emancipation proclamation Archives

US Survey Course: Emancipation Proclamation

During the summer of 2016, we will be bringing together our previously published articles, book reviews, and podcasts on key themes and periods in the history of the USA. Each grouping is designed to correspond to the core areas of the US History Survey Courses taken by undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.

Juliet E. K. Walker examines the contrast between the legal and economic consequences of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Daina Ramey Berry looks at Quentin Tarantino’s sensationalist and willfully inaccurate treatment of slavery in Django Unchained.

George Forgie discusses the political wrangling that accompanied the Emancipation Proclamation, the work it left undone, and the need – that seems so obvious today, but was so deeply contested at the time – for a law abolishing slavery altogether.

Jacqueline Jones takes us right into Savannah’s African American community on New Year’s Eve, to see and hear how Black Americans there anticipated the momentous news.

In March 1865, the U. S. Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau for Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to ease the transition between slavery and freedom for 3.5 million newly liberated slaves. Jacqueline Jones discusses The Freedmen’s Bureau.

Henry Wiencek discusses “Visualizing Emancipation”, a new digital project from the University of Richmond that maps the messy, regionally dispersed and violent process of ending slavery in America.

Laurie Green brings us up to 1963 to show us how civil rights activists in the 1960s saw the work of the Emancipation Proclamation as still unfinished.

Recommended Books:

Cristina Metz recommends Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South by Hannah Rosen (University of North Carolina Press, 2008)

Henry Wiencek discusses Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), which examines Abraham Lincoln’s views on American slavery, southern secession and the convergence of events that produced the Emancipation Proclamation.

Jacqueline Jones recommends more great books on The Emancipation Proclamation and its Aftermath and on Slavery, Abolition, and Reconstruction.

And finally, Jacqueline Jones and Henry Wiencek take us beyond emancipation to segregation in the South with a Jim Crow: A Reading List.

Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012)

by Daina Ramey Berry

I was ’bout fourteen years old when President Lincoln set us all free in 1863. The war was still goin’ on and I’m tellin’ you right when I say that my folks and friends round me did not regard freedom as a unmixed blessin’.
–Daniel Waring, enslaved in South Carolina, interviewed in South Carolina, ca. 1937.

Today marks the 150-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. While I’m delighted that a national discussion on slavery is taking place, it appears that Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Django Unchained, is overshadowing church “watch night” services all over the United States and events hosted by the National Archives, including a rare public viewing of the original Proclamation. To many, the connection between a contemporary spaghetti-western film and the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation is offensive, inappropriate, oxymoronic, and just down right wrong. Perhaps understanding the significance of this legislation in context can elevate the public dialogue and aid in our national healing.

We all know that films on historical subjects distort events for the sake of entertainment. The goal of this review is to examine this latest rendition of slavery in popular culture from a historian’s point of view to see how those distortions are used and what affect they may have on popular ideas about slavery. I am not a historian “having a hissy fit” to quote Tarantino, but I believe that using one dimensional, anachronistic characters and the preposterous plot line of an ex-slave bounty hunter, while satisfying Hollywood entertainment formulas, detract from any understanding of the actual, lived experience of bondage in US history. Whatever satisfactions may be had from Tarantino’s depiction of revenge and the reunification of loved-ones, and however violent the depiction of master-slave relations in the film, its absurdities trivialize the real violence of the slave system and everyday lives of the enslaved. And turning away from the actual history of oppression obliterates the significance of those who sacrificed their lives for African American freedom. What does this say about our sensibilities? How does one reconcile a deliberately over-simplistic impulse to satirize the nearly 300-year history of slavery, for the sake of entertainment? American slavery was full of complexity, hypocrisy, and diversity. Emancipation itself was not a straightforward process, but followed all sorts of contours, twists, and turns evident in the creative ways American slaves sought to secure their freedom.

The past few months have been interesting for historians of the nineteenth century because the subjects we study are part of a contemporary dialogue. Rather than playing “script doctor” to Hollywood (to borrow from Jim Downs’ blog on Lincoln,) this is an important moment for scholars who wish to comment and participate in discussions about films based on historical topics. Yet I regard this as a mixed blessing given the thought of students entering the classroom with images of enslaved men as nineteenth-century gun slinging gangstas and black women as voiceless damsels in distress.

