Celebration of the Abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia by the Colored People, in Washington, April 19, 1862, sketched by F. Dielman. In Harper’s Weekly, May 12, 1866.
Prints & Photographs Department, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
Emancipation in DC in 1862
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
You may wonder why you didn't have to file your taxes by the 15th this month- the date was changed because it conflicted with a now annual celebration in Washington DC. Emancipation Day is a holiday in the District marking the anniversary of the signing of the Compensated Emancipation Act, by Abraham Lincoln on April 16, 1862.
Though most of us think of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment adopted on December 6, 1865 as an end to slavery (except for Juneteenth) not much is discussed about the impact of freeing 3,200 black people from enslavement in 1862.
To be honest, as the family historian and genealogist I didn't bother to dig through or request any records documenting this from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), since as far as I knew, my mom's family were held in bondage in neighboring Virginia.
Thanks to a tip from a Scipio relative, a whole new avenue of research has opened up for me, and I hope for some readers. Important records from this early emancipation and compensation to slaveholders are now digitized and transcribed online, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
For those of you who did not have enslaved ancestors it is hard to describe the feeling you get when you see members of your family documented with price tags next to their names.
Enslavement period research has always been difficult, and is accomplished usually through the understanding that we were property - listed along with chairs and cattle, in wills and tax records, often with no surnames, and in the slave census - with no names at all, a decision which was part of an acrimonious debate, documented by historian David Patterson:
The first debates over the 1850 census of slaves were, in one sense, a struggle over what the slaveholders would allow the rest of the nation to know about slavery and slaves. The Senate committee that drew up the first plans for the 1850 census contemplated recording the names of all persons, slave and free. This led to the first controversy between senators who thought that the census could be taken most efficiently and accurately by naming the slaves, and those senators who opposed naming the slaves on ideological grounds which they disguised as practical objections.
Many southern senators surely believed that requiring a slave master to answer queries that personalized individual slaves invested slaves with a dignity that was incompatible with the institution that held them in bondage. Certainly there was never any serious thought that slaves would have an input to the census—for the census taker to enter the plantation quarters and to record personal facts from the lips of slaves would be an unthinkable trespass on the prerogative of slave masters, the same as if a census taker were to question a white child instead of speaking to the father of the household.
More pointedly, if a hard-core abolitionist like New York’s William H. Seward supported enumerating the slaves by name, and even demanded more information about the condition of the South’s slaves, pro-slavery senators would reactively oppose him on principle. To argue against enumerated slaves by name, southern senators, led by South Carolina’s Senator Arthur P. Butler, feigned ignorance on behalf of the slave owners. Despite the evidence in volumes of deeds, mortgages, bills of sale, and probate records that packed the shelves of every Southern courthouse—and not to speak of the record books and family Bibles in their own houses—slave owners supposedly could not identify their own slaves. Senator Butler painted a picture of plantations inhabited by hundreds of slaves, whose owners, serenely aloof from life in the slave quarters, only became aware of the identities of young slaves when they were old enough to work in the fields. In this imaginary world, plantation owners—hard-headed businessmen who each managed capital investments and annual crops worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—did not keep records of the names or ages of the slaves who were their principal investment!
Slaveholders won-and so my ancestors were only listed by age, gender and skin color- black or mulatto in those "slave schedules". No names. This is why those of us who search out our history refer to "the Brick Wall" we have to scale or tear down in order to find kin.
Some of us have been helped by white researchers and family history buffs who have in their possession old letters, diaries, wills and overseer logs which provide clues. But too many white researchers still won't share these details of slave-holding ancestors, and many online wills leave out the mention of "negroes" owned.
So let me put in a heartfelt plea - if you have any documents mentioning slaves in your family tree, PLEASE contact me, and I can tell you where to pass those gems of information on. Or you can send information directly to Afrigeneas. Your clue may help someone knock down the wall.
I know that today I am truly grateful for what I learned last week-thanks to this new goldmine of petition data online.
The transcription:
Your Petitioner, Hugh W. Throckmorton of Washington City D.C. by this his petition in writing, represents and states, that he is a person loyal to the United States, who, at the time of the passage of the said act of Congress, held a claim to service or labor against the following persons of African descent of the names of Lewis Sipio, Solomon Ford, Henry Weaver, Patsy Jackson, John Jackson, Dennis Weaver, Winney Ford and Joseph Ford for and during the life of said Persons and that by said act of Congress said Persons was discharged and freed of and from all claim of your petitioner to such service or labor; that at the time of said discharge said Lewis Sipio was of the age of Thirty Years and of the personal description following:(1) Light Coloured, Solomon Ford Twenty Nine Years of a Dark Coloured, Henry Weaver aged Twenty Six Years, Dark Coloured Patsy Jackson, aged Twenty two years, Dark Coloured John Jackson aged Eight Months. Light Coloured Dennis Weaver aged Eighteen years. Dark Coloured Winney Ford aged Sixteen years, Dark Coloured and Joseph Ford aged fifteen years. Dark Coloured all very healthy and No defect excepting Henry Weaver who has a Broken Leg; and at Present Writing on Crutches but improving
Joy! The Sipio's, Jackson's and Weaver's listed are my family.
