But today is Juneteenth
Hey, it’s a long hard road, it’s a long hard road
It’s a long, hard road, and before we’ll be free
And before we’ll be free— from “Handsome Johnny” by Richie Havens
Monday is a federal holiday, finally, a celebration of the end of slavery in the United States. Not of the day Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863), but of the day official word reached Galveston, Texas that formerly enalaved people were now free: June 19, 1865. A horrific war fought to preserve the union and end slavery had concluded at the Appomattox courthouse in Virginia on April 9. It took until June for word to reach Texas what the war’s end meant for people still held as property in former slave states.
On June 17, 2021, propelled by nationwide protests over police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, both Black, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act declaring the day a national holiday, the first since Ronald Reagn declared Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday in 1983.
We’re still not there yet.
Unfulfilled
Published by Tom Sullivan on June 19, 2020
June 19, 2020 will not mark a deadly COVID-19 superspreader event sponsored in Tulsa, Okla. That will come tomorrow, sponsored by a very different Republican president than the one whose Emancipation Proclamation was read this day in the streets of Galveston, Texas in 1865.
The Washington Post Editorial Board provides this thumbnail sketch of the original Juneteenth:
AS U.S. troops gradually reasserted Union control over the defeated South in the spring of 1865, units under Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Tex., flying the American flag and bearing news of President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. They marched through town reading General Order No. 3: “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.”
As the current (and temporary) occupant of the Oval Office is learning now, simply signing a declaration does not change reality or culture. The promise of Juneteenth remains unrealized 155 years later.
Even as former slaves celebrated, white southerners had set about ensuring that equality between former masters and former slaves would never become reality. The North won the Civil War and lost Reconstruction. One hundred years of Jim Crow followed, memorialized with statues and monuments erected to a Dixie where old times are not forgotten. Those are only recently coming down.
Hundreds of statues erected decades after the war were reminders not just of Confederate heroes, but a declaration of just who is in charge. Much of human behavior among our neighbors is not so much deep strategy as alpha dog behavior, showing who’s boss by barking loudly in the other dog’s face until he rolls over on his back and pees in the air. During the transition after the 2016 election, adviser to the incoming administration Sebastian Gorka declared as much on Fox News: “The alpha males are back.”
It took a Second Reconstruction, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, to begin uprooting the systemic racism knotted into the soil of 400 years of American history. Even 50 years after the King assassination, those we ripped up before remain viable and sprout anew whenever nonwhite Americans assert their Americanness and demand the equality Lincoln’s proclamation promised. Or whenever certain whites feel their cultural and political supremacy challenged.
For all their supposed reverence for the U.S. Constitution, many among our white, self-declared patriots would just as soon rip out the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. All their bluster, froth, and spittle cannot conceal the insecurity behind “White Fragility.” As they see it, for nonwhites to gain full Americanness, whites must surrender their alphaness. Blacks don’t want equal rights. They want “specialty rights.” The “boogaloo bois,” won’t have it. This is their country, by God, and they’ll burn it down before sharing it. For nonwhite Americans to be equal means they must be less. It is not so, but what they believe nonetheless.
Black Americans just want to be treated equally and not to live in fear when their children leave the house or when a police cruiser heaves into view.
So, here we are. Juneteenth again. One America demanding the nation live up to a promise unfulfilled. Another fighting against it while wrapped in the flag and armed to the teeth and itching for a second Civil War.
Update: This chilling short film (h/t Rude Pundit)
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