On September 22, 1862 President Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation which declared that “on the first day of January [1863] . . . all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” For the next 100 days northern and southerners alike anticipated the changes our nation would undergo after the pending deadline. Frederick Douglass recalls anxiously awaiting the news with a large crowd at Tremont Temple in Boston, MA:

Every moment of waiting chilled our hopes, and strengthened our fears. . . We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky, which should rend the fetters of four millions of slaves; we were watching, as it were, by the dim light of the stars, for the dawn of a new day; we were longing for the answer to the agonizing prayers of centuries. Remembering those in bonds as bound with them, we wanted to join in the shout for freedom, and in the anthem of the redeemed.

In 1862 news did not travel as fast as a 140-character tweet nor could it instantly appear in the blogosphere. Instead, Douglass and his constituents waited at the church from 8 pm until after midnight and they were elated to learn from the flicker of the wires in the form of a telegraph that “. . . on this day of January 1st, 1863, the formal and solemn announcement was made that thereafter the government would be found on the side of emancipation.”

This fall, similar to the days leading to the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the buzz about Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained filled the media anticipating its Christmas release. Spike Lee went on record noting that he did not want to disrespect his ancestors by supporting the film, perhaps thinking about Tarantino’s sensationalist treatment of the Holocaust in his previous film, Inglorious Basterds, and anticipating the same treatment of “the peculiar institution.” In fact, the press has spent more time discussing Lee’s brief remarks than they have Tarantino’s habitual and pornographic use of the N-word (even though it was used in 1858 Mississippi—we all get that!). Oprah Winfrey, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michael Eric Dyson, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Howard Stern, and others interviewed members of the cast and the director, to promote and perhaps understand the film. They wanted to know from Jamie Foxx what it felt like to play a newly freed slave. His answer was disheartening to say the least. Rather than draw upon the eloquent statements or heroic acts of historical figures who radically tried to uproot slavery like David Walker, Gabriel Prosser, Charles Deslondes, Nat Turner, or Denmark Vesey, Foxx “wanted this s—t to be fly” so he channeled the fictitious, gun-slinging, crack dealer, Nino Brown from New Jack City (1991). The actor shared these thoughts in an interview with Brett Johnson on The Root, openly admitting that “I want to be Nino Brown” and that “we got to take some responsibility now that the movie is out, to spark education; we gotta know our history.”

Can we learn the history of slavery from a Tarantino film? The director readily admitted that he used his artistic license to create a movie that Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. labeled “a postmodern slave narrative Western.” To this Tarantino responded, “I’ll buy that,” but he added that the film contains “more of an entertainment value” and it is also “a thrilling adventure” in which he is committed to showing some of the brutalities of slavery.

Described by critics and supporters as a Western romance set against the backdrop of slavery, the director claims that Hollywood has virtually left the antebellum south and films about slavery untouched with the exception this not so short list including: Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone With the Wind (1933), The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972), Mandingo (1975) and more recent films such as Glory (1989), Amistad (1997), Beloved (1998), and Lincoln (2012). Beyond these Hollywood canons are independent and television films such as Roots (1977), Ganga Zumba (1963), Burn! (1969), Quilumbo (1986) and Sankofa (1993). Tarantino enters this body of work casting familiar faces such as Academy Award Winners Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz, as well as Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel Jackson, and Kerry Washington. Thus, it is no surprise that Django Unchained would draw a large viewership and without these specific actors, Tarantino himself has a large following.

As a result of Tarantino’s popularity, the discussions of slavery at this historic moment are not about the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation or the meaning of freedom. Instead, the current buzz centers on Tarantino’s fanatical love story of a black superhero who channels a crack dealer to get his girl . . . “It’s me baby,” says Django upon his “heroic” rescue. This romanticized framing of gender roles flies in the face of scholarship by historians such as Deborah Gray White. From White and others, we learn that slavery created a different set of gender roles where strength is evident in both men and women. One might even argue that a more accurate portrayal of this western slave romance would involve an enslaved woman going to great lengths to help her man out of slavery. One such historical woman had a Biblical male nickname (Moses), carried a gun, and her “husband” refused to join her. The true story of Celia, another enslaved woman who took matters into her own hands, clubbed her enslaver after years of sexual abuse, burned his corpse, and then buried his remains on the plantation. Do not mistake these examples as endorsement for emasculating black men; instead, consider them as incentives for moviegoers to travel beyond the one-dimensional characters reflected in this film. Enslaved women were not props on a stage, swinging on swings, idly watching another sister being whipped, nor were they damsels in distress waiting for men to save them.

