; Whereas, even after the Emancipation Proclamation, Confederate States ignored Lincoln’s emancipation order and maintained the institution of slavery; Whereas slavery did not legally end until 1865, with the close of the Civil War; Whereas, while the 13th Amendment is known to have abolished slavery and indentured servitude, it made an exception for those convicted of crimes; Whereas, rather than shrinking after the technical abolition of slavery, Southern plantations increased in size, as for example, the number of Louisiana plantations in selected parishes increased by 286 percent between 1860 and 1880; Whereas, following the Civil War, in 1865, Confederate veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan, a group that would unleash genocidal violence and a reign of terror across the country for decades to come; Whereas the Federal Government provided reparations to White slaveowners in the District of Columbia for the loss of human property through the Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862, while never addressing the need for restitution to enslaved Black people and their descendants; Whereas the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands Bureau, also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established to provide economic and social aid to formerly enslaved Black people in 1865, but was eventually looted and corrupted by White politicians and businessmen, resulting in its demise in 1872, and in more than 60,000 Black people and organizations losing their deposits and having to wait years for only a fraction of them to be returned; Whereas, Callie House, a formerly enslaved Black woman, alongside Reverend Isaiah Dickerson, founded the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association in 1898, in a mass effort to pass Federal pension legislation for formerly enslaved people, and whose efforts were ultimately shut down by Federal agencies; Whereas an estimated 6,500 racial terror lynchings took place between 1865 and 1950