The end of slavery in the United States is the most important turning point in American constitutional, political, and social history. The legacies of emancipation will be with us forever, shaping who we are as a people. This traveling exhibition, on display in Trexler Library for one month–funded by a grant from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History–charts the history of emancipation and the struggle for civil rights from 1850 to 1964, focusing on how, due to the persistence of African Americans, abolitionists, and politicians, the Civil War became an “abolition war”; how the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments transformed the Constitution of the United States; and how we continue to debate the legacies of slavery and emancipation and reach for the goal of equality.
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