Ironically, the film opens in Texas in 1858 “two years before the Civil War,” (the war began in 1861), with Dr. King Shultz (Waltz), a “bounty hunter,” interrupting a slave coffle to “purchase” Django (Foxx). Given the history of Texas emancipation, this is indeed an interesting starting point. Texas bond people did not know they were free until June 1865 nearly two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, a date still commemorated in Texas in annual Juneteenth celebrations. Schultz needed Django to help him find a family of slave traders for his next job. Since Django knew the notorious men and wanted to locate his “wife,” (in bondage, enslaved people’s marital relationships were not legally sanctioned,) he agreed to partner with Schultz in exchange for freedom and a portion of the bounty. The majority of the film documents the duo’s killing spree throughout Texas and into Mississippi leading them to Candyland, a plantation owned by Calvin Candie (DiCaprio). This is where we meet Broomhilda, Django’s “wife” (Washington), because up to this point viewers only know her through a series of Django’s flashbacks. We also meet Stephen (Jackson) at Candyland, who resurrects the most despised “Uncle Tom” character on screen or stage today. Stephen is the quintessential snitch who unravels Django’s and Shultz’s plan. Some reviewers embrace Django’s “justice” reveling that, in the end, the guy gets the girl and that “bad” men and women are blown to pieces. Yes, enslaved men and women tried to reunite upon separation, but the killing sprees depicted in this film would have been met with physical, legal, and psychological sanctions. One only has to turn to the enslaved experiences of Celia, Margaret Garner, Nat Turner, and Dred Scott to illustrate this point.

Former slaves such as Daniel Waring experienced freedom as a mixed blessing. People like Douglass, Waring, Elizabeth Keckley, Harriet Jacobs and countless and nameless others witnessed horrific scenes: nursing babes being torn from mothers’ breast; fathers burned alive; mothers gang raped or having their pregnant bellies placed in shallow trenches to protect their fetus during beatings. Yes, these scenes are difficult to imagine and even more difficult to convey using the historian’s pen or the filmmaker’s lens, but they occurred in our history. The horrors of slavery do appear in Django Unchained — whippings, auctions, and family separation — yet most are depicted in the form of “flashbacks” from a freed slave. In many ways, this creates an even greater space between the audience and the reality serving as a way for the director to regain his viewers after difficult imagery.

In addition to the visual representations, Tarantino’s selection of music undermines the realities of nineteenth-century culture, which at that time would have included spirituals–a genre that attempted to capture the sorrow, sadness, and pain of the antebellum era. Instead, Tarantino creates an anachronistic moment with the soundtrack by allowing the audience to escape the past and experience the film through the eyes of the present. This tactic lightens the mood to the entertaining flair he falls back upon and blurs the line between past and present. The music also facilitated Foxx’s character as a gangsta while at the same time highlighted his modern verbal swagger in an effort to appeal to members of the Hip Hop, X and Y generations.

Like the Emancipation Proclamation, the appearance of this film at this time is also a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we have a major motion picture that touches on slavery, but by prioritizing entertainment over education it trivializes the suffering of four million slaves who became legally free in 1865 with the passage of the 13^th Amendment. One hundred and fifty years ago today, enslaved people in Confederate occupied regions were supposed to receive their freedom. But we know that this did not happen. Frederick Douglass described the period following the Emancipation Proclamation as “one marked by discriminations and reservations” against blacks. He believed that this five-page document was “moderate, cautious, and guarded” even if, “it created a howl of indignation and wrath amongst the rebels and their allies.” Looking at those affected by the Emancipation Proclamation, we have few stories if any, of lone enslaved men teaming up with white “bounty hunters” to reunite with their enslaved wives. The public interest in a wildly popular director’s well-known penchant for depicting violence and revenge, and applying his formulas to the historical subject of slavery, inevitably effects the popular memory of slavery and begs the question: Should Tarantino’s exercise in counterfactual history make us feel good? Who wouldn’t want to see victims of enslavement embrace their power? Yet how do we rectify the “Mandingo” fighting and dog-mauling scenes with the blessing(s) of freedom? Tarantino’s uses fiction, humor, and exaggeration to rectify this contrast.

