How Long Was American Slavery

The signature of President Abraham Lincoln on a rare, restored copy of the 13th Amendment.

Information technology%27s Blackness History Month%2C merely how many people actually know facts about slavery%3F
President Lincoln%27s Emancipation Proclamation did not stop slavery.
Slavery officially ended on Dec. 6%2C 1865%2C the day the 13th Amendment was ratified.

I cringe every year when Black History Month rolls around. Don't get me wrong, I think information technology'due south of import for all Americans to know something nearly "the black experience" that played such a big role in shaping the culture and politics of this nation.

But I'm always bothered by what we don't learn about blackness history during this February observance. Nothing makes me want to holler more than two important things we don't seem to know about slavery. And merely what is that? Most Americans I see don't know when it started — or ended.

Without this vital historical context, non-blacks lack a foundation for understanding that "peculiar institution." Counting from the arrival of the kickoff slave transport, blacks were enslaved a century longer than they have been free. These are important benchmarks of the journey blacks have made from enslavement to liberty. African Americans who don't know this lack a vital part of what Socrates said is the greatest knowledge a person can have: know thyself.

Sadly, about people don't know that the first slave ship docked in Jamestown, Va., in August 1619, a year before the pilgrims dropped anchor at Plymouth Stone. And most aren't aware that slavery in this country didn't officially end until Dec. 6, 1865, the day the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified.

Information technology didn't terminate on Jan. 1, 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. That was a Civil War executive order that freed slaves only in parts of the South that were not under control of the Union Ground forces. Slaves in sections of Virginia and Louisiana occupied past the Spousal relationship Army were left in chains — and those in the rest of the Confederacy weren't actually freed because Lincoln didn't command those rebellious areas.

And despite the fact that more than half of the states and the District of Columbia take a Juneteenth observance to celebrate the end of slavery, slavery wasn't ended in June 1865. That's when slaves in Galveston, Texas, learned of the Emancipation Proclamation. But by and then, that presidential executive order was widely idea to exist unenforceable, and the 13th Amendment had been passed by Congress and was sent to the states for approving.

So, the Juneteenth celebration of slavery's demise is something alike to telling a lie, when the truth volition do improve.

If anything of lasting value comes out of our annual homage to black history, I recall information technology should exist this: the designation of Dec. 6 equally Liberation Day. It was on that solar day in 1865 that America's flow of black enslavement, which lasted 246 years, officially came to an cease.

Now I'm non talking almost creating another national vacation — though Liberation Twenty-four hour period ought be far more important to our national consciousness than New Twelvemonth's Twenty-four hour period, which just marks the turning of a page in the Gregorian agenda, and Columbus 24-hour interval, a perpetuation of the myth of European discovery.

No, Liberation Twenty-four hours ought to be rooted in the determination of blacks to become our history right. Instead of people staying dwelling house, Liberation Day should crusade blacks — and many other Americans -- to plough out for events that will help us to get to "know thyself."

"There are the stories that made America, and there are the stories that America fabricated upwardly," Bernard Kinsey, owner of 1 of this nation's most informative collections of blackness artifacts and memorabilia, told me. And he's right.

Making Dec. 6 our Liberation Twenty-four hours vacation would be a great way to ensure that black history is more than fact than fiction.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University'southward School of Global Journalism and Advice, writes on Tuesdays for Usa TODAY.

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