Harder to digest is seeing their "dollar value" listed:
That your petitioner's claim to the service or labor of said Negroes was, at the time of said discharge therefrom, of the value of Seven thousand three hundred fifty Dollars dollars in money.(3) as follow to Wit. Lewis 1200$ Solomon 1400$. Henry 400$ Dennis 1150$ Joseph 1000$ Patsy 1000$ John 100$ and Winney 1100$. They all Being healthy, Young and Good Workers and no defect except Henry, as aforesaid, and that to the Best of My Knowledge and Belief they have no moral mental or bodily infirmities or defects except in the case as stated in Henry.
But I now understand more about my great-grandmother's brother Dennis (who I get the name Denise from) I thought he had run away from slavery to join the union army and fight in the Civil War. I now know he was freed in DC, and left soon after to enlist.
I wrote about him here in 2009 in Ode to a colored soldier whose name I bear.
I am humbled by the thought that no sooner than being freed - he rushed off to risk death to fight for the freedom of all those still held without liberty or dignity. He enlisted in the 1st Regiment, United States Colored Infantry
Regiment lost during service 4 Officers and 67 Enlisted men killed and mortally wounded and 1 Officer and 113 Enlisted men by disease. Total 185
He was at
The Battle of Wilson's Wharf (also called the Battle of Fort Pocahontas). The battle was the first combat encounter of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia with African-American troops. I. P. Farmer
wrote home about that battle
The artillery firing was very heavy and rapid. The infantry fighting was done principally by the black troops and nobly did they repel the slander that "Niggers won't fight." Men who were in the fight told me that they charged several times to the mouths of the cannon in a Rebel fort and had to fall back. At the fifth charge they carried the works. The fort was in plain view of where I stood and I watched the volumes of white smoke it belched forth all day. The last charge was made after dark and during the time the sides of the fort seemed to be a sheet of flame. In five minutes all was dark and silent. The blacks had carried the works and a well credited camp report says that its garrison, over 200 in number, shared the fate of the garrison of Fort Pillow.
I think of Dennis when I see the monument at the African American Civil War Memorial
The African American Civil War Memorial, at the corner of Vermont Avenue, 10th St, and U Street NW in Washington, D.C., commemorates the service of 209,145 African-American soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union in the United States Civil War. The sculpture The Spirit of Freedom, a 9-foot bronze statue by Ed Hamilton of Louisville, Kentucky, was commissioned by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities in 1993 and completed in 1997. The memorial includes a walking area with curved panel short walls inscribed with the names of the men who served in the war.
I m not particularly pleased with the statue in DC which is the
Emancipation Memorial.
Other folks share my feeling.
Dedicated in 1876, the Emancipation Memorial depicts President Abraham Lincoln standing elegantly while, kneeling next to him, a former slave looks up with a forlorn expression. In one hand Lincoln holds a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, the document that declared slavery illegal in 1863. Lincoln’s other hand rests above the head of the freed slave (the model for the figure was Archer Alexander, a former slave made famous in a biography written by William Greenleaf Eliot). He is naked but for a loincloth. His broken shackles lie at his side.
The statue had its opponents even before it was cast.
Though former slaves paid for the memorial, its design was overseen by an all-white committee. Its sculptor, Thomas Ball, also was white. Some critics felt the statue was paternalistic, that it ignored the active role blacks played in ending slavery. An alternate proposal for the memorial depicted a statue of Lincoln as well as statues of black Union soldiers wearing uniforms and bearing rifles. That option was considered too expensive. And so we have Lincoln and the kneeling slave, a nation’s narrative cast in bronze: Lincoln the freer of the black man, the savior of a race that couldn’t save itself.
I'd rather remember those who resisted their enslavement, those who died in chains or who struggled to survive-with grit, courage and persistence, not kneeling. I also honor my white ancestors, like my gr-gr-grandfather
Bratt who answered the call in Wisconsin, to fight for the Union.
Those times are not the distant past for me. The struggle with our ugly legacy of racism continues today and into the foreseeable future.
We will continue to fight, guided by the ancestors.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Black organic farmers took Malcolm X's "by any means necessary" and turned it green. The Root: An Earth Day Fix for Urban Food Deserts.
