Rutgers’ Clement Alexander Price says the path to freedom was set in motion, but not achieved, with the Emancipation Proclamation
Black History month has special resonance this year as the nation commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Added to that, millions of Americans are rediscovering Lincoln’s time with Steven Spielberg’s new movie, likely to sweep the Academy Awards later this month. But the road to lasting freedom was a process set in motion, but not achieved, with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, as Professor Clement Price explains:
As grand an event as any other in American history before or since, The Emancipation was not a singular experience, but rather many experiences that more than four million black women, men and children lived through along with white Americans, Indians and Latinos. It was also an evolutionary experience, with all the pieces of its drama not necessarily falling neatly into place.
Ezra Adams, a former slave of Columbia, South Carolina, was interviewed by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s: “…De slaves, where I lived, knowed after de war dat they had abundance of dat somethin’ called freedom, what they could not wat, wear, and sleep in. Yes, sir, they soon found out dat freedom ain’t notin’, ‘less you is got something; to live on and place to call home.”
As Mr. Adams reminds us, many of the slaves freed over the course of the Civil War, or after the Civil War, initially wondered if freedom would be better than slavery. Over time, they would realize that it was. Others worried that as swiftly as slavery ended in areas that came under the control of the Union Army, it might be re-imposed once the Union, and the power of the Southern states, was restored. Obviously that did not happen. But the concern of blacks on their way to becoming free people was justified.
President Lincoln’s famous Proclamation was issued during the War and had not been brought before the Supreme Court, the very Court that before the war was a decisively pro-slavery branch of the federal government. And still other blacks on their way to becoming free, as in the case of Ezra Adams, were most practical men and women. Enslavement had been their way of life; they had formed a relationship with a system that by our standards was demeaning and harsh, but by theirs was grounded in the racial, labor and political customs of their time, not ours. It was the only harbor they had known. Would freedom be a safe one? That was not certain when freedom came.
Now that the commemorative season for the Great Emancipation is upon us, the time has come to complicate what we know about that historical moment and have empathy for those who lived through it.
Becoming free during the Great Emancipation involved uncertainty, danger, and the mustering of courage. It also involved a determined reliance on the folk culture that had sustained black Americans in slavery. As it became clear to those once enslaved that they were no longer to be enslaved, the folkways that they knew enabled them to navigate their way forward, giving many blacks a sense that they were, after all, in charge of important aspects of their lives, including their aspirations as free people. I have always imagined navigating the Great Emancipation to have been a remarkable achievement for Africans on American soil and period that the nation needs to embrace as its finest hour, despite the obstacles that it placed in the face of those newly freed.
The release of two blockbuster Hollywood films that in very different ways deal with the story of black freedom in 19th century America, Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln, and Quentin Tarantino’s Djano Unchanged, and this year’s array of public programs on the Great Emancipation, will likely energize interest in what Ezra Adams witnessed when he was but ten years old.
While the Emancipation is being monumentalized this season as a great event, brought on by great men and largely anonymous women, made possible by an especially brutal and transformative war, and consummated as that war’s most noble objective, we should consider how that momentous event affected its primary historical actors, the slaves themselves. Ezra Adams and others who stepped into freedom a hundred and fifty years ago are deserving of that broadly based acknowledgement and reverence.
Clement Alexander Price is Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History. The Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series, which Dr. Price co-founded in 1981, will have as its theme on February 16, 2013, “Emancipation and the Work of Freedom.”