African American's Magna Carta - Editorial

American Visions, Feb-March, 1993 by Gary A. Puckrein

The 130th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1993, passed without much public fanfare. Although President Abraham Lincoln was opposed to slavery, his intention when he issued the proclamation, during the throes of the Civil War, was to cripple a stubborn Confederacy that was using slaves to support its war against the Union. Thus, the proclamation only offered freedom to slaves whose masters continued in their rebellion; slaves whose masters remained faithful to the Union were not freed by the proclamation.

Pointing to the limited scope of the proclamation, many people today fail to appreciate its importance. Yet once the power of the government was enlisted on the side of freedom, slavery - in or out of the Confederacy - could not survive the Emancipation Proclamation. Indeed, the proclamation helped turn the Civil War from a struggle to preserve the Union into a war against slavery. By 1864, Congress had passed the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery in all states.

The Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment raised thorny questions about the status of free blacks: Can a Negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen?

Before the Civil War, in 1857, the Supreme Court resolved a complaint brought to it by a black man, Dred Scott, by deciding that the Founding Fathers had never intended African people to be a part of "We the people," who formed the nation and were recipients of its citizenship rights, privileges and responsibilities. Eager to protect the rights of those who had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, Congress passed the 14th and 15th amendments, which essentially overturned the Dred Scott decision. The 14th Amendment declared all persons born or naturalized in the United States both national and state citizens and prohibited the states from abridging their "privileges and immunities"; depriving any person of life, liberty or property without "due process of law"; or denying any person "equal protection of the laws." The 15th Amendment made it illegal for the states to deny anyone the right to vote on the basis of race.

The Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War amendments to the Constitution are the African American's Magna Carta. To be sure, it would take another 100 years of struggle to turn law into reality, but the fact is that the rights and freedoms that we enjoy today were guaranteed to us by these documents. We therefore cannot afford to ignore their anniversaries.