I feel like you are saying exactly what I am saying and then telling me I’m saying it wrong. I’m a bit baffled as to how I’m somehow bastardizing history.

My original point was that the oppressed cannot alleviate the yoke of their bondage by appealing to the morals of their oppressors. Which is completely true, no slave or indigenous person ever “convinced” a slave owner of the wrong of slavery or indigenous land theft that I can guarantee. Slaves themselves had to fight for it themselves and when the truth of this fact threatened to upend the union, a war happened. Were there sympathetic northerners like abolitionists and sympathizers to the plight of black peoples? Absolutely. But freed and escaped slaves like Fredrick Douglas had to speak truth to power and ONLY when the security of the union was in danger did the president free the slaves. Period. At no point before that did any legislation pass to free slaves because…

The oppressed (slaves) cannot appeal to the moral virtues their oppressors (United States government in general and the confederacy in particular) to free themselves

They had to fight, plead and advocate for themselves

Even AFTER empancipation there was STILL sharecropping, vagrancy laws, sundown towns, lynchings, redlining, segregation, Jim Crow laws, anti-miscegenation etc etc.

Which spawned the civil rights movement to improve the living conditions of African Americans in the centuries after emancipation, and who lead the civil rights movement? African Americans

Emancipation was not a “gift”, slaves fought and died for it for themselves.

Freedom is not a gift of patience, but the reward of determination and sacrifice, it must be taken.