{"id":4037,"date":"2012-02-01T07:33:54","date_gmt":"2012-02-01T12:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/?p=4037"},"modified":"2012-08-03T19:01:25","modified_gmt":"2012-08-04T00:01:25","slug":"why-is-february-1st-designated-as-national-freedom-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/2012\/02\/01\/why-is-february-1st-designated-as-national-freedom-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is February 1st Designated as National Freedom Day?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>February 1 is National Freedom Day in the United States and has been since 1948.\u00a0 The question is why?\u00a0\u00a0 The story begins with a bit of presidential trivia but then turns into a fascinating tale of an extraordinary citizen. It was on February 1, 1865 that President Abraham Lincoln signed a joint congressional resolution proposing a Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would abolish slavery.\u00a0 But any good civics student knows that the process for amending the Constitution was by no means complete.\u00a0 Congress (and not the president) sends amendments to the states for ratification, and it is the states that must finalize any proposed changes.\u00a0 The requisite number of states did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until December 6, 1865, an event which set off an explosion of celebrations in the North, immortalized by John Greenleaf Whittier’s once-famous poem, “Laus Deo!”<\/a>:<\/p>\n

IT is done!
\nClang of bell and roar of gun
\nSend the tidings up and down.
\nHow the belfries rock and reel!
\nHow the great guns, peal on peal,
\nFling the joy from town to town!<\/p>\n

Yet Lincoln himself had appeared to acknowledge the special nature of\u00a0 February 1 when he placed an otherwise superfluous signature on the joint resolution.\u00a0 He had called the proposed amendment “a king’s cure” to the challenge of ending slavery and clearly wanted to bear witness to the transformation that was being wrought by the bloody Civil War.\u00a0 Though he did not live to see ratification, Lincoln’s contributions as military emancipator and advocate for constitutional abolition deserve commemoration.<\/p>\n

That was the idea that eventually inspired a former slave to lobby Congress to designate February 1st as National Freedom Day.\u00a0 Richard R. Wright was a 9-year-old enslaved boy living in Georgia when Lincoln signed the joint resolution.\u00a0 After the war, while attending a freedmen’s school during Reconstruction, he became known as the source for yet another once celebrated poem by Whittier, this one entitled, “Howard at Atlanta<\/a>,” about the visit of Union general Oliver O. Howard to a black school:<\/p>\n

The man of many battles,
\nWith tears his eyelids pressing,
\nStretched over those dusky foreheads
\nHis one-armed blessing.<\/p>\n

And he said: “Who hears can never
\nFear for or doubt you;
\nWhat shall I tell the children
\nUp North about you?”
\nThen ran round a whisper, a murmur,
\nSome answer devising:
\nAnd a little boy stood up: “General<\/a>,
\nTell ’em we’re rising!”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Richard R. Wright (1855 - 1947)<\/p><\/div>\n

The phrase, “Tell ’em we’re rising!” became an anthem for the post-war black middle class of which young Richard Wright soon became one of the most notable embodiments.\u00a0 He served as an officer in the Spanish-American War and later became a renowned educator (and mentor to W.E.B. DuBois) and eventually a banker in Philadelphia,<\/p>\n

Pennsylvania, a self-made man who never seemed to stop striving. At age 67, Wright \u00a0enrolled\u00a0 in Wharton Business Schoo<\/a>l to help retrain for his new commercial endeavor, The Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust Company.\u00a0 In early 1942, at age <\/span>86, he began an intensive lobbying effort for the creation of National Freedom Day.\u00a0 The first grassroots celebration drew 3,500 people to the Academy of Music in Philadelphia.\u00a0 The crowd held a mass Pledge of Allegiance in front of the Liberty Bell and then organized a patriotic parade “with forty flag-bedecked automobiles,” according to a report from the Baltimore Afro-American <\/em>(Feb. 7, 1942). \u00a0The turnout was especially impressive because the national climate did not seem promising for such an earnest effort.\u00a0 World War II had already begun, Japanese internment was about to be launched and a climate of segregation and oppression still prevailed across the South and much of the North.\u00a0 Attendees at this first gathering, for example, felt compelled to formally denounce a recent lynching in Missouri.\u00a0 Yet Wright persisted, undertaking a national speaking tour and working behind-the-scenes with various members of the Pennsylvania congressional delegation.<\/p>\n

Seven years later, the effort finally bore fruit on June 30, 1948 when President Truman signed Public Law 842<\/a>, establishing “National Freedom Day” into the federal code.\u00a0 The final legislation encouraged national observance of February 1st as a way to commemorate the abolition of slavery, but did not mandate a new federal holiday.\u00a0 That had been the original intent of Wright’s proposal, but some in Congress had objected to canceling a work day in the short and already commemoration-crowded month of February.\u00a0\u00a0 Unfortunately, Wright was not present to fight for more.\u00a0 He had died in July 1947 and never lived to see the formal establishment of his dream, not so unlike Abraham Lincoln who also had been unable to witness the ratification of his.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

General Sources:\u00a0 Hanes Walton, Jr., et.al., “R. R. Wright, Congress, President Truman and the First National Public African-American Holiday: National Freedom Day,” PS: Political Science and Politics <\/em>24 (Dec. 1991): 685-688 and Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery and the Thirteenth Amendment\u00a0<\/em>(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).<\/p>\n

A version of this blog post also appears at Constitution Daily<\/a>, a blog of the National Constitution Center.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

February 1 is National Freedom Day in the United States and has been since 1948.\u00a0 The question is why?\u00a0\u00a0 The story begins with a bit of presidential trivia but then turns into a fascinating tale of an extraordinary citizen. It was on February 1, 1865 that President Abraham Lincoln signed a joint congressional resolution proposing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-war-1861-1865","category-general-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4037"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4068,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4037\/revisions\/4068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}