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Veronica Kyle of Chicago is not happy, but she is hopeful. Her upset stems from knowing that too many blacks and Hispanics living in urban settings must travel far to purchase fresh, nutritional, appropriately priced fruit, vegetables and meat products. During that trip, they traverse food deserts. She says those are neighborhoods that major supermarkets have effectively redlined, where shops sell 20 fried chicken wings for a dollar, where there are too many liquor and fast-food stores. Where there are far too many dialysis centers and where too many amputees, the victims of poor diets, walk the streets.
Kyle is an outreach coordinator for Faith in Place, an umbrella organization of more than 500 Illinois religious congregations united ''to promote clean energy & [SIC] sustainable farming.'' Speaking optimistically, Kyle declares, ''there are black people getting serious about changing this unhealthy paradigm.''
For more than a decade, across the country, there's been a growing network of African-American locavores, or farmers, vendors, and fans of naturally or organically cultivated vegetables and livestock grown or produced within a 150-mile radius of markets. They meet up in some of the most unlikely places, from Brooklyn, N.Y., to the southeastern part of the country to Wisconsin to Chicago to northern California. Many of the farmers, descendants of blacks who fled sharecropping and segregation during the Great Migration, now sell victuals at farmers markets that are becoming fixtures in black neighborhoods. The farmers also sell to food co-ops in the same areas. Some supply produce to black-owned (and other) restaurants, as well as well-known natural food supermarkets.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
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The images at this link are disturbing, but many people gloss over how wretched the hatred of the Jim Crow era really were. Daily Mail: Inside the new $1.3m Museum of Racist Memorabilia with 9,000 exhibits that leave most visitors 'angry or offended'
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It is a museum which is probably best avoided for those with a sensitive disposition.
Provocative exhibits at one of America's newest museum's include a full-size replica of a lynching tree with many items portraying black men as lazy, violent or inarticulate.
The objects displayed in the U.S. state of Michigan's newest museum are steeped in racism so intense that it makes visitors cringe.
That's the idea behind the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, which says it has amassed the nation's largest public collection of artifacts spanning the segregation era, from Reconstruction until the civil rights movement, and beyond.
The museum in a gleaming new exhibit hall at Ferris State University 'is all about teaching, not a shrine to racism,' said David Pilgrim, the founder and curator who started building the collection as a teenager.
Its name - Jim Crow - is often used to describe the segregation laws which arose after Reconstruction ended in 1877 and continued until the mid-1960s.
Mr Pilgrim, who is black, makes no apologies for the provocative exhibits. The goal of the $1.3 million gallery, he explained, is 'to get people to think deeply.'
The displays are startling. The n-word is prevalent throughout and black women are shown as kerchief-wearing mammies, sexually charged Jezebels or other stereotypes.
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On the 20th anniversary of the L.A. riots, the victim of now-fabled LAPD abuse talks about life and its lessons. LA Times: Rodney King, 20 years after L.A.'s riots.
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In 21 years, his name has appeared in the Los Angeles Times on more than 7,000 occasions. Sometimes it's as himself, Rodney King, the victim of now-fabled LAPD abuse the world got to see, the plaintiff in a civil lawsuit, the hapless guy getting stopped yet again on some speeding or DUI beef, the man on the celebrity rehab show. And sometimes it's as "Rodney King," the accidental symbol and the rallying cry on police abuse issues. Some of the biggest institutions in Southern California — the Los Angeles Police Department, the city itself — were changed because of the beating King took in 1991 and the beating the city took in 1992 in the riots that followed the acquittal of the officers charged in his beating. Has the man himself changed? On the 20th anniversary of the riots, his book, "The Riot Within,"' written with Lawrence J. Spagnola, is letting us, and King himself, find out.
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Essence magazine and its white male managing editor — whom the leading magazine for black women has emphasized had a production, not an editorial role — are parting ways, a spokeswoman told Journal-isms Friday, after right-wing material on his Facebook page was brought to the editors' attention. The Root: Essence Shifts White Male Managing Editor.
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The hiring of Michael Bullerdick last July created an uproar, partly because the title of "managing editor" implied to many a major role for a white man in the editorial process of a magazine for black women.
In his LinkedIn profile, Bullerdick lists "Edit stories for tone and style" among his duties, even though editor-in-chief Constance C.R. White insisted when he was hired, "Michael is responsible for production and operational workflow. He has no involvement in editorial content."
The announcement of Bullerdick's departure for the book division of Time Warner, the conglomerate that owns Essence, came after Journal-isms shared screen shots of Bullerdick's Facebook page taken by a reader.
"Essence readers would be shocked to find that Bullerdick, who under the prodding of Time Inc became the first white male editor at the magazine last year, openly espouses extremist Right-wing views that run counter to what Essence has historically stood for," the Journal-isms reader wrote in an email.
