tour of Civil War and civil rights sites.

Those sites will include stops at the Armstrong Tire Company, where the attempted assassination by bomb of desegregation activist George Metcalf happed; Beulah Baptist Church, where activists were arrested and sent to Parchman penitentiary for their civil rights organizing; and the site of Ladner’s attempted assassination.

“The person who did it put the bomb in the wrong building,” Boxley said. “Supposedly, the then-police chief told her the bomb was meant for her and he was surprised she hadn’t already been killed.”

The tour will also include stops where the Deacons for Defense, an armed group organized to protect blacks and civil rights workers against Klan violence, first met to organize, Boxley said.

The surviving original members of the Deacons for Defense have also been invited to the Friday reception, he said.

The overall efforts of those groups — and the successful economic boycott they later organized — helped desegregate Natchez and specifically integrate local government bodies. That’s why members of the city and county governments, as well as city employees, have been invited to the reception, Boxley said.

“I want people to understand, especially the African Americans, how they got the opportunity to be clerks in Natchez, the opportunity to be policeman, as teachers to be able work in integrated school district, to be able to vote for the first time since Reconstruction,” he said.

Saturday’s events will be 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Historic Jefferson College. Ladner and Sampson will speak starting at 11 a.m.

At 1:30 p.m., 22 role players will take on the living history aspect of the program, sharing the stories of black Civil War soldiers, including the 6th Heavy Colored Artillary, which did the heaviest fighting in central Louisiana.

Artemis Gaye, the seventh generation great-grandson of Prince Adul Rahman Ibrahim — known as the “prince among slaves” for his decades spent enslaved in the Natchez area despite being heir to a kingdom in present-day Guinea — will also be in attendance. Gaye, who has created a foundation to promote his forebear’s legacy, last attended the events in Natchez in 2012.

The weekend will end Sunday afternoon, when Sampson will preach a sermon at Beulah Baptist Church he first delivered in 1965 titled “I will not bow.”