April 16 · This Day in America
Nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln signs a law that ends slavery in the District of Columbia — in the capital of the United States, in the shadow of the Capitol dome itself. More than three thousand people who went to sleep as property wake up free. The act is imperfect by design: it pays slaveholders up to $300 for each person they can no longer own, and offers the freed money to leave the country. But it is the first time the federal government has abolished slavery anywhere, and it is real, and it is now. Freedom arrives not as a battlefield rumor but as a signature on a page. Washington's Black residents have marked April 16 as Emancipation Day every year since 1866 — a small, stubborn celebration that the words on the founding documents could, with enough fighting, be made to mean what they said.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1947
Unveiling his portrait in the South Carolina statehouse, the elder statesman and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch tells the room: "Let us not be deceived — we are today in the midst of a cold war." The phrase, fed to him by a speechwriter, is exactly right and instantly permanent. For the next forty-four years it will be the two words that describe the whole anxious shape of the world, and the standoff that ends only when the Soviet Union does.
Source: www.history.com
“Let us not be deceived — we are today in the midst of a cold war.”Bernard Baruch, 1947