June 19, 2021
Reflections on Juneteenth
Jonathan D. Greenberg
Today we celebrate the emancipation of Black Americans who had been enslaved as chattel, their humanity brutally denied. Juneteenth has been celebrated as Jubilee Day, or Freedom Day, or Emancipation Day, or Black Independence Day for more than 150 years. The Juneteenth celebration started in Texas and eventually spread across the country. Today, June 19, 2021, is the first Juneteenth celebrated as an official national holiday of the United States, following a law passed by Congress and signed by President Biden two days ago.
Why do we celebrate Black Freedom on June 19? Juneteenth commemorates “General Order Number 3” issued in Galveston Texas by Union Army General Gordon Granger on June 19, 1865: “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…”
Of course, the slaves were officially liberated, many months earlier, on September 22, 1862, when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
We celebrate Freedom Day on June 19 because it took nearly three years for Union troops to control Texas and make Lincoln’s promise real.
And it took another hundred years to end the system of racial apartheid and terror known as Jim Crow.
As the great scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
As the great Southern author William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.”
This month, for example, we remember the centennial anniversary of the mass atrocity that took place one hundred years ago in June 1921 in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
In the early 20th century, Greenwood was a self-contained, economically prosperous Black community made up of Black Americans who had come mostly from the South to participate in Oklahoma’s booming oil economy. Its business district, known as the Negro Wall Street, was the center of African American economic power in the Southwest. But white Tulsans did not want the competition of a Black Wall Street in their city. In the early hours of June 1, 1921, a white vigilante mob — sanctioned by the Tulsa police — swept through the community, burning and looting homes and businesses, and killing people because they were Black. Their murder weapons were torches and pistols. They tied an old man to a car and dragged him through the streets, his head banging on the pavement, until his arms fell off and body shredded. They used machine guns. They dropped bombs from airplanes. They razed Greenwood to the ground and massacred untold numbers of people, buried in mass graves. If you don’t know this story, it is not a coincidence. It wasn’t in your history book.
This is the traumatic legacy of historical injustice. Trauma is the Greek word for “wound”. The wounds of systemic racism persist in this country, and they are passed on, generation after generation.
These wounds persist because of a pervasive conspiracy of denial. A wound cannot be healed until it is treated, and it cannot be treated unless it is seen, and its ongoing pain acknowledged. The truth of what happened in Greenwood was suppressed, for example, never taught to subsequent generations, even in Tulsa itself, so that the descendants of those who were killed or made homeless, and the descendants of the white mobs who perpetrated these crimes, have been condemned by this conspiracy of denial to live in perpetual ignorance, fear and lies.’
Meanwhile, the perpetrators of these injustices from slavery to the present day, from the Tulsa mass murder to similar atrocities in Wilmington North Carolina, East St. Louis, Chicago, and cities across the country have almost entirely been people who call themselves Christian, believe in the Christian Bible as their holy scripture, and profess the tenants of Christian faith, just as the enslavers of Black men, women and children from generation to generation until June 19, 1865 regarded themselves as good Christians.
The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.
Following decades of slow and steady civil rights activism within Black communities, labor unions, churches and student groups, the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960s achieved a Second Reconstruction, overthrowing the institution of Jim Crow segregation throughout the former Confederate States, and generating federal legislation guaranteeing equality of civil rights, voting rights and housing rights across the United States.
Today, we are living through a time of great contradiction and dangerous volatility.
On the one hand, we are experiencing a racial reckoning in our nation. Black Lives Matter activists galvanized the country, bringing millions of Americans to the streets one year ago, following the murder of George Floyd, in the largest nonviolent racial justice movement in the history of the United States. In efforts exemplified by the 1619 Project, educational and media institutions have reshaped the dominant narrative and curricula of US history to situate the struggle of Black Americans at the center of our national story. A new emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) has solidified throughout all major governmental, educational, corporate and civil society institutions in throughout the country. The decision to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, the recentering of Black struggle in our understanding of American identity, and the pressure on all companies, universities, public agencies and nonprofit organizations to adhere to far more rigorous DEI standards – none of this would have happened were it not for Black Lives Matter and the reckoning it launched.
On the other hand, police violence disproportionately experienced in Black communities continues unabated. Efforts to situate slavery, Jim Crow and the struggle for racial justice at the center of US history curricula and teaching has generated fierce backlash, especially in states controlled by the Republican Party. The 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder invalidating the federal preclearance requirements of the 1965 Voting Rights Act has produced catastrophic consequences, leading to massive retrenchment of voting rights in Republican-controlled states the nation has not seen since the Jim Crow period. The January 6, 2021 insurrection included a significant mobilization of white nationalists; it was the first time in our nation’s history that the Confederate Flag was carried inside the halls of Congress.
The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past. Its right here in 21st century America.
The original Juneteenth had a greater impact on Black people in Texas than anywhere else in the country – for more than 250,000 Black Texans, June 19, 1865, was the day that the bonds of slavery were finally released. Juneteenth has always had a special meaning in Texas, ever since.