Tarantino clearly acknowledges that a film on slavery will not generate a comfortable dialogue—it’s not supposed to. But in an effort to redirect our conversation and reflect on the current historic moment, I encourage filmgoers to shift their gaze back to the history of slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation, a document written as a decree to force the Confederate States to return to the Union. Take a moment to learn about Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” whose primary goal was to preserve the Union. Imagine the antebellum south and the diversity of slavery from the recollections of former slaves, fugitive slave narratives, and plantation records. Although it’s not a “fun history” full of triumphs like Django Unchained depicts, hearing the words of actual slaves may help a twenty-first-century audience imagine the experiences of life in bondage.

More on the Emancipation Proclamation on Not Even Past:
George Forgie, “Work Left Undone: Emancipation was not Abolition”
Jacqueline Jones, “The Emancipation Proclamation reaches Savannah”
Laurie Green, “1863 in 1963”
Nicholas Roland on Spielberg’s Lincoln
Daina Ramey Berry “Let the Enslaved Testify“

Further Reading:

John Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Century of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies (1977).

William L. Andrews, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Slave Narratives (2000).

Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1999, 1985).

Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (2012).

Heather Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (2012).

James Downs, “Our Lincoln Our Selves: Rethinking Slavery and Abolition” Huffington Post Blog (12/12/12)

Selected Links:

Celia a Slave, The Trial (1855)

David Walker’s Appeal

Digital Library of American Slavery

Documenting the American South

Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
Born in Slavery: Library of Congress

Voices from the Days of Slavery: Library of Congress

Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses

Work Left Undone: Emancipation was not Abolition

by George Forgie

There are two great legal milestones in the destruction of slavery in the United States—the Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress and ratified by the states in 1865.

F. B. Carpenter, First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln

The difference between the two documents is not always well understood. Here, for instance, is how an encyclopedic website, the Internet Movie Database, summarizes the plotline of Steven Spielberg’s film, Lincoln: “As the Civil War continues to rage, America’s president . . . fights with many inside his own cabinet on the decision to emancipate the slaves.” In fact, President Lincoln had made and proclaimed his decision to free the slaves two full years before the beginning of the “fight” over the Thirteenth Amendment that is depicted in the movie. But the confusion is understandable. If Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863, why were he and his cabinet—and others—fighting about the future of slavery in 1865? The short answer is that, momentous as the Emancipation Proclamation was, its reach was limited. It promised to liberate the approximately three million slaves held in those parts of the country controlled by the Confederate rebels, but it left in bondage nearly one million slaves held in those parts of the country loyal to the Union. More crucially, the Emancipation Proclamation did not abolish the institution of slavery. Indeed, on that subject, it had not a word to say.

When it was framed in 1787, the Constitution contained provisions designed and understood to protect slavery in the United States. This was why the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison condemned and burned the document in 1854 as a “covenant with death” and “an agreement with hell.” This was why President Lincoln in his inaugural address in 1861 had no problem endorsing a proposed amendment to the Constitution explicitly barring the federal government from ever interfering with slavery in the states where the institution was legal.

Less than two years later, Lincoln interfered with slavery more than any American ever had before, by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. His rationale was straightforward: our objective is to suppress the rebellion. We all agree that we must do everything we reasonably can to destroy the rebels’ capacity to make war. Thus we blockade their ports, we seize their military resources, and we kill their soldiers. How is taking away their labor force any different? And how better to accomplish that than to welcome the slaves to freedom?

This rationale appealed to Northerners who might have been indifferent or even hostile to freeing the slaves, but who at the same time were willing to support whatever measures were necessary to win the war. Placed on this basis, however, the Emancipation Proclamation carried with it an obvious and ominous implication: what would happen if the war reached a point where such measures were deemed no longer necessary to win it?

The imaginations of antislavery activists quickly conjured up a variety of bleak scenarios, which laid bare the greatest vulnerability of an executive proclamation: it could be easily undone. What might Lincoln do if the Confederates offered reunion in return for new guarantees for slavery? Had he not famously told Horace Greeley in 1862 that saving the Union was more important than freeing the slaves? If Lincoln should be defeated by a Democrat in the 1864 presidential election (which for a time during the campaign seemed more likely than not), might his successor revoke the Emancipation Proclamation? What complications might arise if the Supreme Court ruled the Emancipation Proclamation unconstitutional? What would ensue if the war should end with a Union victory and with hundreds of thousands of slaves not yet actually liberated? At that point, obviously, securing their freedom would no longer be necessary for Union victory.

