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ON JUNETEENTH: RECKONING WITH THE HISTORY OF SLAVERY ACROSS AMERICA
 
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Interview of Clint Smith by Amy Goodman
June 19, 2024
Democracy Now
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_ "If we don't fully understand and account for slavery's history in
this country, we won't understand how it shaped the political,
economic and social infrastructure of this country and the landscape
of inequality today." _

Historian Clint Smith shown next to image of Juneteenth
demonstration.,

 

AMY GOODMAN: Today, a _Democracy Now!_ special on this, the newly
created Juneteenth federal holiday, which marks the end of slavery in
the United States. The Juneteenth commemoration dates back to the last
days of the Civil War, when Union soldiers landed in Galveston, Texas
— it was June 19th, 1865 — with news that the war had ended, and
enslaved people learned they were freed. It was two-and-a-half years
after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

In 2021, President Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth the
first new federal holiday since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The
day after Biden signed the legislation, I spoke to the writer and poet
Clint Smith, author of _How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the
History of Slavery Across America_. I began by asking him about
traveling to Galveston, Texas, and his feelings on Juneeteenth
becoming a federal holiday.

CLINT SMITH: As you mentioned, I went to Galveston, Texas. I’ve
been writing this book for four years, and I went two years ago. And
it was marking the 40th anniversary of when Texas had made Juneteenth
a state holiday. And it was the Al Edwards Prayer Breakfast. The late
Al Edwards Sr. is the state legislator, Black state legislator, who
made possible and advocated for the legislation that turned Juneteenth
into a holiday, a state holiday in Texas.

And so I went, in part, because I wanted to spend time with people who
were the actual descendants of those who had been freed by General
Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3. And it was a really remarkable
moment, because I was in this place, on this island, on this land,
with people for whom Juneteenth was not an abstraction. It was not a
performance. It was not merely a symbol. It was part of their
tradition. It was part of their lineage. It was an heirloom that had
been passed down, that had made their lives possible. And so, I think
I gained a more intimate sense of what that holiday meant.

And to sort of broaden, broaden out more generally, you spoke to how
it was more than two-and-a-half years after the Emancipation
Proclamation, and it was an additional two months after General Robert
E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, effectively ending the Civil War. So
it wasn’t only two years after the Emancipation Proclamation; it was
an additional two months after the Civil War was effectively over.

And so, for me, when I think of Juneteenth, part of what I think about
is the both/andedness of it, that it is this moment in which we mourn
the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of enslaved
people for years and for months after it had been attained by them,
and then, at the same time, celebrating the end of one of the most
egregious things that this country has ever done.

And I think what we’re experiencing right now is a sort of marathon
of cognitive dissonance, in the way that is reflective of the Black
experience as a whole, because we are in a moment where we have the
first new federal holiday in over 40 years and a moment that is
important to celebrate, the Juneteenth, and to celebrate the end of
slavery and to have it recognized as a national holiday, and at the
same time that that is happening, we have a state-sanctioned effort
across state legislatures across the country that is attempting to
prevent teachers from teaching the very thing that helps young people
understand the context from which Juneteenth emerges.

And so, I think that we recognize that, as a symbol, Juneteenth is not
— that it matters, that it is important, but it is clearly not
enough. And I think the fact that Juneteenth has happened is
reflective of a shift in our public consciousness, but also of the
work that Black Texans and Black people across this country have done
for decades to make this moment possible.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you explain more what happened in Galveston in
1865 and, even as you point out, what the Emancipation Proclamation
actually did two-and-a-half years before?

CLINT SMITH: Right. So, the Emancipation Proclamation is often a
widely misunderstood document. So, it did not, sort of wholesale, free
the enslaved people throughout the Union. It did not free enslaved
people in the Union. In fact, there were several border states that
were part of the Union that continued to keep their enslaved laborers,
states like Kentucky, states like Delaware, states like Missouri. And
what it did was it was a military edict that was attempting to free
enslaved people in Confederate territory. But the only way that that
edict would be enforced is if Union soldiers went and took that
territory.