Opal Lee grew up in Texas — first in Marshall, where she was born, then in Sycamore Park, Fort Worth – and she celebrated Juneteenth with her family each year as a child.
But Juneteenth was a special day for racists, too; a day to lash out at Black Texans, especially those with the audacity to live in predominantly white neighborhoods.
On Juneteenth, 1939, when Opal was 12 years old, she watched a mob of 500 white supremacists set fire to her family’s home.
No member of the mob was arrested for their act of criminal arson and racial terror.
That experience transformed a young girl into an activist for justice.
In 2016, at the age of 89, Mrs. Lee launched a one-woman march from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington D.C. in an effort to get Juneteenth named a national holiday. She walked two and a half miles each day to commemorate the two and a half years Black Texans remained slaves following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Last Thursday, Mrs. Lee stood next to President Joe Biden when he signed the law declaring “Juneteenth National Independence Day as a Legal Public Holiday.”
Opal Lee’s story is immensely moving. It provides a form of just closure to the racist hate crime her family experience on Juneteenth more than sixty years before, even as traumatic memory persists for her and for Black Americans throughout the country. Still, we remember the words of General Granger’s Order Number 3: “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.” This declaration of “absolute equality” remains far from realization 156 years later.
The median income for Black households in the United States today is roughly 60% of the median income for White households. The median net worth of Black households is less than 15% that of white families. The poverty rate for Black families is nearly three times that of white families. These racial disparities define America today, unconscionably heightened by the coronavirus pandemic, with death rates for Covid-10 over twice as high for Black as compared to White Americans, with comparable discrepancies in our Hispanic and Indigenous populations. In contrast to the “absolute equality” promised in the original Juneteenth, our society remains defined by extreme inequities on the basis of race.
What explains these extreme inequities? You know that too. Public health outcomes have social determinants: lower incomes and barriers to wealth accumulation, as we have seen; also greater debt, lack of affordable and quality housing; crowded conditions; higher exposure to environmental pollution; lack of access to quality healthcare and comprehensive health insurance; disproportionate representation among essential workers; lack of benefits such as paid sick days and access to reliable child care; inequities in access to high quality education; disproportionately high rates of incarceration; high exposure to violence in surrounding community, including police violence; on and on.
Juneteenth is a day of celebration, especially now that it is enshrined as a national holiday for all Americans. Still, as Jelani Cobb, emphasizes, Juneteenth is also a day in which we share a heightened awareness of the trauma of racial injustice in our country, and a renewed commitment to the ongoing struggle achieve the absolute equality General Granger promised.
The fact that slaveholders extracted thirty additional months of uncompensated labor from people who had been bought, sold, and worked to exhaustion, like livestock, throughout their lives is cause for mourning, not celebration. In honoring that moment, we should recognize a moral at the heart of that day in Galveston and in the entirety of American life: there is a vast chasm between the concept of freedom inscribed on paper and the reality of freedom in our lives.
Kevin Young, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, reflects:
When Juneteenth becomes a national holiday, will it still remain Black? Can it be both serious and playful, and recognize, as the poet Toi Derricotte reminds us, that “joy is an act of resistance”? Can we cook and laugh while we remember, remaining rooted in tradition while telling the full story of America and Black life in it? Perhaps the commemorations from Tulsa to Texas should remind us of the threats that shadowed Emancipation long after slavery was legally over….
In his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted that “[w]e are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Echoing Dr. King’s principle of our interconnected humanity, across barriers of race and class, Young continues:
African Americans should not have to bear the burden of this history alone. Nor should Black achievement be something that only African Americans celebrate. As James Baldwin well knew, our freedoms are interrelated — and otherwise imperiled… Like Juneteenth, that soaring space on the National Mall — which took over a century after it was first proposed to build — reminds us that freedom is not free. More than that, as Toni Morrison put it, “the function of freedom is to free someone else.” Juneteenth tells us that a fuller future awaits, and the work of collective freedom is ongoing.
In conclusion, Vann R. Newkirk remembers the Juneteenth celebration on June 19, 1968 led by Coretta Scott King at the “Resurrection City” encampment of Poor Peoples Campaign activists in Washington D.C. ten weeks after Dr. King’s assassination.
In the spirit of that 1968 observance, it is clear that now more than ever, Juneteenth is a necessary cornerstone of the American tradition, and a worthy public holiday today. It is worthy because of the dizzying contradiction at its core—and all American holidays have at least a touch of contradiction. It is both a second Independence Day and a reminder of ongoing oppression and continuing forms of stricture. It is a memorial to the dead and a remonstrance to those who killed them. It is a clear articulation of the fact that America can never be free until her people are free, and a celebration of the people who have worked to make it so. Juneteenth is the purest distillation of the evils that still plague America, and a celebration of the good people who fought those evils.
Let us celebrate and honor Juneteenth by joining together in nonviolent struggle to achieve the absolute equality promised by the Declaration of Independence of 1776, General Granger’s Order #3 of 1865 — and the Promised Land of racial justice Dr. King saw from the mountaintop, and told us, with certainty, on the last night of his life, that we will enter.
