Continuing our unit on the Civil War, our class examined the progression of African American freedom during the time period. The essential questions for this lesson were: Who "gave" freedom to enslaved Americans? Did freedom come from above or below? To what extent were Abraham Lincoln's actions influenced by the actions of enslaved Americans? Freedom from above indicates that people in positions of power are the ones who brought about change, while freedom from below indicates that the actual group of affected people got up and did something about their situation, bringing about their own change. We looked at 6 different sources and decided if they showed freedom from above or below. On our new whiteboard surfaces, we put the sources in order of what we thought they showed.
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The 6 documents, with a brief analysis, are put in order here. The top 4 documents, from Lincoln, can be found here,
while the bottom 2, on African Americans in the Civil War, are found here. |
Overall, freedom came from below in this case. Though Lincoln was the one that did the actual freeing part, his documents show a slight reluctance to follow through with this; he takes multiple baby steps before going all out with freeing the slaves. Instead, African Americans forced the issue here, making themselves a visible problem to the Union, who needed to deal with them somehow.
I feel that a similar "freedom from below" situation can easily be seen LGBTQ community. After such a prolonged period of stigma and oppression, it's nice to see them getting some visibility today, like the Bruce Jenner interview in recent news. I'd say this is freedom from below, considering how hard the LGBTQ community has worked the get their message out, especially with some federal governments' reluctance on the subject of gay marriage. The dichotomy of freedom coming from above or below, while not necessarily black or white, is an interesting way to look at any major change in the rights of a group of people.
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