April 17, 2023, DC Emancipation Day weekend activities will culminate with the Reading of the Names of the First Freed at the African American Civil War Memorial on Vermont Ave. NW Washington, D. C. At the start of the Civil War in 1861 there were 3.9 million enslaved blacks held in captivity in the United States with thousands of enslaved persons being held in Washington, DC. After the Confederate firing on Ft. Sumpter, Frederick Douglass, and other abolitionists started agitating for ways and means by which slavery could be abolished and the country could, at last, live up to the ideals of the Preamble that stated: “All men are created equal”.
