Notes on the 150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation (part 1 of 3) - by Aberjhani

Montage of African Americans and Abraham Lincoln illustrating significance of the Emancipation Proclamation. (Image courtesy of Library of Congress Public Domain)

Welcome to the first of this special 3-part article series presented in honor of the 150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation:

The fact that an African American sits in the White House at the helm of government in the United States of America on this 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation represents both phenomenal political symbolism and a victory of faith in democracy that should not be lost on any American.

Thoughts of the Emancipation Proclamation or the text of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. 

Constitution generally evoke images of American Blacks departing fields and kitchens to lend their own interpretation to the country’s great experiment in western democracy. But the end of legalized slavery did more than provide liberation for the bodies of some four million slaves by the time the Civil War ended. It also provided a kind of freedom for the minds and souls of those Whites who for whatever reason had believed that slavery was a sustainable institution in a society founded precisely to restrict limitations imposed upon individual human liberty.

For slave owners, it therefore meant release from the shackles of fear of awaking some night to the grip of a slave’s gnarled hands choking his or her life away. It meant freedom from the entanglements of hypocrisy that had led them to employ Biblical scripture to justify the vilest actions. And it meant escape from a jailhouse constructed of self-delusion and over-inflated egos incapable of reconciling personal desire with the realities of irreversible history.

To read the full article by Aberjhani please click this link:

Notes on the 150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation (part 1 of 3) - National African-American Art | Examiner.com