This Saturday will be an auspicious day for the United States, as it is the second anniversary of the day when every state officially ratified the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. To clarify, it's the amendment that banned slavery in 1865.
If anyone reading this thought, perhaps, that slavery was legally abolished after the Civil War, they would be correct. While it is true that the designation of human beings as property was made illegal in our country due to a majority of states ratifying the amendment, there were still some holdouts. Some states, including Kentucky and Mississippi, didn’t officially ratify it for many years to come.
In 1976, Kentucky decided that formally ratifying the amendment might be a good idea, and Mississippi stood alone. Finally, on Feb. 7, 2013, the state notified its Office of the Federal Register that it had finally ratified the 13th amendment.
To Mississippi’s credit, this was not when the state’s legislature actually voted the amendment into law. Both houses of the state legislature had passed a measure to ratify the amendment years before, but a bureaucratic error had prevented any notification from being sent to the Federal Register. Mississippi will still be able to hold onto the title of being the last state to ratify the amendment.
Race relations in the United States today still hold a great deal of tension during this Black History Month. From national protests over tensions between police and minority communities to local student movements over monuments, the number of important conversations going on about race in America is high.
Fortunately, there is positive news — we can take solace in the fact that all fifty states in our country have agreed that slavery should not be legal in the land of the free.
state@dailytarheel.com
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