African Americans After Emancipation

Abstract

Emancipation was the turning point for African Americans as well as the United States as a whole. With the promise of freedom, emancipation proved to be both a blessing and a detriment to the African American life.

African Americans after Emancipation

On January 13, 1865 Congress passed an Amendment prohibiting slavery in the United States, though African American did not learn of slavery’s end until the spring of 1865 (Faragher, Buhle, Czitrom, & Armitage, 2009, pp. 458-459). The first impulse of many emancipated slaves was to test their new found freedom (Faragher, Buhle, Czitrom, & Armitage, 2009, p. 459). The simplest, and perhaps, most obvious way to accomplish this involved leaving home (Faragher, Buhle, Czitrom, & Armitage, 2009, p. 459). Yet many who left their old neighborhoods returned soon afterward to seek work in the general vicinity or even on the plantation they had left (Faragher, Buhle, Czitrom, & Armitage, 2009, p. 459). As individuals and communities transformed by emancipation, former slaves struggled to establish economic, political, and cultural autonomy (Faragher, Buhle, Czitrom, & Armitage, 2009, p. 459).

The African American Family

Emancipation allowed freed people to strengthen family ties (Faragher, Buhle, Czitrom, & Armitage, 2009, p. 460). For many former slaves, freedom meant the opportunity to find long-lost family members (Faragher, Buhle, Czitrom, & Armitage, 2009, p. 460). This also gave those living together an opportunity to become legal families. Thousands of African American couples who had lived together under slavery streamed to military and civilian authorities and demanded to be legally marred (Faragher, Buhle, Czitrom, & Armitage, 2009, p. 460). By 1870, the two-parent household was the norm for a large majority of African