His only apparent crime was making eye contact with the police and then running away. One hundred and fifty years later, on April 12, 2015, at nine in the morning, 217 miles north of the Appomattox courthouse, Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old black man, was arrested by the Baltimore police. Although you have been deprived of your God-given rights by your so-called Masters, you are now as free as I am, and if those that claim to be your superiors do not know that you are free, take the sword and bayonet and teach them that you are - for God created all men free, giving to each the same rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In reference to you, colored people, let me say God has made you free. Days after the surrender of the Confederacy, Abraham Lincoln rode into Richmond, VA, the former capital of the slaveholders, where he stood upon the stairs of the former Confederate capitol building and told a large gathering crowd of black people days into their freedom,

There was no ambiguity that the war had buried chattel slavery once and for all. to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens. The Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first declaration of civil rights in the United States, stated thatĬitizens of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States . . . The Union Army, led by two hundred thousand black soldiers, had destroyed the institution of slavery as a result of their victory, black people were now to be no longer property but citizens of the United States. On April 12, 1865, the American Civil War officially came to end when the Union Army accepted the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy on the steps of a courthouse in Appomattox, VA.

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