Whereas the District of Columbia has been a focal point of the Nation’s complex racial history, which has included slavery, the Civil War, killings, segregation, and disenfranchisement, among other violations of civil and human rights; Whereas, on April 16, 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which freed the approximately 3,100 enslaved individuals in the District of Columbia and authorized compensation to former enslavers; Whereas, on January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which established a new birth of freedom by legally emancipating millions of enslaved individuals in the 10 States of the Confederacy not under Union control, freeing the majority of the Nation’s enslaved individuals; Whereas the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which reads Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation , was adopted on December 6, 1865, and effectively outlawed slavery in the United States; Whereas the enslavement of persons of African descent endured for more than two centuries in what is now the United States, including the District of Columbia; Whereas, in 2005, District of Columbia Emancipation Day, commemorating April 16, the date of the signing of the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, was made a legal public holiday in the District of Columbia to be celebrated annually on April 16; Whereas the residents of the District of Columbia pay more per capita in Federal taxes than the residents of any State