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12 7 Emancipation Day
The United States recently made Juneteenth its newest Federal holiday to commemorate the date slavery ended, however, there was another date that was previously celebrated by U.S. abolitionist societies: Aug. 1.
August 1st, 1834, had marked the end of slavery in the British Empire, when the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act came into force and many of Britain’s former colonies in the Caribbean, as well as Canada, Aug. 1 is celebrated as Emancipation Day. The Caribbean was the center of British imperial political economy in the 18th century. Between 1619 and the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, at least 365,563 enslaved people disembarked in British North America and what would become the United States of America. By comparison, more than 2,221,000 enslaved people disembarked in Britain’s sugarproducing colonies in the Caribbean, including more than 1 million people in Jamaica alone. N.Y., Frederick Douglass — who had toured Britain several times, to enthusiastic crowds — weighed Britain’s achievements in the fight against slavery. The British Empire had “made the name of England known and loved in every Slave Cabin,” he said, and “spread alarm, hatred, and dread in all the accursed slave markets of our boasted republic.” But freedom for Black people remained elusive. The formal policy shift, rooted in imperialism, capitalism and coercion that occurred on Aug. 1, 1834, was something very different from the struggle for freedom celebrated on Emancipation Day.
Jul/Aug 2021
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