Free at Last

Today is the 140th anniversary of the Radical Republican House of Representatives' passage of the resolutions of what became the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the U.S.

Just to be clear here, since there's been this rumor floating around that I'm sure we've all heard, Lincoln did NOT free the slaves. Yes, he did issue the Emancipation Proclamation, but if you read carefully the Emancipation Proclamation did not free all the slaves; it only freed slaves in the states in rebellion (i.e. the Confederacy; i.e. the South). Now, if only by definition alone, the states of rebellion weren't very open to hearing what President Lincoln had to say.

So who freed the slaves?

AFRICAN AMERICANS

Yeah I said it. We freed ourselves! Shoot, the Union was losing the war until Lincoln finally listened to Frederick Douglass and used Black troops in the war. It wasn't until the Gettysburg Address that the Civil War officially became about ending slavery and not just holding the Union together (as well as the underlying economic issues). As a matter of fact and irony, if it hadn't been for African Americans enlisting in the Union forces, the United States as a nation would not exist as it does today. If Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had really "freed" the slaves as is popularly thought, there would have been no need for a 13th Amendment.

So when you hear all this talk of freedom and spreading freedom, know this brothas and sistas: we fought for it, we died for it, we earned it! NOBODY freed us! WE FREED OURSELVES!



Now we just gotta work on this mental slavery thing...