Our nation must fulfill the hopes unleashed by the Emancipation Proclamation.
CreditGeorge McCalman
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“Then
Moses said to the people, ‘Commemorate this day, the day you came out
of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, because the Lord brought you out
of it with a mighty hand.’” — Exodus: 13:3.
Late
in the night of Dec. 31, in African-American churches across the
country, congregants gather to welcome the new year. They sing songs of
freedom and overcoming. They testify to how far their faith has brought
them and how much faith and courage they will need to face another year.
The tradition is called Watch Night, and it dates back 156
years to when President Abraham Lincoln set forth an essential document
of freedom that most Americans have probably never read or thought much about: the Emancipation Proclamation.
The
night before the proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, free
blacks in the North and their enslaved brothers and sisters in the South
sat vigil in churches, in shabby slave shacks and in moonlit plantation
woods to watch, pray and hope throughout the night to hear news that
Lincoln’s promises of freedom had been officially issued and millions of our ancestors were legally free.
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The
president kept his word — although two more years of slaughter and
civil war lay ahead. African-Americans emerged from that long night of
waiting and watching with the right to pick up arms and join the
military struggle to save the Union as soldiers and aboard “vessels of
all sorts.” The proclamation declared that those enslaved in the
Confederacy were now “forever free,” and the might of the United States
government, “including the military and naval authority thereof, will
recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act
or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may
make for their actual freedom.”
The
proclamation was the most consequential executive order in the history
of the United States. It should be celebrated and honored.
For
every American who cherishes freedom and democracy, New Year’s Day
should mean far more than college bowl games and parades. The nation
must revive and reclaim the true meaning and significance of Jan. 1,
Emancipation Day.
This Jan. 1 is even
more significant in that the year 2019 marks the 400th anniversary of
the first documented African slaves’ forced arrival on the shores of the
New World that was to become the United States of America. This
anniversary year should be a time of commemoration and celebration,
reflection — and action — on how far we have come and how far we must
still travel to reach the mountaintop.
The
journey from slavery to freedom was largely completed in 1865 with the
adoption of the 13th Amendment. The march from freedom to equality is
far from over.
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I
spent Christmas morning — as I have for more than 40 years — visiting
and praying with the inmates and staff at Cook County Jail, the
sprawling warehouse of the poor and dispossessed on the West Side of
Chicago. As I looked out over the faces crowded into the jail’s gym, I
saw that they were overwhelmingly black and brown.
Although
African-Americans make up just 24 percent of the population of Cook
County, nearly 74 percent of the jail’s population is black.
This story of inequality was four centuries in the making. It began in August 1619, when some 20
frightened, bewildered and beleaguered Africans arrived in Jamestown,
Va., as prizes that had been pirated from Spanish ships on the open
seas.
Even as revolutionary Americans
rebelled against the British monarchy, declaring all men created equal,
the founding fathers at the Constitutional Convention bowed to the
South with three slave compromises that still haunt our nation:
permitting the international slave trade; counting slaves as
three-fifths of a person for congressional representation; and
establishing the Electoral College, giving the South congressional
representation disproportionate to its voter eligibility.
Yet
in the darkness of chattel slavery, the enslaved were able to sustain
enough of their humanity to maintain a light of hope for a better day,
for freedom and for equality. African-Americans were able to see the
dimly lit outlines of a more just social, economic and political order,
even during slavery, apartheid and centuries of discrimination. But
black people did not wait for freedom to fall from the sky. The Colonial
era and beyond bristled with slave rebellions and resistance.
The
lies, myths and insanity of white supremacy contaminated the soil and
the soul of America. The Academy said African-American minds were
inferior. The medical establishment said our bodies were inferior; the
church, our morality. The banks determined that we were unworthy for
loans or investment. These barriers have yet to be completely broken
down. We are free but unequal. Yet still we rise.
History
is an unbroken continuity that cannot be denied. Americans should not
hide from the past nor engage in an extended exercise of rehashing 400
tragic years. Although there can be no plan for the future without
comprehending the past, we cannot go forward while only looking
backward.
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2019 must be about the vision of a fully equal society.
In
the coming year, we must set goals and a timetable for the most
profound and in-depth corrective action program in history and show what
true equality for all Americans means and looks like.
We
must examine how much such repair will cost, what failure to repair has
already cost, and the continuing cost to the nation in terms of human
and economic underdevelopment if we fail to even the playing field for
African-Americans and other people of color.
In
2020, there will be another presidential election. As the candidates
campaign in the next two years, they must be challenged to share their
vision of what an equal, nondiscriminatory, multiracial, multiethnic,
multireligious and nonsexist society looks like, and how they propose to
take us there.
In the meantime, we
the people — red, brown, yellow, black and white — must do what
African-Americans have done for 400 years, from bondage to emancipation,
from lynch mobs to great migrations, from the back of the bus to Rosa
Parks, from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of the
Lorraine Motel in Memphis to President Barack Obama on the balcony of
the White House.
Keep hope alive.
Jesse L. Jackson Sr. (@RevJJackson) is the founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
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