Our liberation is bound together [View all]

[TexasTowelie]

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of the forthcoming From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, looks at the sources of Black power, in an article published at Jacobin.

ON APRIL 12, 1865, the American Civil War officially came to end when the Union Army accepted the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy on the steps of a courthouse in Appomattox, Virginia. The Union Army, led by 200,000 Black soldiers, had destroyed the institution of slavery; as a result of their victory, Black people were now to be no longer property but citizens of the United States.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first declaration of civil rights in the United States, stated that:

citizens of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States...to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens.

There was no ambiguity that the war had buried chattel slavery once and for all. Days after the surrender of the Confederacy, Abraham Lincoln rode into Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the slaveholders, where he stood upon the stairs of the former Confederate capitol building and told a large gathering crowd of Black people days into their freedom:

In reference to you, colored people, let me say God has made you free. Although you have been deprived of your God-given rights by your so-called Masters, you are now as free as I am, and if those that claim to be your superiors do not know that you are free, take the sword and bayonet and teach them that you are--for God created all men free, giving to each the same rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Read more: http://socialistworker.org/2015/11/02/our-liberation-is-bound-togeth