A year after protests for racial justice swept the nation,
propelling conversations on how to improve conditions for Black lives, the
country is getting ready to celebrate the 158th anniversary of one of its
earliest liberation moments: Juneteenth.
A portmanteau of “June” and “nineteenth,” Juneteenth marks the day
in 1865 when a group of enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally learned
that they were free from the institution of slavery. But, woefully, this was
almost two-and-a-half years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the
Emancipation Proclamation. As much as Juneteenth represents freedom, it also
represents how emancipation
was tragically delayed for enslaved people in the deepest reaches of the
Confederacy.
The first Juneteenth in 1866 was celebrated with food, singing,
and the reading of spirituals — and it commemorated newly freed Black people taking pride in their progress. Today, Juneteenth celebrations span the world,
with the global diaspora adopting the day as one to recognize emancipation at
large.
After being largely ignored in
schools, recognition of the day has also grown in recent years, especially amid
a climate seeking justice for Black lives — a Gallup poll in
2021 found most Americans now know about Juneteenth, which is now a national
holiday.
As the American public continues to
grapple with how to talk about slavery and its enduring consequences, the
national recognition of Juneteenth is at least a start to acknowledging the
harmful way America was built and the foundational contributions of the
enslaved.
Setting the foundation for Juneteenth
Often referred to as the Second
American Revolution, the Civil War began in 1861 between northern and southern
states over slavery and economic power. A year into the war, the US Congress
passed the Confiscation Act of 1862, which authorized Union troops to
seize Confederate property, including enslaved people. (The act also
allowed the Union army to recruit Black soldiers.) Months later, on January 1,
1863, President Lincoln affirmed the aims of the act by issuing the final draft
of the Emancipation Proclamation. The document
declared that “all persons held as slaves … are, and
henceforth, shall be free.”
While the proclamation legally
liberated millions of enslaved people in the Confederacy, it exempted those in
the Union-loyal border states of Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky.
These states held Confederate
sympathies and could have seceded; Lincoln exempted them from the
proclamation to prevent this. A year later, in April 1864, the Senate attempted
to close this loophole by passing the 13th
Amendment, prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude in all
states, Union and Confederate. But the amendment wouldn’t be enacted by
ratification until December 1865. In other words, it took two years for the
emancipation of enslaved people to materialize legally.
Not to mention, the ratification happened after the Civil War
had already ended — in
April 1865, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Virginia.
Enslaved people in Texas, meanwhile, didn’t learn about their freedom until
three months later. On June 19, 1865, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger of the Union
army arrived in Galveston and issued General Order No. 3 that
secured the Union army’s authority over Texas. The order stated the following:
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 personal rights and rights of
property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore
existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The
freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes, and work for
wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military
posts, and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or
elsewhere.
Still, even under Order No. 3, as historian Henry
Louis Gates Jr. noted, freedom wasn’t automatic for Texas’s 250,000
enslaved people. “On plantations, masters had to decide when and how to
announce the news — or wait for a government agent to arrive — and it was not
uncommon for them to delay until after the harvest,” he wrote.
Emancipation came gradually for many enslaved people, the
culmination of a century of American abolition efforts, North and South. And
even still, the formerly enslaved were viewed as chattel that merely existed to
work and produce.
Juneteenth
symbolized hope — that was quickly quashed
According to Gates, newly freed Black women and men rallied
around Juneteenth in the first year it was recognized, transforming it from a
“day of unheeded military orders into their own annual rite.”
The first Juneteenth celebration took place in 1866 in Texas
with community gatherings, including sporting events, cookouts, prayers,
dances, parades, and the singing of spirituals like “Many Thousands Gone” and
“Go Down Moses.” Some events even featured
fireworks, which involved filling trees with gunpowder and setting
them on fire.
At the core of the celebrations was a desire to record group
gains since emancipation, “an occasion for gathering lost family members,
measuring progress against freedom and inculcating rising generations with the
values of self-improvement and racial uplift,” Gates wrote.
Communities would read the Emancipation Proclamation as part of
the tradition, which was especially significant during Reconstruction, when the
holiday reinforced hope. Reconstruction (1863-1890) was a time to rebuild the
Southern economy and society through the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and
15th amendments — which
gave Black people freedom, due process, and the right to vote — Black-run
Southern governments, and the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau,
among other efforts.
But the goals of Reconstruction were consistently countered by
white supremacists. For example, Democratic Congress members awarded Republican
Rutherford B. Hayes the 1876 presidential election in exchange for the
withdrawal of Union troops from the South, according to historian Richard M.
Valelly’s The Two Reconstructions: The
Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. After Hayes’s win, leaders
at the state and local levels “weakened black voting in the South by means of
gerrymandering, violence, and intimidation,” Valelly wrote.
Then in 1890, Mississippians drafted a white supremacist state
constitution to disenfranchise local Black people; it included provisions that
required people to be able to read and understand all parts of the state
constitution in order to vote, according to the New
York Times. This barred thousands of illiterate Black people from
voting in the 1890s.
