The original Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, will now be on permanent display at the National Archives in Washington, and Black people lined up to get a glance, ABC News reports.
For the second year in a row, Black people from all over the country spent their Juneteenth in the nation’s capital to see the rare Emancipation Proclamation and General Order No. 3 documents that set slaves in the South free after the Civil War. Two years later, a Union general informed slaves in Galveston, Texas, that slaves were free—on a day now celebrated as Juneteenth. The fragile documents are normally kept in a climate-controlled vault with limited light exposure to maintain preservation. However, the National Archives is looking to make the display permanent.
Juneteenth was signed into a federal holiday by President Joe Biden in 2021, and archivist Colleen Shogan said she is “proud” that the National Archives will have the document out for public display. The plan is to have the document out for view next to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. “Together, they tell a more comprehensive story of the history of all Americans and document progress in our nation’s continuous growth toward a more perfect Union,” Shogan said.
Parents took the time to explain the document’s significance and why seeing it on Juneteenth is so important. “There have been struggles of equality and continued struggles that are present and it’s connected. If we don’t have those conversations, we’re just going to repeat them,” visitor Beth Short said. Other guests, like Garrett Osumah, who is raising three Black boys, told the Washington Post he chooses to educate his sons rather than shield them from racism in America. “We have three young Black men,” Osumah said. “They need to understand that these things happened in the world and it’s not just back in the 1800s. These types of things are happening now.”
from Black Enterprise https://ift.tt/20Nhf4E
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