And so, part of what many enslavers realized — and realized
correctly — was that Texas would be one of the last frontiers that
Union soldiers would be able to come in and force the Emancipation
Proclamation — if they ever made it there in the first place,
because this was two years prior to the end of the Civil War. And so,
you had enslavers from Virginia and from North Carolina and from all
of these states in the upper South who brought their enslaved laborers
and relocated to Texas, in ways that increased the population of
enslaved people in Texas by the tens of thousands.

And so, when Gordon Granger comes to Texas, he is making clear and
letting people know that the Emancipation Proclamation had been
enacted, in ways that because of the topography of Texas and because
of how spread out and rural and far apart from different ecosystems of
information many people were, a lot of enslaved people didn’t know
that the Emancipation Proclamation had happened. And some didn’t
even know that General Lee had surrendered at Appomattox two months
prior. And so, part of what this is doing is making clear to the
250,000 enslaved people in Texas that they had actually been granted
freedom two-and-a-half years prior and that the war that this was all
fought over had ended two months before.

AMY GOODMAN: During the ceremony making Juneteenth a federal
holiday, President Biden got down on his knee to greet Opal Lee, the
94-year-old activist known as the Grandmother of Juneteenth. This is
Biden speaking about Lee.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: As a child growing up in Texas, she and her
family would celebrate Juneteenth. On Juneteenth 1939, when she was 12
years old, a white mob torched her family home. But such hate never
stopped her, any more than it stopped the vast majority of you I’m
looking at from this podium. Over the course of decades, she has made
it her mission to see that this day came. It was almost a singular
mission. She has walked for miles and miles, literally and
figuratively, to bring attention to Juneteenth, to make this day
possible.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is Opal Lee speaking at Harvard School of
Public Health.

OPAL LEE: I don’t want people to think Juneteenth is just one day.
There is too much educational components. We have too much to do. I
even advocate that we do Juneteenth, that we celebrate freedom from
the 19th of June to the Fourth of July, because we weren’t free on
the Fourth of July, 1776. That would be celebrating freedom — do
you understand? — if we were able to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: And that is Opal Lee, considered the Grandmother of
Juneteenth. And, Clint, one of the things you do in your book is you
introduce us to grassroots activists. This doesn’t come from the
top; this comes from years of organizing, as you point out, in
Galveston itself and with people like — not that there’s anyone
like — Opal Lee.

CLINT SMITH: Yeah, no, absolutely. Part of what this book is doing,
it is an attempt to uplift the stories of people who don’t often get
the attention that they deserve in how they shape the historical
record. So, that means the public historians who work at these
historical sites and plantations. That means the museum curators. That
means the activists and the organizers, people like Take ’Em
Down NOLA in New Orleans, who pushed the City Council and the mayor
to make possible the fact that in 2017 these statues would come down,
several Confederate statues in my hometown, in New Orleans.

And part of — when I think about someone like Miss Opal Lee, part of
what I think about is our proximity to this period of history, right?
Slavery existed for 250 years in this country, and it’s only not
existed for 150. And, you know, the way that I was taught about
slavery, growing up, in elementary school, we were made to feel as if
it was something that happened in the Jurassic age, that it was the
flint stone, the dinosaurs and slavery, almost as if they all happened
at the same time. But the woman who opened the National Museum of
African American History and Culture alongside the Obama family in
2016 was the daughter of an enslaved person — not the granddaughter
or the great-granddaughter or the great-great-granddaughter. The
daughter of an enslaved person is who opened this museum of the
Smithsonian in 2016. And so, clearly, for so many people, there are
people who are alive today who were raised by, who knew, who were in
community with, who loved people who were born into intergenerational
chattel bondage. And so, this history that we tell ourselves was a
long time ago wasn’t, in fact, that long ago at all.

