As the executive summary regarding
the selected 2013 theme indicates:
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 Emancipation
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 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 in Brown v.
Board of Education, 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.
Visit this blog and monitor our Facebook page particularly this month for posts about local African American history.
View our library system calendar for events and programs scheduled to celebrate Black History Month.
Come see our display of BDC related materials on the topics of Emancipation and the Civil Rights movement. (Charmaine did a good job selecting and arranging materials for the display!)
No comments:
Post a Comment