Emancipation – That Day of such Hope!

The Emancipation Proclamation.

157 years old.

One can’t help but to reflect on what it was probably like on the day to newly/officially freed slaves.

To argue the reasoning for Lincoln’s decision, and the imperfections of the document, there can’t be any argument that it was a giant first step in delivering us from the bondage of slavery.

Just try an imagine for a moment – an alternative outcome – if there were someone as president, and I am sure you’ll leave the dinner table today with an emptiness in your stomach, and knowing in your heart, that while wasn’t made perfect, it was sure as hell made better.

Consider some of these poignant points

Being a Slave

• No day ever dawned for a slave, nor is it looked for”, a freed black man wrote. “It is all night, all night forever”
  One white Mississippian wrote: ” I’d rather be dead, than be a nigger on one these big plantations”.
• A slave entered the world in a one room, dirt floor shack; drafty in Winter, reeked in Summer. Slave cabins breed phenomena, typhus, cholera, lockjaw, tuberculous, and other debilitating illnesses and diseases.
• Fewer than 4 out a hundred lived to be 60
• The child who survived, and went to fields at 12, were likely to have rotten teeth, worms, dysentery, malaria
• Hundreds, maybe thousands of women were constantly raped, physically and mentally abused by their masters and his wives, and forced to be mistresses on slave masters and their sons.
• New slave mothers were often milked like cows for their breast milk to feed the white babies and often were denied breast feeding their own new-born babies, a practice called Wet Nusing
• A slave could expect to be sold at least once, maybe twice, oftentimes more
• There were 8 million people in the South at the start of the Civil War – 6 million of them were slaves

Elections matter!