The Hierarchy Of Freedom After The Civil War

In 1863 the new birth of freedom or what we thought of as freedom came about. It was around this time that the Civil war had broke out because of the uncompromising differences between the states that were free and those that still had slaves, over whether or not the government should prohibit slavery. Abraham Lincoln issued the proclamation which instituted a level of freedom for those who were enslaved. Although that seemed like an amazing and progessive part in America, what it actually meant to be free dealt with a heiracrchy of race, restrictions and negative views which caused a lot of black people to lose their lives. This kind of freedom was never really freedom because when we think of that word, we think about having the power to
Though there was a change in race issues after the civil war, there was no debate that there was some sort of seperation between people of color and white people, even if you were an American citizen and had gained the rights to do certain things. Yet, people of color were said to be “free” although they weren’t free to do simple things like drink from the same bubbler as a white man or woman. People of color were considered to be at the bottom of what was called the heirarchy of race and thus had the least amount of freedom than those who were above them on that pyramid. A professor called Micheal Hunt in his article named The Hierarchy of Race mentions that “By the beginning of the twentieth century the issue of the place of blacks in American society rested on the same foundation that it had three centuries earlier” (page 3). This same foundation that he speaks of is the fake knowledge and mentality that blacks are inferior and white people are superior and therefore people of color should be under the control of white people. He is basically saying that even though people of color were released from slavery, they were not freed in the minds of those who
To understand how the emancipation proclamation actually wasn’t a form of freedom, the word “freedom” and “emancipation” would have to be defined. Freedom defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “ the quality or state of being free: such as the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action”. Emancipation defined in that same dictionary is “to free from restraint, control, especially: to free from bondage”. The difference between the two is that when an individual is free, they are free physically, mentally and wholistically to make choices but, to be emancipated you are only physically “free from” the hands of someone who has you in constraint, but the objective is to always keep you under control. Just as if a child is emancipated from their parents; at the end of the say they are still a child and have to abide by the rules of someone superior even if it isn’t their parents. Emanicpation is something that somebody gives you, freedom is something that you take. To further explain this, we can look at the story behind Juneteenth. Juneteenth is a holiday that celebrates the release of enslaved African Americans on the day of June 19th 1865, two years after the emancipation proclamation was in affect. Slaves had been emancipated for two and a half years yet those in the south did not know that they had been freed. Their slave masters deliberately chose not to share the news