Meanwhile, the Federal Elections Bill, or Lodge Bill, to oversee
Southern elections failed in the summer of 1890, effectively closing the last
window for national voting rights jurisprudence for decades to come. This
signaled the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of Jim Crow. “Once black
southerners were disenfranchised by the early 1900s, the stage was set for a
systematic entrenchment of white supremacist norms and public policies,”
Valelly wrote.
Then, and now, the
symbolism and spirit behind Juneteenth remain sorely needed.
Over time, Juneteenth spread to neighboring states like
Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and eventually to California as Black Texans
moved west; it also appeared in Florida and Alabama in the early 20th century due to migration from Texas, wrote historian
Alwyn Barr in The New
Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 4: Myths, Manners, and Memory.
Perceptions of Juneteenth have also changed over the past
century. During World War I, white people and some Black people even considered
it un-American, unpatriotic, and shameful “because it focused attention on a
dark period in U.S. history,” according to the authors of the academic article “When Peace Come:
Teaching the Significance of Juneteenth.”
According to Barr, Juneteenth observations declined in the 1940s
during World War II but were revived in 1950 “with 70,000 black people on the
Texas State Fair grounds at Dallas.” The celebrations would decline again as
attention went to school desegregation and the civil rights movement in the
late 1950s and 1960s but picked back up in the 1970s as advocates in Texas
launched the first effort to make Juneteenth an unofficial “holiday of
significance ... particularly to the blacks of Texas.”
On January 1, 1980, Juneteenth became a Texas state holiday
after state Rep. Al Edwards put forth legislation. Since that move, individual
states began commemorating Juneteenth, and 48 states
and Washington, DC, currently observe it.
For more than a decade, Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee has
introduced a resolution to
recognize the historical significance of Juneteenth. In 2020, Democrats
introduced a bill to make the Juneteenth a national holiday, but Sen. Ron
Johnson (R-WI) single-handedly blocked it on the grounds that America could not
afford another day off for federal workers. This year, though, the legislation passed
in both the Senate and the House and was signed into law by President Biden —
the day before the very first Juneteenth would be commemorated as a federal
holiday.
The
shift in opinions and recognition of Juneteenth
Juneteenth has been called many things over time: Emancipation
Day, Jubilee Day, Juneteenth National Freedom Day, Juneteenth Independence Day,
and Black Independence Day. And yet despite the many monikers, Juneteenth has faced competition from other emancipation holidays and
has been unknown to many
Americans — until perhaps last year, when widespread protests
for racial justice coincided with the day.
In 2020, corporations pledged to be anti-racist and many
recognized Juneteenth as a company holiday. Cities also
took steps to specifically recognize Juneteenth at the municipal level. For
example, Philadelphia, the site of one of the country’s largest Juneteenth
parades, passed an executive order designating Juneteenth as an official city
holiday for 2020. “This designation of Juneteenth represents my
administration’s commitment to reckon with our own role in maintaining racial
inequities and our understanding of the magnitude of work that lies ahead,” said the city’s
mayor, Jim Kenney.
One reason Juneteenth’s history has
remained widely misunderstood, or even unknown, until recently is because it’s
not often taught in schools. Karlos Hill, an author and University of Oklahoma
professor of African and African American studies, told Vox in 2018 that “Juneteenth as a
moment in African-American history is not, to my knowledge, taught.” As for
history textbooks that already tend to whitewash history, “I
would be willing to guess that there are few, if any, mentions of this
holiday,” Hill said.
In “Teaching the Significance of
Juneteenth,” Shennette Garrett-Scott and others wrote, “It is sometimes hard to
teach small but pivotal moments in American history. Survey classes mostly
allow for covering the biggest events and the most well known people.” But to
help students understand major moments like the passage of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, it is important to teach the smaller historical milestones. To
Garrett-Scott, teaching Juneteenth gives students a fuller picture of the long,
enduring fight for freedom.
Another obstacle that remains for
Juneteenth is the pervasive idea that it’s a “Black thing,” much like Kwanzaa.
“It is seen as a holiday that is just observed by African Americans and is
poorly understood outside of the African American community. It is perceived as
being part of black culture and not ‘American culture,’ so to speak,” Hill
said.
Now, the meaning of
Juneteenth is being seized more broadly by activists as an opportunity for the
United States to come to terms with how slavery continues to affect the lives of
all Americans today — it is something for everyone, of
every race, to engage in. Stereotypes about Black people as being subhuman and
lacking rationality are rooted in slavery. These harmful notions
still rear themselves today as police officers disproportionately kill Black
people and the health care system fails to adequately care for Black bodies.
Advocates argue that the national holiday obviously wouldn’t put an end to
racism but would rather help foster dialogue about the trauma that has resulted
from the enslavement of 4 million people for more than 250 years.
This year, Juneteenth will be
celebrated as it has been for decades, with cookouts and parades as well as
church gatherings and spirituals, keeping in touch with the original tradition.
In 1937, formerly enslaved man Pierce Harper recalled the first Juneteenth: “When
peace come they read the ‘Mancipation law to the cullud people. [The freed
people] spent that night singin’ and shoutin’. They wasn’t slaves no more.”
Fabiola
Cineas covers race and policy as a reporter for Vox. Before that, she was
an editor and writer at Philadelphia magazine, where she covered business,
tech, and the local economy.
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