I honor January First not because the Gregorian Calendar tells me to start a new year, but rather because that is the day in 1863 that Lincoln signed THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION.
Emancipate: set free from legal, social, or political restrictions.
The Emancipation Proclamation states:
“… on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.”
Emancipation or freedom is the primary responsibility of government’s political system. But it has to exist in the hearts and minds of the citizens. If it does not, no proclamation, no law, no constitution will make it real. Once it is fixed indelibly in the minds and hearts of the people, no proclamation, no paper, no law, no constitution can eradicate it.
Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage; if in my soul I am free,
Angels alone enjoy such liberty. –Lovelace
A political system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect (W.E.B. DuBois); and the American political system was not designed provide equality for African American slaves and their descendants.
Langston Hughes said America never was America to me because there was an ORIGINATING GAP between the founders’ rhetoric about unalienable rights and African Americans’ reality before and after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.
The originating gap became clear when James Madison’s first sentence for inclusion in the Declaration of Rights stated: “… all human beings are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity….”
His fellow slave-owners could not allow that wording stand; and after heated debate, the sentence was rewritten thusly: “… all human beings are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity.”
Consequently, some Americans were free by virtue of their birth, while others became free when whole human beings, not Three-Fifths, allow them into the American state of society.
America’s greatest crime against the descendants of slaves was that unrelenting oppression induced us to inculcate feelings of self-hate, internecine-hatred, and self-victimization that made many of us trust and defend our oppressors, while making enemies of those who tried to free us.
After we were Emancipated, America’s White Supremacists segregated us into poverty-stricken environments intending that we perish mentally and spiritually, and, thus, become our own enslavers.
The opposite of freedom is not slavery, but rather “un-freedom.” True freedom in a Democracy demands for all: FREEDOM FROM both physical and psychological mistreatments perpetrated by others; and FREEDOM TO do those things that all other citizens are able to do. Un-freedom in a Democracy, unlike physical slavery, is a complete lack of freedom that while mostly psychological, is also mental, sociological and economic. Physical slavery is not automatically handed from one generation to the next. Un-freedom, however, can be passed to future generations.
Treachery, even inadvertent, against one’s people begins first with the corruption of one’s own spirit. The individual who was born into one of America’s oppressed groups is not an authentic member of the group until every injustice committed against any member of the group is deemed to be a personal attack and is treated with outrage irrespective of its source, including oneself. People who think and act with a corrupted mind, will continue to suffer and retard their own achievement of success.
“Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility (Stanton).” Each of us is personally responsible and accountable for our own behavior.
Those who ultimately realize that power is inborn, that they are weakened when they look for personal salvation outside themselves, and, upon realization, commit themselves unerringly to TRUTH, transform themselves, direct their thoughts and limbs rightly, and work miracles. (From Emerson)
Seeking success — or redemption after failure — through Self-Reliance, once one of the most powerful Black cultural tenets, necessitates that we lay accurate culpability for crimes committed against our people both by our enemies and by ourselves; and that we adopt clear rectification plans with strategies specified for both sides – what THEY must do and what WE must do. Nothing short of this will be in the least way effective.
