Today is Emancipation Day. It is a Freedom Day we must all know and commemorate regardless of identity.
Here’s way.
- Emancipation.
- Etymology, from French émancipation, from Latin emancipationem/emancipare.
- Meaning to free from ownership control, or power, or give up one’s ownership of
- A key usage/reference – freedom from enslavement.
- The Merriam Webster dictionary definition: “the act or process of emancipating.”
The act of emancipation that is commemorated on August 1st annually in Canada (since 2021) and across several Caribbean nations is the remembrance of August 1, 1834, which is the date that the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 came into effect across the British Empire. This Act created the pathway to freedom from enslavement for Black (and Indigenous peoples) in Canada (see more here).
- Check out my (ongoing and periodically updated) list of African and Black Canadian History for more…
However, the process of emancipation for all of us, whether those previously enslaved and the previous enslavers, continues. It is a fact that the proclamation of emancipation initially applied to children under 6 years old only and it took a few more years for full emancipation for those who remained enslaved and indentured. It is a fact that the logics and mindsets that created enslavement continue to plague our societies today in what the United Nations calls the poison of racism.
This day is not about distant past events. We have come a long way, and yet we continue to live with the unravelling of the process of emancipation. For the avoidance of doubt, here are three relevant and very present examples for you to reflect on.
It was only in May this year that France’s National Assembly voted unanimously to end the 17th century law, Code Noir, signed by King Louis XIV in 1685, which codified the treatment of enslaved people in their colonies as property and led to widespread abuse and oppression of Black enslaved peoples. Code Noir widely influenced the subsequent classification of enslaved Africans as property in French colonies and beyond, including in Canada’s New France. Code Noir was only officially repealed on May 28, 2026, 178 years after slavery was abolished. Let that sink in.
When the repeal of Code Noir hit the news, I was reminded that in British Columbia where I live, it was only in 2020 that the City Council of West Vancouver passed a unanimous motion to work with the provincial government to formally remove historic land covenant clauses that prevented peoples of African or Asian descent to own, reside or remain in residences in the British Properties neighbourhood, unless they were servants of the occupiers. The work to formally strike all such racist clauses in land titles provincially has still not been completed, ostensibly due to the cost of doing so.
Just this year, on 25 March which is the annual International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, The United Nations Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialized Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime against Humanity (UNDOTEA) passed with 123 votes in favour. This non-binding motion recognized the crime of an estimated 12.5 million Africans being captured and transported to Latin America, the Caribbean and North America to live and die in enslavement and the additional official estimate of over 2 million African people who died during the horrific Middle Passage journey. There were three votes against this motion and 52 abstentions, including all 27 members of the European Union [you can see the results and make your own judgement and assessments here]. Most devastating for me was that my Canadian home was among those that abstained despite a previous United Nations Working Group Report that has found enduring anti-Black racism in Canadian housing, education, employment, criminal justice and healthcare systems. I hold a vision that as happened with Canada’s reversal of their initial ‘no’ vote on the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, this abstention will not be Canada’s final record on this matter as it continues its own reckoning with Black communities.
I witnessed and experienced this connection between Canada’s enslavement past and our present on a visit, somewhat of a pilgrimage, to Nova Scotia this year. As Canadians of Sierra Leonean descent, my family is an example of the long-lasting impacts of enslavement, colonization, forced migration and displacement journeys that mark communities of African descent. My husband and I are both immigrants and former refugees, who came to Canada in the shadow of a civil war with roots and echoes to the enslavement and colonial histories of Africans. Furthermore, the Gilpin-Jackson family are Freetown Krios (Creoles), with at least a 3/5th probability (after eliminating the Krio people groups they are definitely not descended from) of being descendants of the Black Loyalists who made the journey from Nova Scotia to present-day Sierra Leone in 1792 (see my previous post about this family connection here).
It was surreal for us to visit the Black Loyalist Heritage Museum, The Black Cultural Centre and Africville. We traced the footsteps of these likely ancestors (both those that left and stayed), listened to their stories on audio archives and contended with the harsh realities of their lives in Nova Scotia that led to the exodus to Freetown. Those conditions included living in pit houses that they were taught to build for survival by the Mi’kmaq Indigenous people when they were not given the land they were promised in exchange for freedom and fighting for the British in the American Revolution. We perused the Book of Negroes and found entries for connected family names: 62 Jacksons, 3 Griffins, and 2 Turners. We stood in the church where they prayed. In a profound twist, we discovered that the Wilkinson Road we had both once lived and grew up on in Freetown was named after Black Loyalist Moses Wilkinson! And yet, in the midst, we were shocked to learn that as recently as in 2006, there was a likely racially motivated arson to burn it all down.
These examples are but drops in the bucket of the unfolding process of emancipation. Today, we are faced with an age of recognition, reckoning and reparative justice. The United Nations has declared a Second International Decade for People of African Descent to build on the foundation of increased awareness of the first decade, towards ongoing transformative change. We are seeing African and Caribbean nations doubling down on calls for Reparative Justice. And for the first time, on Africa Day this year, Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology in the Magnifica Humanitas for the church’s role in legitimizing slavery and failing to condemn it.
All these events are the push and pull of transformative change. The process of emancipation continues, whether for those who remain in modern day slavery around the world, or those descended from enslavement or those who are on their ongoing journey of self-emancipation from the psychological and mental slavery that is required to free the psyche of the traumatizing impacts of generational (re)enslavement.
In a decolonial twist, as I reflected on the meaning of emancipation as act and process, it struck me that the etymology and root of the word in its European origins focuses on the giver of freedoms–the one who relinquishes or gives up control. It is not lost on me, and it should not be lost on any of us, that the relinquishing was in reference to fellow human’s lives. People, who had literally been owned as property by other people.
So, I would rather think of this day, both for those who gave up what they should never have ‘owned’ and for those who fought, took back their right to self-determination, and continue to defend the human rights of all people, as a commemoration of freedom. As Frederick Douglass famously said in the1857 speech on West India Emancipation “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Today, I ask you, what is your stand for freedom, in terms of the ongoing process of emancipation? It is past time to recognize the inalienable human rights of those that have historically struggled for freedom. It is also way past time for those who have perpetuated enslavement of others in one way or another to be free of the mental chains that lead to ongoing racialization and the oppression of fellow humans. Join the 2026 wall of freedom dreamers and actors. Make a freedom commitment to practice for the rest of this year and ongoing…
Today, I am celebrating those that never gave up on Freedom Dreams so that I can be here, writing this post.
I am celebrating those who continue to work to prevent those freedoms from being artificially limited by the same logics that brought humanity to enslavement.
And I am dreaming of a future where the challenges and barriers that persist today for Black and Indigenous communities, and all peoples, are a figment of history that we only encounter in our museums so that we never forget the lessons of the then and now.