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Watch Night: A holy ritual on New Year s Eve bears witness to the unfinished business of emancipation

Library of Congress Early in “The Souls of Black Folk,” the book that established his reputation and remains a classic to this day, W.E.B. DuBois observed of African-American religion: “Few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain Liberty.” DuBois pointedly noted that he was writing precisely 40 years since the emancipation of 3.5 million Black people then enslaved in the Confederacy. He was not only identifying the liberation theology at the heart of African-American Christianity in general. He was describing a specific and holy ritual that is traced to the eve of Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation: Watch Night.

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