As the war slogged on, month after dreary month, the enemies of slavery pounded home a simple message: slavery caused the war; if emancipating slaves was necessary to win it, destroying slavery was necessary to prevent its recurrence. And the only way to put the institution beyond the chance of resuscitation was to amend the Constitution, “the supreme law of the land,” to prohibit forever the ownership of one human being by another in the United States. Millions of Americans had reached this conclusion by the beginning of 1865. Whether that number would be enough is the question that sets the stage for the constitutional drama depicted in Spielberg’s film. Spoiler alert: on January 31, 1865 the Congress passed and sent to the states for ratification an amendment to the Constitution stating that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The next evening, speaking to a jubilant crowd gathered outside the White House, President Lincoln congratulated “the country and the whole world upon this great moral victory.” He implicitly acknowledged that no presidential proclamation could ever be what he said the amendment now was: “a King’s cure for all the evils. It winds the whole thing up.”

More on the Emancipation Proclamation on Not Even Past:
Jacqueline Jones, “The Emancipation Proclamation reaches Savannah”
Laurie Green, “1863 in 1963”
Daina Ramey Berry, “Unmixed Blessin'”? A Historian’s Thoughts on Django Unchained“
Nicholas Roland on Spielberg’s Lincoln

The Emancipation Proclamation reaches Savannah

by Jacqueline Jones

December 31, 1862 fell on a Wednesda, and that night members of Savannah’s First African Baptist Church held their traditional New Year’s Eve “watch meeting.” Each year members of the congregation gathered on this night to welcome the new year and to ask for God’s blessing on the city’s African-American community. Such “watch meetings” or “watch night” services were held all over the country, linking African Americans in Savannah with communities in Richmond, New York, Boston and elsewhere. After a year and a half of a bloody civil war, the community in Savannah consisted of about 10,000 enslaved men and women, 1,000 free people of color, and several hundred enslaved workers brought from all over the state of Georgia to dig trenches and otherwise toil at the direction of Confederate military authorities.

Outwardly, the “watch meeting” that night seemed unremarkable, the prayers and songs customary for this type of service of celebration. Soon after midnight, the worshippers exchanged greetings with one another, and then parted. The service had proceeded peacefully, undisturbed by city officials. And yet secretly among themselves the members of First Baptist had just celebrated a promise of freedom: the Emancipation Proclamation to be released by President Abraham Lincoln the next day, January 1, 1863.

One of the participants, James Simms, considered the service a miracle of sorts, a quiet affair honed by long years of verbal restraint and by one hundred days of painful anticipation. Looking back, Simms recalled his inability to speak openly of his yearnings for freedom during slavery times: “The tongue must be dumb upon that theme; it was the soul that sung.” That night the choir offered up familiar hymns of worship and thanksgiving; only in their hearts did these “gospel trumpeters” herald “the year of Jubilee,” for, according to Simms, the music of the soul “was not for earth’s ears, but it was heard in heaven.”

On New Year’s Day, black clergy from all over the city held another celebratory but equally subdued gathering, a dinner. This ecumenical gathering featured prayers that “God would permit nothing to hinder Mr. Lincoln from issuing his proclamation” that day. Of the dinner itself, we know little more, except that James Porter, choirmaster and warden of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, “delivered an excellent address on the proclamation”—an address recounted by the anonymous author of Porter’s obituary, published thirty-two years later.

How did these black preachers and church congregants learn that President Lincoln would announce the Emancipation Proclamation on the first day of January? Simms implied that he and others knew of Lincoln’s September 22, 1862, public statement that he intended to issue such a proclamation on January 1; hence their “one hundred days of painful anticipation.” In all likelihood from early 1862 onward, the Savannah black community kept informed of national political and military events via the Union forces occupying Fort Pulaski and nearby Tybee Island, just eighteen miles down the Savannah River. Black refugees, fugitives from slavery, were fleeing from the interior of the state and from Savannah, seeking safety along the coast, where Yankee gunboats were patrolling the waters. As early as the summer of 1862, some male runaways had joined the Union navy, and colonies of self-sufficient refugees had begun marketing fish, eggs, and vegetables to the occupiers and the gunboat crews. With Confederate deserters running from the coast, and black men, women, and children making their way downriver, the border between southern and Union-held territory remained porous. Spies, scouts, messengers, and runaways all conveyed information back and forth between Savannah and the federal forces not far away.

