emancipation

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  6/16/2023
  

  Texas Politicians Want to Erase What Happened Between Juneteenth and Jim Crow

  by Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Zachary Montz

  Joshua Houston, long enslaved by Sam Houston, recognized that the collective work of securing freedom only began with the announcement of emancipation, and that teaching the state's history honestly was part of the struggle for an egalitarian society against people determined to stand against it. 

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• SOURCE: SPLC Learning for Justice
  6/12/2019
  

  Teaching Hard Histories Through Juneteenth

  A celebration of freedom should put the work of the people who fought and struggled to achieve it at the center; thinking of freedom as something achieved instead of something granted. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Guardian
  3/30/2023
  

  Gullah Geechee of Sea Islands Fight for their Post-Slavery Legacy

  by DeNeen L Brown

  The Gullah Geechee people were chosen for enslavement in the Sea Islands because of their experience cultivating rice in Africa, and maintained a distinctive culture with strong African elements through slavery and emancipation. Development and gentrification threaten that legacy today. 

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• 1/15/2023
  

  Teach the History Behind "Emancipation" with the Primary Sources

  by Alan J. Singer

  Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith's "Emancipation" has rediscovered the life of an enslaved man variously called Peter or Gordon, who had been made famous through an 1863 photograph. Here's how history teachers can use the primary records of his life to accompany the film. 

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• SOURCE: New York Review of Books
  12/16/2022
  

  Was Emancipation Intended to Perpetuate Slavery by Other Means?

  by Sean Wilentz

  Protests movements have latched on to a misguided interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment that argues it allowed and even encouraged the system of mass incarceration as an extension of slavery. A new global history extends that critique to the age of emancipation in general.

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  10/27/2022
  

  The Freedman's Bank Forum Obscures the Institution's Real History

  by Justene Hill Edwards

  Vice President Kamala Harris's recent remarks at the forum enlisted the Freedman's Bank to celebrate public-private partnerships between banks and minority communities. The real history of the Freedman's Bank shows why public-private partnerships and moral uplift are inadequate to promote financial equity. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  10/17/2022
  

  Revisiting Saidiya Hartman on the Meaning of Freedom

  by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  A quarter century after publication, "Scenes of Subjection" still shows how Americans have embraced emancipation as a national expurgation of the sin of slavery, without stopping to consider the substantive meaning of freedom. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  10/3/2022
  

  Thulani Davis Reconsiders the Geography of Freedom During Reconstruction

  Emancipation wasn't just an idea, it was a literal place, described in a new book as the route around the periphery of the South traced by Black Americans in pursuit of work, business, and family reunification. 

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• SOURCE: Boston Review
  6/13/2022
  

  Can Law be an Instrument of Black Liberation?

  by Paul Gowder

  As activists debate whether the law and courts are a dead end for the pursuit of justice, it's useful to recall Frederick Douglass's conception of the law as a basis for collective demands. 

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• 6/19/2022
  

  "Oh, We Knowed What Was Goin’ On": The Myths (and Lies) of Juneteenth

  by Clyde W. Ford

  After the myths of Juneteenth are stripped away, the day symbolizes the incompleteness of the promise of emancipation. 

• 
• 5/25/2022
  

  A Century After its Dedication, the Lincoln Memorial's Meaning is Still Contested

  by Patrick Malone

  From its dedication to the present, the meaning and legacy of Lincoln and his memorial have been the focus of struggle between those who see Lincoln as the savior of the Union and those who claim him as the great emancipator.

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• SOURCE: Wash
  3/13/2022
  

  Painful, Cutting, and Brilliant: The Meaning of Freedom in Letters to Former Enslavers

  by Gillian Brockell

  Wages and economic security, citizenship rights and family unification were core concerns addressed in letters from free Black people to their former enslavers. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  11/18/2021
  

  Are We Witnessing a General Strike Today?

  by Nelson Lichtenstein

  DuBois's insight that enslaved people abandoning plantations during the Civil War was a form of general strike helps us understand the seemingly unorganized trend of workers quitting their jobs today as a meaningful labor action that points in the direction of economic freedom.

• 
• 11/14/2021
  

  Look to Lincoln's Interactions with Black Americans to Understand His Racial Attitudes

  by Michael Burlingame

  As Lincoln's personal racial views have come under scrutiny, a biographer says that the prominent and ordinary Black Americans the 16th president dealt with didn't have the doubts today's activists do about where Lincoln stood. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  8/4/2021
  

  Overturning Five Myths of the Haitian Revolution

  by Julia Gaffield

  Many understandings of the Haitian Revolution, from its intellectual and political roots, to its military progress, to its political consequences, are at best half-truths. And it did not entail "white genocide." 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  8/1/2021
  

  August 1 Was Emancipation Day in Britain, but Abolition Didn't Create Freedom

  by Padraic X. Scanlon

  Emancipation in the British West Indies was accompanied by policies that maintained the racial hierarchy necessary for profit through labor exploitation. 

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  7/4/2021
  

  What The Haitian Revolution Tells Us About The U.S. Movement For Racial Equality

  Historian Marlene Daut on the significance of the Haitian Revolution for America's unfinished struggle for racial equality. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  6/25/2021
  

  The Emancipation Proclamation did not End Slavery. Here’s what Did

  by Clarence Lusane

  Chattel slavery was ended by the enactment of the 13th Amendment. Whatever the merits of recognizing the Juneteenth holiday, it commemorates the specific emancipation of enslaved Texans, and not national abolition. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  6/18/2021
  

  The Truth About Black Freedom

  by Daina Ramey Berry

  Observing Juneteenth shouldn't be limited to commemorating a grant of freedom by the government; the deeper history of emancipation is of Black Americans demanding and pursuing freedom for themselves. 

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  2/11/2021
  

  Biographies of Women and Emancipation in the Americas

  by Vanessa M. Holden

  Historian Vanessa Holden reviews a new book edited by Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas and Terri L. Snyder which draws on the stories of women of African descent in the Americas to argue that such women helped bring freedom into being and defined what freedom in the world actually means.