freedom from my opinion

Panelist Walter Johnson addressed the first question with an examination of the commonplace notion in historical literature that slavery “dehumanized” enslaved people. Johnson argued that the idea of dehumanization had multiple problems including that of “separating a normative and aspirational notion of humanity” from the exploitative and violent history that may well be definitive of human beings. the notion of dehumanization of enslaved people is misleading because slaveholders depended upon the human capacities of enslaved people—their ability to reproduce, to feel, to work, and to think—to make a profit. When this profit was threatened, perpetrators used violence as a means of control. They beat, raped, degraded, humiliated, and starved slaves, in order to assert their power over their immediate victims and the entire slave society.

Brenda Stevenson and Thavolia Glymph showed not only that enslaved people were not dehumanized but that they had developed key cultural elements to sustain them in slavery and immediately thereafter. Both demonstrated the importance of emancipation as perhaps one of several turning points in the African American experience.  glymph suggested that more work needed to be done on “what it meant to live in the in-between space of slavery and freedom . . .,” Enslaved people knew that making freedom was hard and arduous work, and scholars, Glymph asserted, do disservice to the difference freedom made when they state that it accomplished little. “No matter how hard it was to make, freedom did make a tremendously important difference.”

 

While almost all formerly enslaved African Americans remembered the circumstances when they gained or seized their freedom, there was no single emancipation experience. Some self-emancipated by escaping to the Union lines or by joining the army; others learned of their new condition when former owners, often prodded by Union officers, announced that they were free; and others found the promise of freedom clouded by racial hatred, disease and death.

 “After surrender, I can remember the negroes were so happy,” recalled Hamp Santee, who had been enslaved in Mississippi. “They just rang bells, blowed horns and shouted like they were crazy. Then they brought a brand new rope, and cut it up into little pieces and they gave everyone a little piece. And whenever they look at the rope they should remember that they were free from bondage.” To Lafayette Price of Morgan County, Ala., the jubilation of emancipation meant that “I’m free as a frog because a frog had freedom to jump when and where he please.” Yet many newly freed realized that this was a time of great uncertainty and danger. To W.L. Bost, freedom meant being “just like a turtle,” cautiously peeking out of the shell to “understand the lay of the land.”

It is that sense of caution, that sense of the unknown that shaped the experiences of most African Americans when freedom came. While many defined freedom as a chance to reunite with kin, to ensure the education of their children and then themselves, to never again experience the violence and sexual exploitation that was so much a part of the institution of slavery and to have the economic wherewithal to provide for their families’ well-being, they also realized the limits of freedom and the vulnerability that accompanied emancipation. As the daughter of a freedman explained, “Daddy said he was proud of freedom but afraid to own it.”

 

 

 

 

What is clear is that emancipation was a long process, a process that is still unfolding — not simply a day or a moment of celebration. The changes brought by emancipation took generations to reveal, and more than a century would pass before African Americans began to reap the full benefits of freedom.

Owning the freedom, as I understand it, means embracing change. Many enslaved African Americans did not wait for freedom to come. Their struggle reminds us that change does not come without courage and without loss.

Slavery and freedom are a common history and the actions of ordinary men and women, demanding freedom, transformed our nation.it is a shared story resting at the heart of political, economic, and cultural life.

Personal knowledge of slavery and limitation creates both a means and an end to promote freedom in oneself, which does not ignore desires but manages them. In other words, our desires and souls are not sovereign over us Rather, we become sovereign over them and dictate what role and even the means of its appeasement.