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 sla...