Emancipation: False Promises After the Civil War? During a speech regarding civil rights and the role of Emancipation, American president Lyndon B. Johnson stated that the Emancipation Proclamation failed in a manner that it will not truly come into fruition until aspects of life and opportunity are no longer intertwined with race (Johnson 1973). Though emancipation gave African Americans a false promise of respect, Hunter argues that the proclamation was used as a tool for the South to confine the Black community to degradation while Du Bois argues that despite the restrictive nature of the proclamation, African Americans can be successful if they can adhere to societal expectations and conform in sectors such as the workforce and when exercising their civil liberties. When the ‘Work or Fight’ law …show more content…
The Work or Fight Law left Black women between a rock and a hard place, as the policy took away any free will they may have had prior to the law's implementation pertaining to their careers (ibid). Not only were they forced to leave behind the work they had fought so hard for and built from the ground up, but Black women found themselves in similar, if not identical positions to where they were prior to Emancipation. Just as decades prior to the proclamation, they were being forced into hard labour with little to no pay while attending to every beck and call of the white families they were forced to work for, out of fear of being beat or subject to worse forms of punishment (ibid). Instead of the physical punishment they were subjected to on plantations, Black women were now faced with the threat of group attacks and being arrested for not fulfilling every demand of their white counterparts. For Black folks, specifically Black women, the Work or Fight law was a component of Emancipation that acted as a dead end for African Americans, who even after forty years of Emancipation, have yet to truly experience what it