And part of what so many activists and grassroots public historians
and organizers across this country recognize is that if we don’t
fully understand and account for this history, that actually wasn’t
that long ago, that in the scope of human history was only just
yesterday, then we won’t fully understand our contemporary landscape
of inequality today. We won’t understand how slavery shaped the
political, economic and social infrastructure of this country. And
when you have a more acute understanding of how slavery shaped the
infrastructure of this country, then you’re able to more effectively
look around you and see how the reason one community looks one way and
another community looks another way is not because of the people in
those communities, but is because of what has been done to those
communities, generation after generation after generation. And I think
that that is central to the sort of public pedagogy that so many of
these activists and organizers who have been attempting to make
Juneteenth a holiday and bring attention to it as an entry point to
think more wholly and honestly about the legacy of slavery have been
doing.

AMY GOODMAN: During an interview on CNN, Democratic Congressmember
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called out the 14 Republican congressmembers
— all white men — who voted against making Juneteenth a federal
holiday.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: This is pretty consistent with, I
think, the Republican base, and it’s — whether it’s trying to
fight against teaching basic history around racism and the role of
racism in U.S. history to — you know, there’s a direct through
line from that to denying Juneteenth, the day that is widely
recognized and celebrated as a symbolic kind of day to represent the
end of slavery in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: If you could respond to that, Clint Smith, and also the
fact that on the same day, yesterday, the Senate minority leader said
they would not be supporting the For the People Act?

CLINT SMITH: Yeah, I mean, I think —

AMY GOODMAN: The Voting Rights Act.

CLINT SMITH: Absolutely. I think, very clearly, the critical race
theory — the idea of it is being used as a bogeyman, and it is
being misrepresented and distorted by people who don’t even know
what critical race theory is, right? So we should be clear that the
thing that people are calling critical race theory is just — that is
the language that they are using to talk about the idea of teaching
any sort of history that rejects the idea that America is a singularly
exceptional place, and that we should not account for the history of
harm that has been enacted to create opportunities and
intergenerational wealth for millions of people, that has come at the
direct expense of millions and millions of other people across
generations.

And so, part of what is happening in these state legislatures across
the country with regard to the effort to push back against teaching of
history — 1619 Project, critical race theory and the like — is a
recognition that we have developed in this country a more
sophisticated understanding, a more sophisticated framework, a more
sophisticated public lexicon, with which to understand how slavery —
how racism was not just an interpersonal phenomenon, it was a historic
one, it was a structural one, it was a systemic one.

AMY GOODMAN: I want you to talk more about your book, _How the Word
Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America_.
Can you talk about the journey you took — you were just mentioning
where you grew up, in Louisiana, the map of the streets of Louisiana
— and why you feel it is so critical not only to look at the South,
but your chapter on New York is something that people will be — many
will be shocked by, the level of — when people talk about the South
and slavery, that New York, of course, had enslaved people?

CLINT SMITH: It did. It was really important for me to include a
chapter on New York City, and a place in the North, more broadly, in
part because, you know, while the majority of places I visit are in
the South, because the South is where slavery was saturated and where
it was most intimately tied the social and economic infrastructure of
that society, it most certainly also existed in the North.

What a lot of people don’t know is that New York City, for an
extended period of time, was the second-largest slave port in the
country, after Charleston, South Carolina; that in 1860, on the brink
of the Civil War, when South Carolina was about to secede from the
Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln, that New York City’s
mayor, Fernando Wood, proposed that New York City should also secede
from the Union alongside the Southern states, because New York’s
financial and political infrastructure were so deeply entangled and
tied to the slavocracy of the South; also that the Statue of Liberty
was originally conceived by Édouard de Laboulaye, a French
abolitionist, who conceived of the idea of the Statue of Liberty and
giving it to the United States as a gift, that it was originally
conceived as an idea to celebrate the end of the Civil War and to
celebrate abolition.

But over time, that meaning has been — even through the conception
of the statue, right? The original conception of the statue actually
had Lady Liberty breaking shackles, like a pair of broken shackles on
her wrists, to symbolize the end of slavery. And over time, it became
very clear that that would not have the sort of wide stream — or,
wide mainstream support of people across the country, obviously this
having been just not too long after the end of the Civil War, so there
were still a lot of fresh wounds. And so they shifted the meaning of
the statue to be more about sort of inclusivity, more about the
American experience, the American project, the American promise, the
promise of democracy, and sort of obfuscated the original meaning, to
the point where even the design changed. And so they replaced the
shackles with a tablet and the torch, and then put the shackles very
subtly sort of underneath her robe. And you can — but the only way
you can see them, these broken chains, these broken links, are from a
helicopter or from an airplane.