In one screen shot, an April 10 posting is headlined, "No Voter Fraud, Mr. Attorney General?" touting a video by James O'Keefe, the conservative activist who worked with right-wing trickster Andrew Breitbart. The same day, Bullerdick shared a photo illustration of Al Sharpton headlined, "MSNBC Race Pimp." Bullerdick also recommends material from the conservative magazine Human Events and the right-wing website townhall.com, from which Bullerdick posted "the Frequent Bomber Program," an article about 1960s radical Bill Ayers. Bullerdick wrote, "Obama's mentor and friend."
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A group of women have stripped to their bras in protest at the alleged sexual assault by Ugandan police of a high-profile female opposition politician. BBC: Uganda Ingrid Turinawe 'sexual abuse' protesters strip.
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Footage shows an officer squeezing the breast of Ingrid Turinawe of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) during her arrest ahead of a rally last week.
Deputy police chief Andrew Kaweesa has apologised, saying the incident will be investigated. Uganda's opposition says police regularly harass them during protests.
Since President Yoweri Museveni's controversial 2011 re-election, there has been a wave of opposition demonstrations - many of which have ended in violence and arrests.
But correspondents say Ugandans are outraged by the arrest on Friday of Ms Turinawe, who is the head of the Women's League of the FDC led by Kizza Besigye. Ugandan television footage clearly shows that, as several officers tried to pull her out of her vehicle, another grabbed and squeezed her breast - and she is heard shouting out in pain.
The BBC's Siraj Kalyango in the capital, Kampala, says a group of about 15 women marched through the town to the main police station waving placards, including one that read "How would you feel if we squeezed your balls?"
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
It is in this Landscape of Loss we find ourselves. It is this highway routed along the foothills and steep cliffs of a familial history that we travel; driving silently under moonlight to that other place we call Home.
It is this red New England iron; and it is this red Alabama mud; and it is this red California volcano clay that a rib was taken and fashioned and dressed in finery, lace and tears.
So it is that this story is Her story. It is Our story.
Interrogative
1. Falmouth, Massachusetts, 1972
Oak table, knotted legs, the chirp
And scrape of tines to mouth.
Four children, four engines
Of want. That music.
What did your hand mean to smooth
Across the casket of your belly?
What echoed there, if not me—tiny body
Afloat, akimbo, awake or at rest?
Every night you fed the others
Bread leavened with the grains
Of your own want. How
Could you stand me near you,
In you, jump and kick tricking
The heart, when what you prayed for
Was my father’s shadow, your name
In his dangerous script, an envelope
Smelling of gun-powder, bay rum,
Someone to wrestle, sing to, question,
Climb?
2. Interstate 101 South, California, 1981
Remember the radio, the Coca-Cola sign
Phosphorescent to the left, bridge
After bridge, as though our lives were
Engineered simply to go? And so we went
Into those few quiet hours
Alone together in the dark, my arm
On the rest beside yours, our lights
Pricking at fog, tugging us patiently
Forward like a needle through gauze.
Night held us like a house.
Sometimes an old song
Would fill the car like a ghost.
3. Leroy, Alabama, 2005
There’s still a pond behind your mother’s old house,
Still a stable with horses, a tractor rusted and stuck
Like a trophy in mud. And the red house you might
Have thrown stones at still stands on stilts up the dirt road.
A girl from the next town over rides in to lend us
Her colt, cries when one of us kicks it with spurs.
Her father wants to buy her a trailer, let her try her luck
In the shows. They stay for dinner under the tent
Your brother put up for the Fourth. Firebugs flare
And vanish. I am trying to let go of something.
My heart cluttered with names that mean nothing.
Our racket races out to the darkest part of the night.
The woods catch it and send it back.
4. But let’s say you’re alive again—
Your hands are long and tell your age.
You hold them there, twirling a bent straw,
And my reflection watches, hollow-faced,
Not trying to hide. The waiters make it seem
Like Cairo. Back and forth shouting
That sharp language. And for the first time
I tell you everything. No shame
In my secrets, shoddy as laundry.
I have praised your God
For the blessing of the body, snuck
From pleasure to pleasure, lying for it,
Holding it like a coin or a key in my fist.
I know now you’ve known all along.
I won’t change. I want to give
Everything away. To wander forever.
Here is a pot of tea. Let’s share it
Slowly, like sisters.
-- Tracy K. Smith
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Welcome to the Front Porch
Front Porch Petition alert:
Free Marissa Alexander
(for more information see In The State Of Florida - Marissa Alexander Had A Gun Permit, Stood Her Ground, Did Not Shoot Or Kill Anyone and Faces 20 Years In Prison