Emancipation Day: Celebrating 150 Years of History

Today marks the 150 year anniversary of a very important date, especially for us living here in the District of Columbia. It is the sesquicentennial of the day that the slaves in D.C. were freed through an act of Congress.

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, as the country entered the third year of the Civil War. It declared that "all persons held as slaves … shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free"—but it applied only to states designated as being in rebellion, not to the slave-holding border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri or to areas of the Confederacy that had already come under Union control.

However, many argued that the proclamation didn’t actually free any slaves or destroy the institution of slavery itself—it still only applied to states in active rebellion, not to the slave-holding border states or to rebel areas already under Union control. In reality, it simply freed Union army officers from returning runaway slaves to their owners under the national Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Any escaped slaves who managed to get behind the lines of the advancing Union armies and any who lived in areas subsequently captured by those armies no longer had to be returned because, in the words of the proclamation, they were "thenceforeward, and forever free."

The Emancipation Proclamation
January 1, 1863 

A Transcription

Contours of the African American Culture by Dr. Molefi Kete Asante