Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery

"We created Envisioning Emancipation in an effort to answer a question: What does freedom look like? We wanted to create a visual history, composed of historical photographs—photographs of enslaved people, of abolitionists and of the emancipated—to see how people represented themselves. Our focus was, how did Black people represent themselves as spouses, as parents, as siblings and as members of communities? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter We assembled about 175 or so photographs; some of the earliest known photographs of African Americans that were made in this country from the 1850s on. I think our last image was from 1963, of a man who had been born into slavery. We wanted a generational history of Black life. We include pictures of Juneteenth celebrations—gorgeous groups of communities, children, old people dressed in beautiful attire to both acknowledge their history and assert themselves as citizens determined to claim their rights as free people. My sense is, not so much. Juneteenth commemorations were celebrations by and for Black communities, affirming their history as a fundamental part of United States history and affirming Black people’s sense of citizenship in our country too. That had a very strong resonance for people who traced their ancestry back to enslaved people."