Today is August 28th. 153 years ago today, on August 28th 1833, slavery was abolished in most of the British Empire.
29 years later, on August 28th 1862, the Second Battle of Bull Ran began in the American Civil War. Over the next three days, more than 17,000 people would be killed or wounded. The Union loss in this battle helped convince the American government that emancipating slaves was a military necessity. (Let’s not labor under the delusion that the South was racist and the North wasn’t. Both were racist.)
93 years later, on August 28th 1955, a 14-year-old black boy named Emmett Till was murdered for the crime of speaking to a white woman.
8 years later, on August 28th 1963, hundreds of thousands of Civil Rights activists marched on Washington and Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
August 28th is an unusual date only in that so many widely known moments in history occurred. The truth is, as writers from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Sonia Sanchez have pointed out, the history of race in America is the history of post-Columbus America. Race is not a sidebar or a footnote, and when we treat it as such, we further marginalize people who have been structurally marginalized since the moment Europeans arrived in the Americas.
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