Juneteenth—June 19—ought to be a national holiday. It ought to be America’s second independence day. It wouldn’t be one that Donald Trump could co-opt for personal self-aggrandizement the way he is doing with the Fourth of July, and it would provide an official day in which to both celebrate the emancipation of millions of slaves and remind everyone how white supremacists and their enablers crushed the ideals and realization of Reconstruction, burying it in re-enslavement schemes and Jim Crow laws that curtailed the economic, political, and social freedoms of black Americans for a century, with oppressive echoes to this day.
The first Juneteenth came on June 19, 1865, when Africans still held in bondage on Galveston Island, Texas, were the last former slaves to learn that they had been freed more than two years previously, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. They learned the news from Union soldiers under Major Gen. Gordon Granger who had finally worked their way south to spread the word. Granger read from General Order No. 3, which proclaimed “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor.”
Upon hearing the news, those former Texas slaves celebrated jubilantly. Today, Juneteenth is a state holiday in Texas and is officially recognized by 42 other states. From 1865 onward, Juneteenth celebrations took place throughout the nation for decades, until they faded away in the early 20th century. But there has been a resurgence more recently of celebrations, and several presidents have observed Juneteenth.
This morning, the legacy of Juneteenth is being considered at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on H.R. 40, introduced by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas. The bill is designed:
To address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.
At The Atlantic, Van R. Newkirk II, a Daily Kos alumnus, writes:
The hearing marks a return to the early black-American celebrations and jubilees, which were staged even as formerly enslaved people beseeched the Freedmen’s Bureau or the Union Army for land. And that’s for good reason. Juneteenth has always had a contradiction at its core: It is a second Independence Day braided together with reminders of ongoing oppression. Its spread from Texas to the rest of the United States accelerated in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., as a sort of home-going for King and other victims of white-supremacist violence, fusing sorrow and jubilation.
For decades, the successes of the civil-rights movement elevated the jubilation. But in recent years, the tenor of Juneteenth has changed. Black Americans see more clearly just how deep white supremacy rests in the country’s bones. The sorrow now predominates, and with it comes an urgency to hold power to account, and to remember who and what is owed.