Some background on Juneteenth

 

Some background on Juneteenth

 

History, viewed as a series of dates, should be easy, you were born this day, died that one, the battle was fought this day, and the peace treaty signed that one. But history is supposed to be more about understanding mass movements, conflicts, and concepts, the why of things happening, how a different generation saw the world, the importance of what came first to what happened later. We still tell the stories by assigning dates, but the closer we get to the heart of things, the manner in which we elevate certain dates gets odder and odder.

 

The Magna Carta is cited as the birth of Constitutional government, but the original document of June 15^th, 1215, but it didn’t do that, it was not nearly that far-reaching. Those who established the English Constitutional Monarchy referred back to the Magna Carta when they did something that the Magna Carta didn’t really do. There’s a number of dates you can pick for when it finally happened, I personally like the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

 

The signing of the Declaration of Independence, July 7^th, 1776, is considered the birth of the USA and the establishment of our then-unique form of government, but we were not a nation yet, that was not until the war’s end, November 25^th, 1783 (something we used to celebrate as Evacuation Day), and we really didn’t have a handle on what our form of government actually was until the separate ratifications of both the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, two different dates, the latter being December 15^th, 1791.

 

And so it is regarding the end Slavery. When I was a child, the focus was on the Emancipation Proclamation, January 1^st, 1863, which, in fact, freed no Slaves. It punted to another day the issue of the Slave in the States still loyal to the Union and freed slaves only in states that under the control of in the Confederacy, who chose to ignore the Proclamation. Moreover, it was only an Executive Order (a common thing back then, even though we didn’t yet have a name for it yet) so a future President could casually overturn it.

 

Slavery wasn’t truly outlawed until the passing of the 13^th Amendment of the US Constitution, December 6^th, 1865. Even then, the Civil War still raged, limiting the Amendments immediate reach, but the President and Senate were full-aware how hard it would be to get it passed after the soon-to-be defeated Confederates started demanding their say in the Federal Government.

Juneteenth, June 19th, 1865, not heard of by school children in the north-east of the USA during my day, is clearly as good, or better, a date as either of the other two cited and is now a National Holiday.

 

But guess what? Juneteenth as THE DATE is problematic as well. This has a lot to do with the also problematic date of the end of the Civil War. 

Generally, we date the end of the War with Confederate General Lee’s surrender, April 9^th, 1865, but that was Lee’s surrender, not the Confederacy's. After Lee’s surrender, the Confederate Government, rather than surrendering, fled Richmond, Virginia for Danville, also Virginia. Then, barely a week later, rather than surrendering, it fled again. An argument can be made that no Confederate Government existed after that, but still it played “let's pretend” until the Traitor-President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, finally officially dissolved it May 5^th. He was captured five-days later but even after that still the war raged farther West. It was not until the last Confederate on June 23^rd that the Confederate Army officially dissolved in Doaksville Oklahoma that the War truly ended. Of course, after that, the fighting still continued in some pockets, but with no Government or Army to fight for.

 

That timeline demonstrates that Juneteenth was born before the enforceable end of Slavery everywhere in the USA. It specifically celebrates the day Union General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston Texas unopposed, and read aloud his General Order 3, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” That was four days before the Doaksville surrender.

 

Juneteenth was first celebrated just the next year, 1866. These celebrations were created by, and apparently first only recognized by, the freed Slaves in Texas. Maybe that’s the best part of Juneteenth in comparison to all the other dates given above, it wasn’t really done of some official declaration, it didn’t really come out of General Order 3, it was born of people dancing in the streets.

 

An attendee of the first Juneteenth was freed Slave Pierce Harper. He was still alive in 1937 and he described it this way, “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.”

 

Of course, the story is more complicated than even described above. There were plenty of places in the former Confederacy that Planation owners were able to hide the news from their Slaves for years. There were other places where Slavery remained in force even with Emancipation known, but unenforceable. One form of Slavery remained Constitutional, that of convicted criminals, and this led to mass arrests for non-existent charges (Whites got dragged into that as well, there’s a scene in the movie “Gone with the Wind” that addresses it).

 

December 6^th, 1865, is also a good date for the end of Slavery, it was when the already existent 13^th Amendment was finally ratified by the all the State Governments across the country (actually, Mississippi didn’t fully ratify until 2013, which they blamed on, believe it or not, a clerical error).

 

The end of Slavery, of course, was just the beginning of a process. Laura Smalley, born into Slavery, was interviewed in 1941, “We didn’t know where to go. They turned us out just like, you know, you turn out cattle.” 

The last laws forbidding Black education (USA maybe the only country in the world to have had anti-literacy laws) were not killed until 1867. No meaningful land reform came in the wake of Emancipation so, though private ownership of land by Blacks did steadily increase, the Share Cropping system, which differed little from Slavery, was more prevalent and that didn’t disappear until the late 1960s. Racist laws concerning purchasing properties didn’t disappear until the 1950s and were not meaningfully enforceable until the late 1960s. A 1875 Supreme Court decision gutted the 14^th Amendment (concerning Black’s right to vote) and gave birth to State and/or Local Governments passing Jim Crow laws to inhibit Blacks from voting (these racist laws spread as far north as New York City) and this wasn’t corrected the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Then, in 2013, the Supreme Court stepped in again and significantly rolled back protections obtained under the Voters Rights Act.  

Juneteenth’s increasing national visibility began in 1980, when Texas officially recognized it. Other states gradually followed suit, and it made its way to the Federal Congress in 2020, when a bill to make Juneteenth a National Holiday was introduced. Unfortunately, Senator Ron Johnson (member of the Republican Party, once known as the Party of Lincoln, but no one says that anymore) single-handedly blocked a vote on it because (he said) the USA couldn’t afford another paid day-off for Federal workers. But the momentum was unstoppable, Johnson dropped his objections, and in 2021 it both the Senate (unanimously) and the House (only 14 “nays”) passed it. The President signed it into law President the day before its celebration.