“Then Moses said to the people,“ Remember this day, the day you came out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, for the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand. ”- Exodus: 13: 3.
On the night of December 31, in African American churches across the country, congregants gather to welcome the new year. They sing songs of freedom and overcoming. They testify to the extent of their faith and how much faith and courage they will have to face one more year.
The tradition is called Watch Night and goes back 156 years until President Abraham Lincoln laid out an essential document of freedom that most Americans have probably never read or read thought much about: the proclamation of emancipation.
The night before the proclamation came into force on January 1, 1863, free blacks in the north and their enslaved brothers and sisters in the south guarded churches, dilapidated slave huts, and forests. of moonlit plantations to look at, pray and wait everywhere. the night to learn that Lincoln’s promises of freedom had been officially released and millions of our ancestors they were legally free.
The president kept his word, even though two more years of massacre and civil war were expected. African Americans emerged from that long night of waiting and surveillance with the right to take up arms and join the military struggle to save the Union as soldiers and aboard “ships of all kinds.” The proclamation stated that Confederate slaves were now “always free,” and that the force of the United States government, “including its military and naval authority, would recognize and maintain the freedom of these people and take no action.” nor does it act to repress these people or any of them, in any effort they may make for their real freedom. “
The proclamation was the most consistent executive order in U.S. history. It must be celebrated and honored.
For all Americans who love freedom and democracy, New Year’s Day should mean so much more than bowling and college parades. The nation must revive and recover the true meaning and significance of January 1, the day of emancipation.
This January 1 is even more significant as 2020 marks the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of the first documented African slaves on the shores of the New World that was to become the United States of America. This anniversary year should be a time of commemoration and celebration, reflection and action on how far we have come and how far we still have to go to reach the top of the mountain.
The journey from slavery to freedom was largely completed in 1865 with the adoption of the 13th Amendment. The march from freedom to equality is far from over.
I spent Christmas morning, as I did more than 40 years ago, visiting and praying with inmates and staff at Cook County Jail, the poor and dispossessed warehouse on Chicago’s West Side. As I looked at the crowded faces in the prison gym, I saw that they were overwhelming blacks and browns.
Although African Americans make up only 24% of Cook County’s population, nearly 74% of the prison population is black.
This history of inequality developed over four centuries. It began in August 1619, when some 20 frightened, bewildered, and besieged Africans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, as prizes that had been pirated from Spanish ships on the high seas.
Although the revolutionary Americans rebelled against the British monarchy, declaring that all men were created equal, the founding fathers of the Constitutional Convention bowed to the South with three slave engagements that still haunt our nation: to allow the international slave trade; counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for representation in Congress; and to establish the Electoral College, giving the representation of the Southern Congress disproportionate to its electoral eligibility.
Yet in the darkness of chattering slavery, slaves were able to maintain enough of their humanity to maintain a light of hope for a better day, for freedom, and for equality. African Americans were able to see the dimly lit outlines of a fairer social, economic, and political order, even during slavery, apartheid, and centuries of discrimination. But blacks did not expect freedom to fall from the sky. The colonial era and beyond was full of rebellions and slave resistance.
The lies, myths, and madness of white supremacy contaminated the soil and soul of America. The academy said African American minds were inferior. The medical center said our bodies were inferior; the church, our morals. Banks determined that we were not worthy of loans or investments. These barriers have yet to be completely broken. We are free but unequal. Still, we get up.
History is an uninterrupted continuity that cannot be denied. Americans should not hide from the past or participate in a prolonged exercise of recasting 400 tragic years. While there can be no plan for the future without understanding the past, we cannot move forward by looking back.
2020 must be about the vision of a totally egalitarian society.
Next year, we need to set goals and a timeline for the deepest and most profound corrective action program in history and demonstrate what true equality means and seems to be for all Americans.
We need to examine how much this repair will cost, what cost it has no longer repaired, and the continued cost to the nation in terms of human and economic underdevelopment if we fail to match the playing field for African Americans and other people of color.
In 2021 there will be another presidential election. As candidates campaign for the next two years, they must be challenged to share their vision of what an egalitarian, non-discriminatory, multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious and non-sexist society is like, and how they propose to lead us. -hi.
Meanwhile, we humans (red, brown, yellow, white, and black) must do what African Americans have done for 400 years, from slavery to emancipation, from multitudes of lynxes to great migrations, from the back of the bus to Rosa Parks, from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis to President Barack Obama on the balcony of the White House.
Keep hope alive.
Jesse L. Jackson Sr. (@RevJJackson) is the founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
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