emancipation

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• 7/26/2020
  

  "You Sold Me to Your Mother-in-Law...": An Ongoing Quest to Reconnect a Family

  by Ken Lawrence

  David Jackson had been forcibly separated from members of his family with no word of their subsequent fates for more than two decades, yet he had not given up hope of finding them. Can today’s historians shed light on his quest?

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/14/2020
  

  Black Conservatives Rebuke Call To Remove D.C.’S Emancipation Memorial

  Supporters of the monument, including dozens of conservative black thought leaders, pastors and politicians who came to the nation’s capital to defend the embattled statue, say its critics are misreading the statue and ignoring its history.

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• 7/19/2020
  

  "No Longer Just Lincoln and a Slave": Consider Mary McLeod Bethune's Lincoln Park Statue

  by Jenny Woodley

  Thinking of the Mary McLeod Bethune memorial in Washington's Lincoln Park in tandem with the controversial Emancipation memorial suggests ways in which commemorative spaces can operate as places of dialogue. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/6/2020
  

  Frederick Douglass Statue Torn Down in Rochester, N.Y., on Anniversary of His Famous Fourth of July Speech

  In 1852, Douglass asked the city’s residents and the country: ‘What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?’

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• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  7/4/2020
  

  How a Lincoln-Douglass Debate Led to Historic Discovery

  Just like that, a document apparently unknown to Douglass’s biographers and not found in the orator’s papers at the Library of Congress had landed squarely in the middle of the debate that has swept the nation and the neighborhood around Lincoln Park where the statue stands.

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• 7/3/2020
  

  The Case for a National Liberation Day Holiday on December 6

  by Robert Hardaway

  The anniversary of the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which finally eliminated slavery in the entire United States, should be made a national holiday.

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• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  6/29/2020
  

  A Monument to Our Shared Purpose

  by Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins

  The Freedmen’s Memorial in Washington embodies not white supremacy, but African-American agency and cooperative struggle.

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• SOURCE: The New Republic
  7/1/2020
  

  The True Story of the Freed Slave Kneeling at Lincoln’s Feet

  by Laurie Maffly-Kipp

  The silence of the fugitive slave, the stillness and nakedness of the figure of Archer Alexander on the Emancipation Memorial, may well reflect the fragments of African American life that whites were able to see, but they should not be mistaken for empty space or lack of a voice.

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• SOURCE: NPR
  7/1/2020
  

  Boston To Remove Statue Depicting Abraham Lincoln With Freed Black Man At His Feet

  The statue should be moved into a museum, historian Ibrahim Sundiata says.

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• SOURCE: WAMU
  6/27/2020
  

  Why A History Professor Says ‘Racist’ Emancipation Memorial Shouldn’t Come Down (audio)

  Protesters want to remove the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C. NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Yale history professor David Blight about why he thinks the memorial should stay up.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  6/29/2020
  

  Reparations Need to be Part of the Conversation about Racial Justice

  by Nichole Nelson

  Understanding how government policy held African Americans back economically — and advantaged whites — long after ending slavery, shows why the reparations discussion is once again growing.

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• SOURCE: Civil War Memory
  6/26/2020
  

  Should the Freedmen’s Memorial Stay or Go?

  by Kevin M. Levin

  In considering what to do about the emancipation memorial, academic observers would do well to consider the gap between their understanding of a statue's public impact and the way that black residents experience it. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/25/2020
  

  Yes, The Freedmen’s Memorial Uses Racist Imagery. But Don’t Tear It Down.

  by David W. Blight

  As a nation, let’s replace a landscape strewn with Confederate symbols with memorialization of emancipation. Tearing down the Freedmen’s Memorial would be a terrible start for that epic process.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  6/25/2020
  

  Yes, D.C.’s Emancipation Memorial Advances White Supremacy

  by Rebekah Bryer

  The argument that freed slaves commissioned the Emancipation Memorial is only half true; white officials used the funds but ignored designs that expressed a role for the enslaved in bringing about emancipation.

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  6/19/2020
  

  Growing Up with Juneteenth

  by Annette Gordon-Reed

  "I... did not know, as a child, how intensely African-Americans had fought to keep alive the memory of Juneteenth—to commemorate our ancestors’ struggles and their hopes, and to link them to our own."

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• SOURCE: CNN
  6/13/2020
  

  Make Juneteenth a National Holiday Now

  by Peniel Joseph

  Making a national holiday to honor the emancipation of enslaved people would help fulfill a "generational opportunity" to finally build the Beloved Community Martin Luther King Jr.  sought in his own lifetime.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  6/11/2020
  

  ‘Almost Blasphemous,’ Says Historian: Trump Plans Political Rally in Tulsa, Site of a Race Massacre, on Juneteenth

  CeLillianne Green, author and historian, argues that Trump's plan to hold a rally on the June 19th--the anniversary of emancipation in Texas--just steps from the site of one of the nation's worst episodes of white supremacist terrorism is too much to take. 

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• SOURCE: Public Books
  4/7/2020
  

  Lessons from Haiti on Living and Dying

  by Marlene L. Daut

  The late historian C.L.R. James sought to disavow the importance of one of Haiti’s most storied revolutionary heroes to reveal the role played by the Revolution’s masses and less visible leaders, reflecting that each life and death is profoundly poltical.

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• SOURCE: TIME
  4/7/2020
  

  How the Civil War Changed the Way Americans Thought About Economic Inequality

  by Daniel R. Mandell

  As the Civil War became a campaign to end slavery, some leading Republicans envisioned using confiscation to reshape the aristocratic South into a more equal society in terms of property ownership and power.

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• SOURCE: NY Times
  2/14/20
  

  There Have Been 10 Black Senators Since Emancipation

  by Eric Foner

  Elected 150 years ago, Hiram Revels was the first.