On June 19, 1865, Black dockworkers in Galveston, Texas, first heard the word that freedom for the enslaved had come. “There were speeches, sermons and shared meals, mostly held at Black churches, the safest places to have such celebrations,” history professor Kris Manjapra writes. “But the emancipation that took place in Texas that day in 1865 was just the latest in a series of emancipations that had been unfolding since the 1770s.”
Kris Manjapra
Kris Manjapra is a history professor at Tufts University. He works at the intersection of transnational history and the critical study of race and colonialism. Manjara served as the chair of the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University from 2017-2021. He is the founder of a site-based nonprofit, Black History in Action, dedicated to the restoration and reactivation of a Black cultural heritage center in Cambridge, Mass. He also co-organizes a free online community certificate course, entitled Black Futures Matter, serving people’s assemblies across the US and the Caribbean. Manjapra is the author of five books, including his comparative study of global emancipation processes and the implications for reparations movement today: "Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation," "Colonialism in Global Perspective," and "Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectual across Empire."