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Voyage to Discovery: Untold Stories of African Americans and the Sea (New!!) Presidential Proclamation--National African American History Month 2011 Black History Month Program 2011 Census Facts for Features fact sheet on Black History Month White House Initative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities Information Center from USAJobs U.S. Census Press Release, Facts for Feature-African-American History Month: December 2009 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Black History Month Web Site - highlights contributions made by the agency's African-American meteorologists, oceanographers, engineers and other employees. Library of Congress - African American Mosaic Online Exhibit - African American culture and history Library of Congress - The African American Odyssey Online Exhibit - A quest for full citizenship. The National Park Service's Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement.
Call to Serve -- a joint initiative sponsored by the Partnership for Public Service and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, providing information on careers in the federal government. Search the directory of federal internships and information with a network of over 600 colleges. In addition, you'll find information about multiple vacancies in the federal sector, subdivided by jobs that require language skills, loan repayment programs, etc.
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Black Employment Program Black History Month, February 2013
At the Crossroads of Freedom and Equality: The Emancipation Proclamation and the March on Washington
The year 2013 marks two important anniversaries in the history of African Americans and the United States. On January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation set the United States on the path of ending slavery. A war‐time measure issued by President Abraham Lincoln, the proclamation freed relatively few slaves, but it fueled the fire of the enslaved to strike for their freedom. Increasingly those in bondage streamed into the camps of the Union Army, reclaiming ownership of their bodies. As Fredrick Douglass predicted, the war for the Union became a war against slavery. The actions of both Lincoln and the slaves made clear that the Civil War was in deed, as well as in theory, a struggle between the forces of slavery and freedom. The dismantlement of slavery had begun.
A century later in 1963, America once again stood at the crossroads. Nine years earlier, the Supreme Court had outlawed racial segregation in the public schools. Yet, the nation had not committed itself to equality of citizenship. Segregation and innumerable other forms of discrimination made second‐class citizenship the extra‐constitutional status of non‐whites. In the White House, John F. Kennedy, another progressive president, temporized over the legal and moral issue of his time. Like Lincoln before him, national concerns out‐weighed his personal beliefs. On August 27, 1963, hundreds of thousands of Americans, blacks and whites, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics , marched to the memorial of Abraham Lincoln, the author of the Emancipation Proclamation, in pursuit of the ideal of equality of citizenship. It was on this occasion that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous speech, “I Have a Dream.” Just as the Emancipation Proclamation marked the beginning of the end of slavery, the March on Washington, as it became known, numbered the days of second‐class citizenship. In marking the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History invites all Americans to join us in studying and celebrating how two different generations of African Americans each transformed America.
This copy may be republished electronically with the following acknowledgement and link by the Association for the Study of African American Life & History at www.asalh.org.
A century ago, an interracial group of Americans joined together and formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Two generations after emancipation, a tide of racism had betrayed the promise of first-class citizenship. In the South, whites had stripped blacks of the right to vote and constructed a society based on racial segregation. In the North, African Americans confronted myriad forms of discrimination that thwarted their aspirations. The Supreme Court turned a blind eye to the denigration of American citizenship taking place across the land and in the government itself.
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