Juneteenth
What is this day - and why it means so much this year.
I don’t know about you, but over the course of a few days, a lot of workplaces decided to treat Juneteenth as a company holiday — almost certainly as a reaction to the massive, ongoing Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the death of George Floyd. And let’s be clear: it’s being treated not so much as a holiday than as a secular holy day.
Many places are treating Juneteenth as a day for badly-needed reflection on Black America’s continuing struggle for freedom and liberty; a literal fight for life that’s ongoing; and the ability to pursue happiness, however one defines that.
Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. On June 19th, Union forces led by Major General Gordon Granger landed at Galveston, Texas, bearing news that the Civil War was over, and that the enslaved were now free.
One of General Granger’s first actions - as he sought to re-establish Union control over a rebellious Texas - was a public proclamation of General Order Number 3 to the Texan public. This order began with:
The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.
Bear in mind: this was two and a half years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which became official on January 1, 1863.
Despite the Confederate surrender in April, Texas was the most remote of the slaver states, with a low presence of Union troops, so enforcement of the proclamation had been slow and inconsistent, at best. Later attempts to explain the extraordinary two and a half year delay in the announcement and enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation resulted in a variety of different stories over the years. One was a tale of a messenger who was waylaid and murdered en route to Texas with the news; another was that the enslavers deliberately kept the news in order to hang on to their enslaved plantation laborers. A third is that Union forces held back in 1864 and 1865 so that the enslavers could reap one final cotton harvest.
There might be truth in all these; I don’t know. A common misconception is that Juneteenth marks the end of slavery in the United States; it does not. This day marks the emancipation of all slaves in the Confederacy. Slavery was still legal and existed in the Union border states after June 19, 1865. Slavery didn’t officially end until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865; that amendment abolished slavery entirely in all U.S. states and territories, except as a condition of imprisonment.
Juneteenth still isn’t a federal holiday, although it really should be. However, 45 states and the District of Columbia celebrate it as an official state holiday. Texas was the first to do so, in 1980; New Hampshire was the latest to make it official last year. Virginia and New York look set to follow: Virginia’s governor said he’d propose legislation to make it a paid state holiday, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared it a holiday for state employees on Wednesday.
Why is it resonating so profoundly this year? Probably - and this is just my sense - because right now is the first time in a long time that Black American demands feel like they’re being heard at a root level. This moment really feels like a revolutionary moment. We’ve seen an astonishing shift and speed of change over the last two weeks or so.
So: let’s take today to celebrate and reflect. An excellent place to begin is at The Atlantic. The magazine made its name as a platform for abolitionism, and in that spirit, Atlantic editor Gillian White put together a remarkable list of the magazine’s writing on race and racism in America. Some of the selections include:
Reconstruction by Frederick Douglass, December 1866. “No republic is safe that tolerates a privileged class, or denies to any of its citizens equal rights and equal means to maintain them.”
Strivings of the Negro People by W. E. B. Du Bois, August 1897. “It dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”
The Negro Is Your Brother (Letter From Birmingham Jail) by Martin Luther King Jr., August 1963. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”
Dynamite by Kwame Turé (Stokely Carmichael) and Charles Hamilton, 1967. “These are the conditions which create dynamite in the ghettos. And when there are explosions—explosions of frustration, despair, and hopelessness—the larger society becomes indignant and utters irrelevant clichés about maintaining law and order.”
The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates, June 2014. “And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations — by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences — is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely.”
What If Reconstruction Hadn’t Failed? by Annette Gordon-Reed, October 2015. “In the end, the opportunities for blacks, the South, and the country as a whole that were lost because of the resistance to and abandonment of Reconstruction stand as one of the great tragedies of American history.”
The Quintessential Americanness of Juneteenth by Vann R. Newkirk II, June 2017. “In its spread across the country and gradual supplanting of other emancipation celebrations, Juneteenth has always retained that sense of belatedness. It is the observance of a victory delayed, of foot-dragging and desperate resistance by white supremacy against the tide of human rights, and of a legal freedom trampled by the might of state violence.”
There’s just a massive amount of brilliance in that compilation; make haste to enlighten yourself.
I love all of you. Thank you for letting me visit your inboxes. Let’s take a moment to reflect today, and this weekend. I’m going to close with a hymn I’ve long loved, appropriate to the moment.
Stony the road we trod
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died
Yet with a steady beat
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past
'Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast