August 1 is Emancipation Day

Emancipation Day celebrations began on 1 August 1834, when people of African descent in Upper and Lower Canada marked the end of more than 250 years of enslavement throughout the British Empire.

The Slavery Abolition Act was passed by the British Parliament in 1833 and took effect on 1 August 1834, legally ending the centuries-old system of colonial enslavement of people of African descent throughout the British Empire. Emancipation was immediate in what is now Canada and in other colonies such as Bermuda and Antigua. Elsewhere in the British Caribbean, the transition to freedom took another three or four years as formerly enslaved people were forced to serve mandatory periods of apprenticeship imposed by the Act as additional compensation to slaveholding planters. By 1838, roughly one million people of African descent had been legally freed in Great Britain and its colonies.