A Short and Not Sweet Reflection on Juneteenth and Its Elevation to a National Holiday

 

As Sonali Kolhatkar writes, “Making Juneteenth a holiday was the easy part — but will real justice follow?” Yes, it’s wonderful that it’s a holiday, but it’s difficult to feel like this is more than a feel-good piece of legislation that is more performative than substantive.

There is a lot of hype and hypocrisy surrounding the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation, not the least of which is that the narratives purporting its reaching Texas late because “news traveled slowly in those days” is bunk.

Christopher Wilson, Experience Design Director at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, writes for the Zinn Education Project:

"Very often Juneteenth is presented as a story of “news” of the Emancipation Proclamation “traveling slowly” to the Deep South and Texas, but it was really a story of power traveling slowly, and of freedom being seized. Due to the telegraph, newspapers and the United States Army spread out all across the country to put down the slaveholders’ rebellion, word of Lincoln’s order spread all over the South immediately after it was announced in September 1862 and took effect in January 1863.

While enslaved Black people in far off places like Texas were often kept in the dark and fed a pro-slavery narrative of the events of the war and the nation, whether they received word of the order wasn’t so much the point. As with an incarcerated prisoner who may be told she’s free, until the prison bars are unlocked that word only results in theoretical freedom. The news that the United States government was declaring enslaved people in areas still in rebellion against the nation forever free was incredibly important to the enslaved and the country, but what mattered more than that news was the power and will to enforce it. General Granger’s order was less directed toward offering news to the enslaved than it was about commanding lawless human traffickers and insurrectionists to obey the Proclamation issued two years earlier."

Bear in mind, too, that the U.S. settlers who came to Texas in the early-mid 1800s didn’t fight to establish their own republic as a measure of “freedom from despotic Mexico”; it’s important to bear in mind that they had defied Mexico’s own abolition of slavery from 1829. The point is that the past is prologue; if power can be wrested and kept from the powerless, you better believe that the powerful will continue to do so. All too often, the Lone Star State has proven that to be the case, perhaps never so much as in recent times.

Juneteenth has been celebrated as a Texas holiday, but I don’t recall it exactly being a high time on the order of July 4, say. Indeed, I would hazard to guess that not many people in Texas could have told you what Juneteenth’s significance really was until relatively recently. In some cases, I recall in the 80s, white people joking about the delay in freeing the last slaves in the United States. It wasn't a knee slapper then; it's not one now.

What’s more of the moment is that Juneteenth brings into sharp relief the lack of fulfillment of the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation. It throws into sharp relief how little the dominant white society took abolition seriously. The ensuing one hundred years of Jim Crow, massacres, lynchings, and segregation speak to that far more eloquently. The past half century of the continuing marginalization of Black lives is only now beginning to give way to recognition that the underlying causes of that marginalization still remain. The battleground of voting rights and continued assaults on Black people by police are echoes from the past.

This is not to say that there hasn’t been progress, but for it to be substantial, we need more than a  national holiday to make it so.

Additional Reading: 

Brave New World. "Juneteenth: A Noble Cause Pushed Forth by the Ignoble". https://bravenewworldmedia.com/juneteenth-a-noble-cause-pushed-forth-by-the-ignoble/. Brave New World. June 19, 2021.

Campos, Chaun. "What is Juneteenth and why didn’t I know about it sooner?!". https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/lits/2020/06/19/what-is-juneteenth-and-why-didnt-i-know-about-it-sooner/. Emory University. June 19, 2020

Childs, David. "A Brief History of Juneteenth: Including Resources for Teachers and Home School Parents". Democracy and Me. https://www.democracyandme.org/a-brief-history-of-juneteenth-including-resources-for-teachers-and-home-school-parents/. June 24, 2020.

Kolhatkar, Sonali. "Making Juneteenth a holiday was the easy part — but will real justice follow?" https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/arise-for-social-justice-juneteenth/. AlterNet. June 18, 2021.

Wilson, Christopher et al. "June 19, 1865: “Juneteenth” Emancipation Day". https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/juneteenth-emancipation-day/. The Zinn Education Project. June 19, 2021.