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First Freed:
Washington, D.C., in the Emancipation Era
Edited by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis 

On April 16th, 1862, nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, enslaved Africans residing in the District of Columbia were freed by an act of Congress. The District of Columbia Emancipation Act, signed by President Abraham Lincoln and funded to the tune of nearly a million dollars, not only ended slavery in the Nation’s Capital, but for the first time offered monetary compensation to both slaves and slave owners.  

This revised edition of award-winning author and historian Elizabeth Clark-Lewis’s 1998 volume, published to commemorate the 140th anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, provides readers with critical research and information about this often overlooked and underexamined aspect of local and national history. Presenting seven essays from the proceedings of a community-based conference held in Washington, D.C.,

FIRST FREED sheds new light on the capital city’s unique role in the perpetuation and demise of slavery in the United States.

About the Author 

Elizabeth Clark-Lewis is author of Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration.  She is also the producer of an oral history-based public television documentary on the same topic, “Freedom Bags,” and director of the Public History Program in the Department of History at Howard University. 

Praise for FIRST FREED: 

“…a gem of a collection…an invaluable resource...compelling reading…that  evoke[s] the strength, sophistication, and political astuteness of a many-faceted community in a brief flowering of opportunity…”

Jane Freundel Levy, Washington History Review

Publication Date: May 2002 
ISBN 0-88258-207-0  //  6” x 9”  //  218 pp.
$23.95