"The story of emancipation, going really back to the founding of the country all the way to the civil war is very much the story of enslaved Africans and freed blacks taking the initiative to put their freedom on the agenda of national politics. That's especially true during the Civil War. The war, as many people know, it does not begin as a war for abolition. It begins as a war for union. But as soon as the shooting starts, enslaved people are escaping to union lines. They're leaving work on plantations. They're offering their assistance to- to union soldiers as guides, as laborers and eventually as soldiers. And it's those actions that transform the war for union into a war for liberation, into a war for emancipation. And although Juneteenth commemorates those enslaved Africans who were whisked away to Texas to avoid the Emancipation Proclamation, I think it's still an opportunity for us to really think and take seriously the fact that emancipation does not happen without the actions of the enslaved, not just over the war, but really over the course of 80 years."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Columnists from the United StatesPolitical authors from the United StatesSocial criticsAfrican AmericansJournalists from Virginia
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jamelle_Bouie
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Jamelle Bouie
(born April 12, 1987) is an American journalist and columnist for '. He was formerly chief political correspondent for Slate magazine.
31 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Jamelle Bouie →
Related Quotes
"ah, the halycon free speech days of 1954, when two-thirds of american blacks - about 10 million people - lived in a b…"
"State control of the kind we've seen during the lockdowns has historically been associated with nonwhites and the ext…"
"why this moment? Why Juneteenth has sort of erupted in this way over the past couple weeks, why people find it so res…"
"I think that's progress. I think that represents Americans coming to recognize what those statues were erected for. T…"
"After Trump lost, with the majority of mail-in ballots going to his opponent, his campaign argued that illegal voting…"
"A multiracial coalition of Black, brown, and white Americans had defeated Trump and put Biden and Kamala Harris, the …"
"And Trumpism, as the iconography of his movement demonstrates, has race at its core. Trump began his march to the Whi…"
"Arguably the most prominent and accomplished of these planter-politicians was John Calhoun...On this defense of the p…"
"There is a homegrown ideology of reaction in the United States, inextricably tied to our system of slavery. And while…"
"one consequence of the fact that our popular historical understanding erases roughly 1870 to 1932 from public memory …"