‘Performative Advocacy Doesn’t Work’: Black Justice Leaders Talk Accountability and the Fight for Reparations
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, ordering that “all persons held as slaves” should “be free.”
But some enslavers across the Deep South refused to comply, and many Black people remained in slavery—completely unaware of their new freedom. Finally, on June 19, 1865, Union soldiers in Galveston, Texas, delivered an order, announcing that Black Texans were free, a moment that would come to symbolize the end to chattel slavery.