Juneteenth

Juneteenth (1865- ), short for June 19th, is a holiday that celebrates the end of slavery in the US. It is not (yet) a national holiday. It is celebrated on or about June 19th by some (but not all) Blacks, especially in Texas, where it is a state holiday.

Today, June 19th 2015, is the 150th anniversary – but it comes just two days after the Charleston Massacre, making it more a time for reflection than for celebration.

Juneteenth is the closest thing to a Black American independence day. As Frederick Douglass pointed out in 1852 about July 4th, the White American independence day:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity.”

On July 4th 1776, not a single one of the Thirteen Colonies had outlawed slavery. The American Revolution was about the freedom of Whites, not Blacks.

On June 19th 1865, however, two months after the end of the American Civil War, Major General Gordon Granger, who had just arrived in Texas, issued General Orders, #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 ….”

That was two and half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Lincoln and two months after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomatox. But neither act had freed many actual slaves in Texas. Instead, that was done by Granger’s army, with the help of loyal Blacks and Whites. It took until the following winter to end slavery. By then the Thirteenth Amendment had outlawed slavery across the whole country.

On June 19th 1866, the first anniversary, Blacks in Texas celebrated the end of slavery. It caught on as a holiday. During the Great Migration and the civil rights movement, it spread to other parts of the country. It was probably helped by the fact that it comes at the beginning of summer, right after the end of the school year.

It took the US army to end slavery and protect the right of Blacks to vote. By 1877, it had pulled out of the South. The South sank into Jim Crow rule. Most Blacks were kept from voting. Slavery by Another Name became common: sharecropping, debt peonage and prison labour. The Klan kept Blacks down through terror.

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s regained much of the lost ground and then some, but by the 1980s, with the War on Drugs, a new backlash had set in, growing markedly worse in the 2010s.

– Abagond, 2015.

See also:

• Charleston Massacre
• The nadir in American race relations
  • Jim Crow
  • Slavery By Another Name
• Voting Rights Act of 1965
• mass incarceration
• school resegregation

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