Not far from Savannah, on Port Royal Island, South Carolina, U. S, military officials held their own grand affair to mark New Year’s Day and the proclamation. Gathering together were white and black troops, an estimated 3,000 black men and women civilians, teachers of the freed slaves, and visiting dignitaries from the North. The crowd feasted on ten oxen roasted the night before, and washed down the meal with a mixture of water, molasses, vinegar, and sugar. One highlight of the affair came when, during the ceremonies, an elderly black man and two women spontaneously burst into song, singing “My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty”—an unscripted moment that momentarily caught the white onlookers by surprise. The other highlight came when two Sergeant Prince Rivers and Corporal Robert Sutton, who just a few months ago had been slaves, delivered brief remarks to the crowd.

Meanwhile, back in Savannah, whites sensed foreboding. In the words of one Confederate officer, the day was “filled with disquietudes.” Huge winter battles were taking a tremendous toll on the South, and single clashes were costing both sides many thousands of casualties. Even the most defiant Confederates—and there were many in Savannah—could see no end to the carnage. By this time the local papers were offering rewards for large numbers of runaways; these notices called for the capture and return of not only fugitive slaves, but also Confederate deserters, men who abandoned their posts out of fear for their lives, and out of resentment over the high price paid by ordinary recruits, in contrast to the wealthy buyers of army substitutes.

The war would wage for another long, bloody year and a half, and most Georgia blacks would remained enslaved for another year, until General William T. Sherman and his troops – aided by thousands of black people themselves — liberated Savannah in late December, 1864. Nevertheless, the Emancipation Proclamation marked a turning point in the conflict, and a beacon of hope that freedom was nigh for African Americans all over the South.

More on the Emancipation Proclamation on Not Even Past:
George Forgie, “Work Left Undone: Emancipation was not Abolition”
Laurie Green, “1863 in 1963”
Daina Ramey Berry, “Unmixed Blessin'”? A Historian’s Thoughts on Django Unchained“
Nicholas Roland on Spielberg’s Lincoln

You may also enjoy:
Jacqueline Jones on Civil War Savannah

1863 in 1963

by Laurie Green

The time has come, Mr. President, to let those dawn-like rays of freedom, first glimpsed in 1863, fill the heavens with the noonday sunlight of complete human dignity.

While 2013 marks the sesquicentennial of Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, this year also marks the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, the most famous event of the Civil Rights Movement, made so by the continual remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In the five decades since the March, many people have forgotten or fail to realize the tremendous meaning that the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation bore for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

A shared historical memory of the unfinished nature of freedom granted by the Emancipation made these activists refer to their struggle as a Black Freedom Movement, even a Black Revolution. A century after the abolition of slavery, they were still fighting for an end to segregation and the laws that barred voting rights. At the same time, however, they also pressed for economic justice, and for dignity and respect –- in a sense recuperating the meanings of freedom that had made Emancipation signify more than the release from bondage in 1863.

During the mid-twentieth century, opponents of Jim Crow society referred directly to the legacy of slavery with language like “master-slave” and “plantation mentality” to imbue their own sense of freedom with the sense of ending long-standing, internalized beliefs about race. The Memphis sanitation workers, striking in 1968, for example, created the slogan “I AM a Man!” as a way of claiming economic justice and human dignity at the same time. Freedom was not only a negative – abolition, whether as a historical memory of the eradication of slavery or the current struggle to uproot segregation – but an indignant insistence upon human self-development.

The legendary 1963 March on Washington encompassed but was not limited to desegregation; in fact, its origins lay in the intertwined labor and civil rights movements that had powerfully emerged – not for the first time, but in a new way – on the eve of U.S. entry into World War II. In July 1941, working-class blacks led by A. Philip Randolph and others mounted a movement to march on Washington unless President Franklin Roosevelt issued an Executive Order banning discrimination in the defense industry and the armed forces. FDR did not end segregation in the military, but at the eleventh hour he ordered a ban on racial inequality in defense jobs. And yet the order only addressed wartime circumstances; the Fair Employment Practices Committee he established lasted only until the end of the war.

Picking up on this theme two decades later, African American labor activists including members of the newly formed Negro American Labor Council united with Dr. King to call for a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom – a name that is commonly forgotten in commemorations of the famous 1963 event. By the time the march occurred in August, President John F. Kennedy had finally proposed civil rights legislation but organizers sought to pressure him into expanding his proposal into one that would address economic justice as well.

