Black Studies Program
University of Missouri
2013 Black History Month
Emancipation As Process
This
year the University of Missouri celebrates the Process of
Emancipation for Black people throughout the United States, Africa, and
the Diaspora. 2013 marks the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation
Proclamation—an executive order signed on January 1, 1863 by the 16th
President of the United States—which freed "all persons held as slaves
within any" of the Confederate States of America.
The 1860 election of
Abraham Lincoln, Crittenden Compromise, battles at Port Hudson Antietam,
and Appomattox, Confiscation Acts, Corps d' Afrique, and most
importantly the symbolic meaning what Lincoln's words portended in the
aftermath of Civil War attests to the significance of emancipation as a
process rather than a singular event.
Envisioning the commemoration of
this 1863 document and the 1963 March on Washington in terms of what
historian Wilma King describes as "the reflection of a possibility
rather than a reality" extends the process of emancipation far beyond
the chronological and national boundaries of U.S. emancipation.
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