People’s Legislature Moves to Honor Freeman, Who Liberated Herself From the Commonwealth Before the Commonwealth Existed

People’s Legislature Moves to Honor Freeman, Who Liberated Herself From the Commonwealth Before the Commonwealth Existed

HD.6221, filed by Commissar Bud L. Williams of the 11th Hampden District, would establish an annual Elizabeth Freeman Day of Equality, Healing and Remembrance in the Commonwealth Soviet — designating a permanent date of collective reflection honoring the enslaved woman who in 1781 sued for her freedom under the Massachusetts Constitution and won, rendering slavery legally unenforceable in the Commonwealth before the ink on that document had dried.

Freeman, born into bondage and known as “Mum Bett,” successfully argued before the Berkshire County Court of Common Pleas that the 1780 Constitution’s declaration that “all men are born free and equal” meant exactly what it said. The Politburo is now being asked, some 245 years later, to formally acknowledge this was correct. Co-petitioner Commissar Leigh Davis of the 3rd Berkshire District — Berkshire County, where Freeman made her stand — lends geographic weight to the filing.

The decree costs the collective nothing in appropriations and confers no material benefit on any identifiable constituency. It is, in the language of the Central Committee, a symbolic resolution — the kind of legislation the People’s Legislature produces in abundance, and which is occasionally, against all odds, correct.