But more important, emancipation was not true freedom — not in Texas and not in most of the American South, where the vast majority of Black people lived. It was quasi freedom. It was an ostensible freedom. It was freedom with more strings attached than a marionette.
Most Black people couldn’t claim their freedom on June 19, 1865, because their bodies (and their free will) were still being policed to nearly the same degree and with the same inveterate racism that Southern whites had aimed at them during slavery. As the Rediscovering Black History blog at the National Archives notes <https://rediscovering-black-history.blogs.archives.gov/2021/09/01/preserving-a-communitys-legacy-the-history-of-the-gregory-school/>, “Most white Texans desired to keep Blacks as close to their formerly enslaved status as possible; therefore, they fiercely resisted any actions that would potentially elevate Blacks to a competitive social, political and economic status.” This was true throughout much of the former Confederacy. The question of labor is at the core of how we must understand emancipation and Reconstruction because American slavery, an entire capitalist system representing billions of dollars in wealth, had been built on free Black labor, was brought to its knees and would have to be propped up; newly freed Black people were fed back to the machine to keep it running. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/18/opinion/juneteenth-texas.html -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#30810): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/30810 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/106741132/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