And in many ways, I think that that is a microcosm for how we hide the
story of slavery across this country, that these chain links are
hidden, out of sight, out of view of most people, under the robe of
Lady Liberty, and how the story of slavery across this country is very
— as we see now, very intentionally trying to be hidden and kept
from so many people, so that we have a fundamentally inconsistent
understanding of the way that slavery shaped our contemporary society
today.

AMY GOODMAN: Clint, before we end, you are an author, you’re a
writer, you’re a teacher, and you are a poet. Can you share a poem
with us?

CLINT SMITH: I’d be happy to. And so, when you’re a poet writing
nonfiction, that very much animates the way that I approach the text.
And so, this is part of the — this is an adaptation or an except
from the end of one of my chapters, that originally began as a poem
that I wrote when I was trying to think about some of these issues
that I brought up.

[reading] Growing up, the iconography of the Confederacy was an
ever-present fixture of my daily life. Every day on the way to school,
I passed a statue of P.G.T. Beauregard riding on horseback, his
Confederate uniform slung over his shoulder and his military cap
pulled far down over his eyes. As a child, I did not know who P.G.T.
Beauregard was. I did not know he was the man who ordered the first
attack that opened the Civil War. I did not know he was one of the
architects who designed the Confederate battle flag. I did not know he
led an army predicated on maintaining the institution of slavery. What
I knew is that he looked like so many of the other statues that
ornamented the edges of this city, these copper garlands of a past
that saw truth as something that should be buried underground and
silenced by the soil.

After the war, the sons and daughters of the Confederacy reshaped the
contours of treason into something they could name as honorable. We
called it the Lost Cause. And it crept its way into textbooks that
attempted to cover up a crime that was still unfolding; that told us
that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man, guilty of nothing but
fighting for the state and the people that he loved; that the Southern
flag was about heritage and remembering those slain fighting to
preserve their way of life. But, see, the thing about the Lost Cause
is that it’s only lost if you’re not actually looking. The thing
about heritage is that it’s a word that also means “I’m ignoring
what we did to you.”

I was taught the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, but I was never
taught how the declarations of Confederate secession had the promise
of human bondage carved into its stone. I was taught the war was about
economics, but I was never taught that in 1860 the 4 million enslaved
Black people were worth more than every bank, factory and railroad
combined. I was taught that the Civil War was about states’ rights,
but I was never taught how the Fugitive Slave Act could care less
about a border and spelled Georgia and Massachusetts the exact same
way.

It’s easy to look at a flag and call it heritage when you don’t
see the Black bodies buried behind it. It’s easy to look at a statue
and call it history when you ignore the laws written in its wake.

I come from a city abounding with statues of white men on pedestals
and Black children playing beneath them, where we played trumpets and
trombones to drown out the Dixie song that’s still whistled in the
wind. In New Orleans, there are over 100 schools, roads and buildings
named for Confederates and slaveholders. Every day, Black children
walk into buildings named after people who never wanted them to be
there. Every time I would return home, I would drive on streets named
for those who would have wanted me in chains.

Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee, take a left on Jefferson
Davis, make the first right on Claiborne. Translation: Go straight for
two miles on the general who slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers
who were trying to surrender, take a left on the president of the
Confederacy who made the torture of Black bodies the cornerstone of
his new nation, make the first right on the man who permitted the
heads of rebelling slaves to be put on stakes and spread across the
city in order to prevent the others from getting any ideas.

What name is there for this sort of violence? What do you call it when
the road you walk on is named for those who imagined you under a
noose? What do you call it when the roof over your head is named after
people who would have wanted the bricks to crush you?

_Clint Smith, author of the book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning
with the History of Slavery Across America, speaking
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Now! in 2021, the day after Juneteenth became a federal holiday._

* Juneteenth
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* History of slavery
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* Inequality
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