This week, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday. After the House voted 415-14 in favor of the bill, it made its way to President Joe Biden’s desk, where he signed it into law on Thursday.
In the lead-up to this legislative victory, there was the usual caterwauling by Republicans about “wokeness” and “identity politics.” Still, most Republicans voted with the Democrats because of the bill’s symbolic and practical value at a time that may prove to be as politically volatile as the run-up to the Civil War.
Before last summer’s George Floyd protests, the vast majority of white Americans and a high percentage of Black Americans, especially young people, had never heard of Juneteenth, despite the fact that dozens of states recognized it informally.
The protests against police brutality that prompted a deep dive into the roots of systemic racism in America had collateral benefits: once formerly shadowy corners of American history finally became illuminated.
Stuck at home for 15 months, intellectually curious Americans took a look at and reflected on obscure and unflattering narratives about our shared history most have never been taught in school.
During this period of national soul-searching, Americans learned of a day set aside by Blacks who consider it truer to their aspirations for freedom than Independence Day on July Fourth.
June 19, 1865 — dubbed Juneteenth by a people who once hid the scope and breadth of their creativity to survive — was a celebration of the day that formerly enslaved Black Texans learned from Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger of the Union army that the war was over and that they were free.
The fact that they were hearing about the end of slavery two years after the Emancipation Proclamation “freed” them in 1863 didn’t temper their joy in the least.
They dropped the tools of their uncompensated labor in the fields to walk into a landless, jobless, despised future with only each other, their meager belongings and a fierce desire to cast off the degradation of 246 years of slavery to sustain them.
They were eager to make the transition from a land that subscribed to freedom, but tolerated slavery, to the formerly unimaginable status of free people.
The former slaves were not utopians. They knew the post-slavery reality wouldn’t be easy, but they were more than up to the challenge of translating the horror and despair of the previous two centuries into the blues and arias of an unfettered — and unparalleled — American future.
That first Juneteenth in Texas was the Independence Day promised by every Fourth of July celebration but specifically denied to 4 million people of African descent. Juneteenth had social and political implications, but the celebrations that arose from it in Texas and many African American communities throughout the South in the decades that followed were also aspirational.
Juneteenth came upon those enslaved men and women in Texas 156 years ago like a shooting star that crashes into a nearby field. They woke up that morning either resigned to the backbreaking routine ahead of them on that hot, dusty Monday, or they were fixated on schemes of escape to Mexico or to free territories or Canada.
What they didn’t expect was Gen. Granger’s proclamation in Galveston ending their years of involuntary servitude. Because news of the outside world was kept from them, they didn’t know that the Confederate forces of Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on April 9, thus ending the Civil War and smashing the institution of slavery in America a few months before Gen. Granger arrived in Texas.
They also had no idea that President Abraham Lincoln, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation that theoretically freed them two years earlier, had also been assassinated less than a week after winning the war.
Some of them had heard rumors of the Emancipation Proclamation years earlier, but even those wisps of hope had been excised from their memory by plantation cops well-practiced at the art of demoralizing people who yearned for freedom.
But those Black Texans stood, exhausted from however many hours of uncompensated labor they had already invested in the heat of that day, listening with incredulity to officials of the Union army tell them that they were free.
They were not given land or resources to make their freedom practical, but they were free to make the best of their emancipation in a reunited but still fractious America. The fact that they survived at all is a testament to their ingenuity and resourcefulness.
Imagine the tears of joy that flowed on that first Juneteenth. Imagine the release of intellectual and spiritual adrenaline that such a dramatic pivot toward freedom produced in those who had been told they were nothing but highly evolved chattel the day before.
That’s why Juneteenth has been celebrated by many Black communities and families ever since. Six generations after that incredible day in Texas, many African Americans continue to feel an acute connection to the moment freedom finally arrived for those still toiling on the southwestern rim of the Confederacy after the war was over.
Celebrating Juneteenth is also about recognizing how crucial information was routinely kept from African Americans by those determined to profit from slavery for as long as possible.
This week, a Fox News personality and several Republican politicians who don’t bother to hide their animus toward African Americans denounced the move to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. Some called it an attempt to make critical race theory the reigning ideology of the land, while others sneered at the “identity politics” of a party (Democrats) addicted to political symbols and racial nostalgia.
Never mind that those most vociferous in their opposition to Juneteenth also happen to be the same folks who defend those trying to stop the removal of Confederate monuments from public spaces.
As if by some perverse cue this week, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law legislation to stop teachers in his state from instructing students that contemporary political controversies are in any way the result of systemic or institutional failures rooted in an interpretation of American history that argues that racism and slavery are central to the founding of the United States.
Republicans are increasingly inclined to deny the basic facts of American history because they believe the facts are by definition injurious to the esteem of those who prefer a sanitized version of American history where July 4 is the only Independence Day the country needs. They insist that an ahistorical version of American history is better than the real thing because it upholds the most ideal version of American values.
How will teachers in Texas be able to teach the full meaning of Juneteenth without talking about the racial history that spawned the necessity of the federal holiday in the first place? Ironically, Juneteenth was already a holiday in Texas, but prior to last year, it existed in a space somehow decoupled from the ugly narratives of American history.
A few weeks ago on Memorial Day, retired Army Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter refused to remove a section from his speech at an American Legion post in Ohio crediting the newly emancipated Blacks with creating Memorial Day on May 1, 1865. He wanted to acknowledge history, not GOP orthodoxy.
Mr. Kemter explained how 10,000 people — mostly former slaves, free Blacks and their white abolitionist allies — paraded in their finest clothes to a mass grave site in Charleston, S.C., containing the remains of Union soldiers. His microphone feed was cut at that section by organizers who considered those facts at odds with the spirit of Memorial Day. That post is now suspended for censoring Mr. Kemter.
In “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” historian David W. Blight writes that the Black people who marched to the site in Charleston containing the remains of the soldiers were conducting the first Memorial Day parade. Their respectful but joyous celebration presaged the many that would follow.
Juneteenth and the first Memorial Day are rebukes to the legacy of white supremacy that made federal recognition of those holidays necessary. Neither are about “identity politics.” Both are about a nation acknowledging the tragic complexity of its racist past while striving to be a better place for all citizens in the future.
Tony Norman: tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631. Twitter @Tony_NormanPG.
First Published: June 18, 2021, 4:00 a.m.
Updated: June 18, 2021, 9:47 a.m.
