What did this new status of freedom look like for different people?

“Emancipation: The Past and Future” (Creator unknown), Harper's Weekly, 1863. Courtesy of Wikicommons.
For some, that meant putting families back together — finding children who had been sold and locating spouses, sisters and brothers. People literally put ads in the newspaper to try to locate family members. Legalizing marriages also became very important because enslaved marriages weren’t legally recognized prior to emancipation.
And for some, freedom was more about economic opportunity. For example, the right to own the land people cultivated. The petitioning for land is where the saying “40 acres and a mule” comes from. When General William Sherman asked certain Black leaders in South Carolina what they needed for them to be free, the response was economic opportunity and the land they built, worked and cultivated. While that promise was never fully realized, for many Black Americans then and now, freedom in its fullest sense means having economic opportunity and building generational wealth.
Can you provide greater insight about the removal of Native people from their land and the relationship to the enslavement of African people by Native nations?
You can’t talk about Indian removal without talking about slavery, and you can’t talk about the expansion of slavery without talking about the expulsion of Native people. Historians have done a fantastic job showing the expansion of slavery in the United States, particularly in the 19th century, is due to Indian removal (a better word now being used by scholars is expulsion) of Native societies in the South.
For example, the ancestral homelands of certain Indigenous nations were in areas ideal for cotton production — Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Once they were expelled westward to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, cotton production and slavery in these southern states exploded.
As Native people were pushed out, they brought slaves to build and cultivate the land. Land dispossession and the violation of Native sovereignty affected the growth of chattel slavery in several ways. 
As people were either forced or willfully migrated to Texas, Kansas and Missouri in search of land-owning opportunities, these places became hotbeds of controversy: Are they going to be a slave state? Or are they going to be a free state? The voluntary migrations where white people were looking for opportunities for land are wrapped in the expansion of slavery.
Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, but the part of Mexico that is now known as Texas was given an exemption and continued to enslave people. In 1836, Texas declared independence from Mexico, in large part over conflicts with Mexico about preserving slavery. Texas joined the Confederacy as a state in 1845 and, by1860, there were approximately 180,000 people enslaved. Five years later, it was almost 250,000.
In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation stated enslaved people were to be freed, but it wasn’t until June 19, 1865, that it happened in Texas.
When we consider how the past informs the present and the theme of this year’s inaugural Juneteenth Celebration at MSU: From Freedom to Liberation, how can history help inform pursuits of liberation today?
I think we can already see how it can inform pursuits of liberation. We see discussions beginning on reparations to Black Americans for the labor performed during slavery. Universities are making efforts to acknowledge their roles in using enslaved labor; one seminary is even giving reparations to descendants of enslaved people who worked there.
We see research projects like the one here at MSU, Enslaved.org, that are working to highlight the voices of the enslaved and show events such as the Atlantic slave trade from the perspective of the enslaved. A knowledge of history, particularly the Black experience and the Black diaspora, and making it accessible is instrumental to pursuits of liberation and making the U.S. a liberatory space for Black people in concrete ways. You must know the history to think about how to reconcile it.