The Emancipation Proclamation

President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. The nation was about to enter its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

Despite the wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the Union, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Northern control. Also, the freedom it promised depended on Union military victory.

Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it captured the hearts and emotions of millions of Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war.

Every advance of federal troops after January 1, 1863 expanded the domain of freedom. The Proclamation also announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.

As Lincoln had hoped, the Proclamation turned foreign popular opinion in favor of the Union by adding the ending of slavery as a goal of the war. That shift ended the Confederacy’s hopes of gaining official recognition, particularly from the UK, which had abolished slavery. The Proclamation also solidified Lincoln’s support among the rapidly growing abolitionist element of the Republican Party and ensured they would not block his renomination in 1864.

In his famous Gettysburg Address in November 1863, Lincoln made indirect reference to the Proclamation and the ending of slavery as a war goal with the phrase “new birth of freedom.”

As the Civil War ground to its last shuddering close in 1866, the freedom and equality of African Americans still had a long way to go. Many states began to immediately pass laws, now referred to as “Black Codes,” aimed at limiting the civil rights and civil liberties of blacks by controlling the labor and movement of newly freed slaves.

These were followed by many state and local laws known infamously as the “Jim Crow” laws, which would last from 1876 all the way until the civil rights actions led to their end in 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in southern states of the former Confederacy, starting in 1890, with a “separate but equal” status for African Americans, and led to conditions for African Americans that tended to be inferior to those provided for white Americans.

And what became of those blacks who had fought on the side of the Union? After the Civil War, the regiments of black soldiers who had fought on behalf of the North, known as the United States Colored Troops, were reformed into two Cavalry troops, the 9th and 10th U.S. Cavalry. Eventually they formed two black infantry regiments, the 24th and 25th, which came to be known as the Buffalo Soldiers, a fearful honorific given them by the Native American Indians they were sent out West to fight. These soldiers distinguished themselves well, with thirteen enlisted men and six officers from the four regiments earning the Medal of Honor during the Indian Wars, and many serving in the Spanish-American War, where they won five more medals of honor.

Meanwhile, conditions in the South deteriorated for African Americans to the extent that many blacks began to migrate in great numbers from the South, many to the Midwest. Cities like Chicago doubled its black population every ten years in 1870, 1880, and 1890.

By 1881, the first Jim Crow laws segregating railroad coaches was passed by Tennessee, later by Florida, and then by Texas. Worse, in the decade from 1882 until 1892, the lynching of blacks increased, with more than 1,400 known instances.

Some African Americans already knew that the path upward would involve education. In 1881, the Tuskegee Institute, headed by Booker T. Washington, was founded. In 1895, Washington also attained national prominence for his Atlanta Address, which attracted the attention of politicians and the public, making him the representative of the last generation of black American leaders born in slavery and a popular spokesperson for African American citizens.

Each step was not always forward. In 1898, the literacy tests and poll taxes that were used to keep blacks from voting were upheld by the Williams v. Mississippi Supreme Court decision.

Nevertheless, efforts continued to be made to turn around the damage done by the reconstruction period of the South. In 1903, the General Education Board, which was endowed by John D. Rockefeller, supported better instruction for teachers of black schools in the South. In 1905, W.E.B. Du Bois founded the Niagara Movement and had a Niagara Conference to urge equal civil and economic rights, better education and justice for blacks, and an end to segregation. In 1909, the NAACP was formed. The National Urban League was also founded specifically to help blacks who were migrating to cities deal with social and economic issues. The 1920s to 1930s boomed with the Harlem Renaissance, a black cultural movement.

The country was still far from settled, though, in respect to accepting African Americans as equals. The Ku Klux Klan grew from an estimated one hundred thousand members in 27 states to an estimated four to four-and-a-half million members by 1924.

In 1935, the Harlem riots ended with three killed and as much as $2 million in damages. Considered an early race riot, Mayor LaGuardia ordered a multiracial Mayor’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem headed by African American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier to investigate the causes of the riot.

A bright spot in the Olympics of 1936 in Berlin came when Jesse Owens won four gold medals in track and field events and upset Hitler as a consequence.

Even brighter, on June 25, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, forbidding discrimination in employment in government and defense industries.

From 1941 to 1960, the black migration northward continued, with 43 cities outside the South doubling their black population.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded in 1942 by James Farmer.

Race riots erupted in Detroit, Michigan, and Mobile, Alabama, in 1943 over the employment of blacks.

On December 5, 1946, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9802 creating the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights. He followed that in 1948 with Executive Order 9981, which barred segregation in the armed forces and barred discrimination in federal civil service positions.

On July 12, 1951, rioting broke out in Cicero, Illinois, over segregated housing and grew so severe that the National Guard was called out.

In 1954, the Little Rock Crisis took center stage. On May 17, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education that segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” In September 1957, as a result of that ruling, nine African American students enrolled at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The ensuing, often violent, struggle between segregationists and integrationists, the State of Arkansas and the federal government, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, gained worldwide attention.

Thus, the time went by in the 100 years following the Emancipation Proclamation, with none of the freedom and equality promised fully delivered. The stage was set for someone to come to the front of the civil rights movement and lead, and that was about to happen.