Randolph’s address to the massive crowd on August 28, 1963 articulated this perspective. He supported the desegregation of public facilities, but declared, “[T]hose accommodations will mean little to those who cannot afford to use them.” His speech went beyond any single demand. “We are gathered here in the largest demonstration in the history of this nation,” Randolph proclaimed. “We are the advanced guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.” Randolph explicitly linked that moral revolution to the history of slavery: African Americans would play a vanguard role “because our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property.”

Even before the March on Washington, civil rights activists were forging links between the Emancipation Proclamation, the historical memory of slavery, and the Civil Rights Movement. In June 1961, one and a half years before the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, King and others began pressuring Kennedy to commemorate the upcoming centennial with a second Emancipation Proclamation. “Just as Abraham Lincoln had the vision to see almost 100 years ago that this nation could not exist half-free,” King asserted at a news conference, “the present administration must have the insight to see that today the nation cannot exist half-segregated and half-free.”

On May 17, 1962, the anniversary of the historic Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, King submitted his appeal to Kennedy: “An Appeal To The Honorable John F. Kennedy, President of The United States for NATIONAL REDEDICATION TO THE PRINCIPLES OF THE EMANCIPATION PROCLMATION AND FOR AN EXECUTIVE ORDER PROHIBITING SEGREGATION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”

The document referred directly to the links between past and present:

The wells-springs of equality lie deep within our past. We believe the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation is a peculiarly appropriate time for all our citizens to rededicate themselves to those early precepts and principles of equality before the law.

Eloquently, the appeal declared:

The time has come, Mr. President, to let those dawn-like rays of freedom, first glimpsed in 1863, fill the heavens with the noonday sunlight of complete human dignity.

In the end, although Kennedy had shown initial interest in the second Emancipation Proclamation proposed by King, the President balked and the centenary passed without his seizing the moment to issue what would have been a historic, groundbreaking statement – although one sure to provoke the wrath of southern Democrats. Six months later, after violent police attacks on black youth demonstrating for desegregation in Birmingham were condemned around the world, Kennedy would call for civil rights legislation.

This is the familiar story narrated in our textbooks. The full significance of the Emancipation Proclamation to activists in the Black Freedom Movement one hundred years later has been left out of the story. Steeped in the historical memory of Emancipation and the long Black Freedom Movement, African American activists and their allies were striving to conclude a revolution they perceived as unfinished since 1863.

More on the Emancipation Proclamation on Not Even Past:George Forgie, “Work Left Undone: Emancipation is not Abolition”

Jacqueline Jones, “The Emancipation Proclamation reaches Savannah”

Daina Ramey Berry, “Unmixed Blessin'”? A Historian’s Thoughts on Django Unchained“

Nicholas Roland on Spielberg’s Lincoln

This article draws on research in:
William P. Jones, “The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 7:3 (2010): 33-52.
David W. Blight and Allison Scharfstein, “King’s Forgotten Manifesto,” New York Times, 16 May 2012.

Photo Credits:
Images of the March on Washington and A. Philip Randolph via Wikimedia Commons

The Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863

On the afternoon of January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed The Emancipation Proclamation, freeing approximately three million people held in bondage in the rebel states of the Confederacy. The Emancipation Proclamation was a huge step towards rectifying the atrocity of institutionalized slavery in the United States, but it was only one step and it had a mixed legacy, as the four essays by UT Austin historians in this month’s feature remind us.

George Forgie discusses the political wrangling that accompanied the Emancipation Proclamation, the work it left undone, and the need – that seems so obvious today, but was so deeply contested at the time – for a law abolishing slavery altogether.

Jacqueline Jones takes us right into Savannah’s African American community on New Year’s Eve, to see and hear how Black Americans there anticipated the momentous news.

Laurie Green brings us up to 1963 to show us how civil rights activists in the 1960s saw the work of the Emancipation Proclamation as still unfinished. One hundred years after it was signed, they viewed the civil rights movement as an effort to fulfill its original intent to bring not only legal freedom, but economic justice and individual dignity to the descendants of US slaves.

Daina Ramey Berry looks at Quentin Tarantino’s sensationalist and willfully inaccurate treatment of slavery in Django Unchained and she offers us alternative sources for learning about the historical violent abuses of slave life.

Juliet E. K. Walker examines the contrast between the legal and economic consequences of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Recommended Books:

Recent Posts