At the Crossroads of Freedom: The Emancipation Proclamation and the March on Washington
The
year 2013 marks two important anniversaries in the history of African
Americans and the United States. On January 1, 1863, the Emancipation
Proclamation set the United States on the path of ending slavery. A
wartime measure issued by President Abraham Lincoln, the proclamation
freed relatively few slaves, but it fueled the fire of the enslaved to
strike for their freedom. In many respects, Lincoln's declaration simply
acknowledged the epidemic of black self-emancipation - spread by black
freedom crusaders like Harriet Tubman - that already had commenced
beyond his control. Those in bondage increasingly streamed into the
camps of the Union Army, reclaiming and asserting self-determination.
The result, abolitionist Fredrick Douglass predicted, was that the war
for the Union became a war against slavery. The actions of both Lincoln
and the slaves made clear that the Civil War was in deed, as well as in
theory, a struggle between the forces of slavery and emancipation. The
full-scale dismantlement of the "peculiar institution" of human bondage
had begun.
In
1963, a century later, America once again stood at the crossroads. Nine
years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had outlawed racial segregation
in public schools, but the nation had not yet committed itself to
equality of citizenship. Segregation and innumerable other forms of
discrimination made second-class citizenship the extra-constitutional
status of non-whites. Another American president caught in the gale of
racial change, John F. Kennedy, temporized over the legal and moral
issue of his time. Like Lincoln before him, national concerns, and the
growing momentum of black mass mobilization efforts, overrode his
personal ambivalence toward demands for black civil rights. On August
28, 1963, hundreds of thousands of Americans, blacks and whites, Jews
and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, marched to the memorial of
Abraham Lincoln, the author of the Emancipation Proclamation, in the
continuing pursuit of equality of citizenship and self-determination. It
was on this occasion that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his
celebrated "I Have a Dream" speech. Just as the Emancipation
Proclamation had recognized the coming end of slavery, the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom announced that the days of legal
segregation in the United States were numbered.
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