[The holiday’s 158-year history holds a lot of meaning in the
fight for Black liberation today.]
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JUNETEENTH, EXPLAINED  
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Fabiola Cineas
June 15, 2023
Vox [[link removed]]

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_ The holiday’s 158-year history holds a lot of meaning in the
fight for Black liberation today. _

Juneteenth Celebration at Emancipation Park 1880 touched up.
Thirty-one people in Houston's Fourth Ward. Rev. Jack Yates, left,
Sallie Yates center in black outfit., Public Domain

 

A year after protests for racial justice swept the nation
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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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.

A group of formerly enslaved people who worked as laborers and
servants with the 13th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment during the
American Civil War, circa 1862.Corbis via Getty Images

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
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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
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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
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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
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among other efforts.

President Rutherford B. Hayes oversaw the end of Reconstruction. After
the Civil War, reformers aimed to rebuild society through the passing
of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, black-run Southern
governments, and the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Universal
Images Group via Getty Images

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
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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
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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
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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 [[link removed]], currently
observe it.

For more than a decade, Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee has
introduced a resolution
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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
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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
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been unknown to many Americans
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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
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Performers during the 48th Annual Juneteenth Day Festival in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 19, 2019. Dylan Buell/Getty Images for
VIBE

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
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“Juneteenth as a moment in African-American history is not, to my
knowledge, taught.” As for history textbooks that already tend to
whitewash history
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“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
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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 [[link removed]] 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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* Juneteenth
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* slavery
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* Civil War
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* U.S. history
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* Racism
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