Public Employee Press

Black History Month
On the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, DC 37 remembers
The long fight for freedom

By DIANE S. WILLIAMS

One hundred fifty years ago, on Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, ending 250 years of American chattel slavery and inhuman degradation by declaring enslaved African Americans in confederate states "forever free." His bold act, at once moral and pragmatic, meant slaves could fight for their freedom in the Union Army as equals in American society.

The Emancipation Proclamation reaffirmed the universal value of human freedom stated in the Declaration of Independence but then limited to white men.

An estimated 4 million black people with a collective value of over $3 billion - more than all other American industries combined - were enslaved in 1860 when Lincoln was elected. His act overturned the social order and unraveled the dominance Southern states had achieved in the national economy on the backs of their enslaved, unpaid labor force.

Although Lincoln exempted 750,000 African Americans living in slave-dense places like New Orleans, scholars say the decree freed up to 70,000 slaves immediately and soon brought liberation to 3 million more as Union forces advanced across the South and Union Army soldiers read the president's order aloud from pocket-sized copies of the Emancipation Proclamation.

"There is but one way to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation. That is to make its declarations of freedom real; to reach back to the origins of our nation when our message of equality electrified an unfree world, and reaffirm democracy by deeds as daring as the Emancipation Proclamation," said the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Freedom fighters

While the Emancipation Proclamation changed the Civil War from a struggle to preserve the Union into a crusade for social justice, to say that Lincoln freed the slaves with the stroke of a pen oversimplifies history. His bold executive order came on the shoulders of a freedom movement launched by a multiracial force of abolitionists such as sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and others who acted to condemn slavery and affirm the equality of humanity. The freedom fighters also included the thousands of unnamed self-emancipators who escaped, ran, swam, cried and prayed their way to freedom long before Lincoln's act of political expediency.

For 200 years states from Virginia and South Carolina to Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York had laws that strictly enforced slavery and prohibited blacks (and Indians) from assembling, reading, marrying, traveling without a pass, handling money or owning land, and the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision deprived blacks of citizenship and outlawed any federal ban on slavery.

Lincoln opposed slavery, viewing human ownership as immoral, but he saw blacks as inferior. He had called for government to pay reparations to slave owners and deport to Africa their former slaves - Americans bought and sold by other Americans as property, generating profits in the slave trade that linked the United States, Brazil, the Caribbean and Africa as their blood soaked sugar cane, tobacco and cotton fields.

By the time he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln's ideology had grown to envision a broad, uncompensated emancipation with voting rights for some African Americans. But equality and full citizenship for the formerly enslaved and their descendants remained an elusive dream.

Generations of Americans have had to fight for the racial, gender and economic equality embodied in America's two greatest documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation.

"History," King said, "reveals that America has been schizophrenic where these two documents are concerned. She has proudly professed the basic principles inherent in both documents. On the other hand she has sadly practiced the antithesis of these principles."

Freedom continues to be a process, not one act or moment. On the long arc of America's progress toward a more just, humane and free society, 100 years passed between the Emancipation Proclamation and the 1963 March on Washington.

During that time, the progress African Americans had made during the post-Civil War Reconstruction period was quickly eroded. In the former slave states, segregation laws were enacted and voting prohibited for blacks as Klan terrorism enforced Jim Crow suppression, while discrimination kept them at the bottom of the economic ladder in the North.

During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, African American leaders, such as Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Whitney Young, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis and Dr. King invoked Lincoln's name and legacy to remind Americans, black and white, of the nation's obligations.

It took miles of marches and years of prayer and struggle, nonviolent defiance of unjust laws, momentous legal battles, beatings and killings and brave and brilliant leadership before freedom attained more durable and consistent definition in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

And it would take decades longer and the groundbreaking campaigns of Shirley Chisholm in 1972 and the Rev. Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 before America would elect its first black U.S. president in 2008 as Barack Obama won his historic White House bid.

Some believe Obama's election signified the emergence of a post-racial America, but the nation desperately needs deep discussions of race, class and history to stem the polarizing tides of anger and distrust that paralyze progress today.