Emancipation Proclamation Research Paper

“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” (http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation)
These words issued by President Abraham Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation set out to free all slaves in the Confederate territories; to give blacks a chance to acquire the rights afforded to all persons. Although President Lincoln issued this proclamation freeing the slaves, post Civil War blacks would find it hard to obtain true freedom because racism would become the new slavery. The first Africans had arrived to a Virginian colony in 1619. By the 1800’s, Europeans had traveled to the shores of West Africa to trade with gold and other valuables in return for slaves captured. Most Africans knew slavery, since slavery was an ancient institution that had been
The Emancipation Proclamation brought hope that freedom and equality would be in sight but governmental laws and individual opinion created something worse than slavery. The idea that one can be free but still treated with disrespect and at times violence was discouraging. The South could not reinstate slavery, but it did re-create many of the mechanisms for racial control that the slave system had provided in the old South. Even though the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, racism became the new slavery because blacks were not afforded their civil