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Original Photo Courtesy of Scott Sawyer

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Arc of Justice & Strength

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/GreenPolicy360_Highlights

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Celebrating Freedom & Resilience

Remembering a Great Oak Tree of the South

One day in 1863, the members of the Virginia Peninsula’s black community gathered to hear a prayer answered. The Emancipation Oak was the site of the first Southern reading of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, an act which accelerated the demand for African-American education.

With limbs sprawling over a hundred feet in diameter, the Emancipation oak is designated as one of the 10 Great Trees of the World by the National Geographic Society.

Will Sutton writes for New Orleans/NOLA on June 18, 2020:

The first Southern reading of the proclamation was in what is now Hampton, Virginia, and more specifically on land that is now Hampton University, my alma mater. You can’t attend Hampton and not learn about the Emancipation Oak. It was under this mighty oak — which today stands nearly 100 feet in diameter with sprawling branches hanging low — that the area’s black community gathered to hear the good news about enslaved people being freed.

A tip of our Green political hat to Will Sutton who writes of a call rising across the U.S. for a national "Juneteenth" holiday to be celebrated.

The people of Texas were among the last to hear of the Emancipation Proclamation. In Galveston, the Union troops arrived to announce the war over slavery had ended...

June 19, 1865... the day they heard slavery ended. That day has been recognized — and celebrated — annually as Juneteenth since that’s the day that Union soldiers pulled into Galveston and told all who would listen that the Civil War had ended and enslaved people were free. That’s about two and a half years after Lincoln’s proclamation became law.

"Juneteenth", June 19th... For all who want to celebrate Juneteenth — and I have been in that number — I support you.

We at GreenPolicy360 support the call and all who support the cause of justice and freedom.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution

The 13th amendment, which formally abolished slavery in the United States, passed the Senate on April 8, 1864, and the House on January 31, 1865. On February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln approved the Joint Resolution of Congress submitting the proposed amendment to the state legislatures. The necessary number of states ratified it by December 6, 1865. The 13th amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

In 1863 President Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring “all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Nonetheless, the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation. Lincoln recognized that the Emancipation Proclamation would have to be followed by a constitutional amendment in order to guarantee the abolishment of slavery.

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