EPILOGUE On March 16, 1995, the Mississippi legislature finally got around to ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.1 The amendment, banning slavery in the United States, had actually gone into effect in December of 1865 after three-fourths of the states approved it. As for implementing the amendment, Mississippi''s ratification was meaningless. But in terms of providing insight into the history of emancipation and race relations in America, Mississippi''s delayed action speaks loudly. Freedom''s delay may have officially ended in December of 1865, but it was a contested freedom that would continue to strain at the very fabric of American society for generations to come. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.

C., on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. began one of America''s greatest speeches with the words Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.

One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.2 Resistance to freedom for all Americans before 1865 involved much more than the economic importance of the institution of slavery. Race was at the very heart of that institution, and racial considerations have continued to be at the center of American society into our own day. There was never any legal question that the Thirteenth Amendment gave all Americans freedom from slavery, but the extent of that guaranteed freedom, the extent to which government should be proactive to ensure that freedom, and how responsibility should be divided between state and federal governments on this issue have been open to interpretation over the decades since the amendment went into effect. It became clear after the Civil War that no legislation could instantly change long-held attitudes about race and racial prejudice. As a conflict between preservation of the Union and Southern independence, the Civil War had clear-cut objectives. But when the war, from a Northern perspective, also evolved into a social revolution to end slavery, it became far more complicated to predict or to establish a consensus on what the outcome would, or should, look like. The years following the Civil War saw an America both radically transformed in many ways and at the same time amazingly impervious to change when it came to freedom and equality for America''s former slave population.

The turbulent and violent years of Reconstruction, which began with a roar of freedom and ended with a whimper of accommodation to the Old South, resulted in scant permanent improvement in the lives of many of the nation''s black population, despite the great price that had been paid for their freedom. In the struggle for true freedom and equality in America, emancipation proved to be, in words used by Winston Churchill pertaining to the Second World War, "not the end, not even the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning."3 It is perhaps as true today as in the post-Civil War era that the nation needs to be reminded of Lincoln''s words at Gettysburg: "It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us." While so much has been achieved, the struggle to complete the unfinished work of realizing liberty and justice for all continues in our own day.