Juneteenth will be celebrated this year for the 141st year since Union Major General Gordon Granger informed the city of Galveston, TX, that their Black slaves were free and that they had been free the past two and a half years.
While June 19 is the day the slaves got the news, the original date of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, has never been celebrated. My personal, totally unscientific theory is that barbecue does not work when it's cold outside in January, so June 19 looked a whole lot better.
Lincoln's carefully crafted Emancipation Proclamation originally freed the slaves only in the states that had become part of the Confederacy. He wanted to strip the South of its free labor on the plantations and in the Confederate army, and it worked. But the white cotton farmers in Texas ignored the proclamation for almost three years. After General Robert E. Lee's surrendered in April of 1865, the war was over and Union soldiers came down and physically forced the issue starting June 19, 1865.
Texas has always been like that. It is the only state that began as a separate nation, and that is the root of their "don't mess with Texas" slogans. So the slaves in Texas were relieved to finally get the yokes off their backs, and they threw a party so big that we are still celebrating it today.
But after the party was over and they had to get down to the serious business of being free. They realized that freedom from slavery and being free to prosper as a citizen were not the same thing. We are still wrestling with that concept today.
The law can free you from slavery, but it cannot give you the trappings of freedom. Being free to maximize your political, economic, social and religious opportunities comes as a result of the infra structure you have constructed to make that happen. If you have not organized politically, pooled your resources to create banks and insurance companies or created influential religious organizations, you are not free in America, regardless of your race.
The capital you have in a capitalistic nation is directly related to your freedom within that nation. So as we celebrate our freedom from slavery and servitude, we should be ever mindful of what has to be done to achieve real freedom within America. We also should take the time to ponder the journey that led to the proclamation to emancipate and think about just how far we have come since then.
I have spent years studying ancient history. I have been trying to find a situation in human history that is similar to what Africans in the Americas have experienced. As far as I know, it does not exist. Our journey is a unique one to mankind. No group of people have been captured on one side of the world, sold into slavery and transported to the other side.
No other group had been enslaved for so long that they could not remember where they had come from in Africa and then were freed in the land they were enslaved to try and build a life along side the people who once enslaved them.
Yet in spite of these extraordinary facts, African Americans have done as well, if not better, than any other group of people coming out of slavery. The closest story in history is the story of the Jews leaving Egypt. In that story, God has to constantly punish them because they were messing up, and God was right there with them. Every time something went wrong they would run off and pray to the gods of Egypt and God had to straighten them out again.
They were given a land of their own to build new lives for themselves. They did not ask the Egyptians for Affirmative Action programs or laws guaranteeing their human rights. The Jews left Egypt and created a new life somewhere else, but African Americans have successfully toiled at building a life for ourselves in the same country we were enslaved in, and this is still a young story.
African Americans are not the only people who should be celebrating this holiday. It should be a national holiday because the end of slavery was the most momentous event in this nation's history. That was the moment that America began to live up to its written principles.
If you are a European American, Asian American, Mexican American, Native American, or any kind of American, feel free to find yourself at a Juneteenth celebration and join in. This is real USA history because America's history is sliced into two distinct parts: The 300 years of slavery and the roughly 150 years after.
Juneteenth marks that dividing line between what America was and what America is trying to be. It should be one of the largest bi-racial celebrations in America and we all should pause for a moment and look back at the darkest days of our nation's history and vow together - never again, never again.
Let Charlie James know what you think of Juneteenth by writing to editor@sdistrictjournal.com.
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