Juneteenth: A Celebration for a New Age
Originally published by the Atlanta History Center, June 16, 2018
Juneteenth is a celebration marking an end to slavery in the United States. Though Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, very few people were immediately freed. It proclaimed that “all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” But the nation was in the midst of Civil War and, of course, “rebellious states” were in no mood to pay heed to Lincoln’s order. So, although the Proclamation marked an important shift in federal policy, millions of African Americans had to wait until the Confederacy was defeated before they could begin lives as freedmen. Hundreds of thousands of blacks did take advantage of the new opportunity to take up arms fighting to end slavery as members of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) and to flee enslavement as “self-emancipators” but their efforts were not sufficient to end the “horrible institution” before the war’s end.
