While Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation may not have arrived in Texas until the day that we celebrate as “Juneteenth,” no national conversation about enslavement and the ongoing systemic racism faced by Black Americans can simply be relegated to one day or even a series of historic dates. I support the calls for Juneteenth to become a national holiday, as a first step on the road to a 365-day-a-year effort until this nation achieves recovery.
On this day of celebration, combined with protests taking place in cities large and small, I am looking back at my own family history. I’m looking forward to what the future might bring for those of us who are Black and have roots that go deep into not only an ugly past, but who are attempting to design an equitable tomorrow with those not-Black allies who are joining our efforts to build a future which will be truly free of racial chains.
As we call the names of those who have fallen to the bullets of police, to the lynchings by vigilantes and racist fanatics, let us also honor those ancestors who survived to give us life, and the strength to carry on in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles. We who live today, who dance, who sing, who cook special foods, who love, who embrace joy along with hardships deserve praise. We will not be stopped. We will not be silenced. The voices of our dead join in a mighty chorus demanding both justice and equality.
I have written frequently about my own connections to enslavement. For me, it is not simply a historic time period from a history book. The people in my extended family tree are as real to me as the living folks I deal with in my daily life. I realize that I am blessed to have those connections. Far too many of my brethren and sistren have been severed from that very recent history of enslavement, their family histories lost, left out of history books and school curricula. Far too many of my not-Black friends and associates see no connection to enslavement in their own lives, especially if they grew up in all-white enclaves, or if their ancestors came here post-1865.
How often do I hear the plaint, “my family never owned slaves.” That is probably quite true. It does not mean that your family and you do not benefit from the blood, sweat, and tears of those who built this nation on their backs, or the theft of the very ground we walk upon from the native peoples who lived here. I want to re-share some of my own stories here today, and encourage readers to explore their own.
When Gov. Northam of Virginia announced that the state would make Juneteenth an official holiday, I sat down and called the names of over 100 members of my family who were enslaved in Virginia. My great grandmother Millie Weaver Roberts (short for Amelia) the matriarch of our clan, was a midwife, in slavery and in freedom, as was her mother before her. She was famous for healthy deliveries and healthy mothers who never died of childbed fever.
She birthed all of her own children, not allowing anyone else to assist, in fear that they would not practice proper sanitary procedures. She boiled everything; sheets, and towels, and sterilized her birthing instruments in the oven, at a time when many doctors never even washed their hands before touching a patient. Her clients were both black and white. She passed on her knowledge of herbs and healing to her sons and daughters, and one of her sons went on to become a doctor, another a dentist.
I also called the names of those white people who “owned” them, who abused them, who oversaw them, who raped them, bred them, and the very few, who freed them. If I was a Christian, I would hope that most of that crew are writhing in hell. Since I’m not, it will suffice as a reason to smile.
In “The Road to Juneteenth,” I wrote about my first trip to the Lincoln Memorial:
I can't ever really enthusiastically celebrate the Fourth of July since too many of my ancestors were in bondage in 1776 and in the ensuing decades. Those slave-owning and selling presidents who preceded Lincoln, like George Washington, are not fathers of my country. I can still remember my first trip to Washington, DC, as a little girl with my parents. We went to stay with relatives in Anacostia (southeast DC), and from there went out to see the city's historical sites. The first stop on our tour was not the Capitol or the White House—it was the Lincoln Memorial, where we gazed upon the statue of Abraham Lincoln. My parents explained that President Lincoln had "freed the slaves," naming members of our family that had gained freedom as a result of his Emancipation Proclamation. When you are six or seven years old, you don't have much of a grasp of history, but the man's sad, craggy face moved me, and I felt a personal connection between him and the family names I knew like "Great Granddaddy Roberts," "Great Grandma Millie" and "Great Aunt Annie," who had been a runaway. Later, we took a side trip to Loudoun County, Virginia, to visit Cousin Mandy and Cousin Bea Scipio, where these two elderly ladies who lived in a log cabin told stories of slavery passed down from their parents. In the ensuing years of my childhood, we learned about the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War in school, but it wasn't until later in my life, in young adulthood, that I learned more about the nuances of Lincoln's history—his ambivalence towards Blacks, and colonization plans to send them "back to Africa" or to Chiriqui (Panama). I also learned that all those who were enslaved were not automatically freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. I didn't know as a child that the Emancipation Proclamation covered only freed enslaved people in areas over which Lincoln had no control and.…
did not cover the nearly 500,000 slaves in the slave-holding border states (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland or Delaware) which were Union states...Also specifically exempted were New Orleans and 13 named parishes of Louisiana, all of which were also already mostly under federal control at the time of the Proclamation. These exemptions left unemancipated an additional 300,000 slaves.
The Library of Congress displays this print by artist Thomas Nast, distributed in 1865, depicting a rosy view of emancipation and freedom.
Thomas Nast's celebration of the emancipation of Southern slaves with the end of the Civil War. Nast envisions a somewhat optimistic picture of the future of free blacks in the United States. The central scene shows the interior of a freedman's home with the family gathered around a "Union" wood stove. The father bounces his small child on his knee while his wife and others look on. On the wall near the mantel hang a picture of Abraham Lincoln and a banjo. Below this scene is an oval portrait of Lincoln and above it, Thomas Crawford's statue of "Freedom." On either side of the central picture are scenes contrasting black life in the South under the Confederacy (left) with visions of the freedman's life after the war (right). At top left fugitive slaves are hunted down in a coastal swamp. Below, a black man is sold, apart from his wife and children, on a public auction block. At bottom a black woman is flogged and a male slave branded. Above, two hags, one holding the three-headed hellhound Cerberus, preside over these scenes, and flee from the gleaming apparition of Freedom. In contrast, on the right, a woman with an olive branch and scales of justice stands triumphant. Here, a freedman's cottage can be seen in a peaceful landscape. Below, a black mother sends her children off to "Public School." At bottom a free Negro receives his pay from a cashier. Two smaller scenes flank Lincoln's portrait. In one a mounted overseer flogs a black field slave (left); in the other a foreman politely greets Negro cotton-field workers.
Yes, there were celebrations, like the one depicted below, in Washington D.C.
It wasn't until I began to do intensive research on my own family's enslavement history that I discovered the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which freed some of my Scipio, Weaver, and Jackson relatives. The irony attached to that early emancipation was that slave owners who swore loyalty to the Union were granted "compensation"—in other words, reparations. There was no payback for those men and women held in a lifetime of bondage; those who profited were the whites who had lost their "property."
On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia. Passage of this law came 8 1/2 months before President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. The act brought to a conclusion decades of agitation aimed at ending what antislavery advocates called "the national shame" of slavery in the nation's capital. It provided for immediate emancipation, compensation to former owners who were loyal to the Union of up to $300 for each freed slave, voluntary colonization of former slaves to locations outside the United States, and payments of up to $100 for each person choosing emigration. Over the next 9 months, the Board of Commissioners appointed to administer the act approved 930 petitions, completely or in part, from former owners for the freedom of 2,989 former slaves.
Thankfully, the records of those freed are now digitized on the Civil War Washington website, giving glimpses of what those "slaves"—who were people—looked like. Here's what I found: I've bolded the names of my family members, including my Great Grand Uncle Dennis Weaver, one of the two enslaved ancestors for whom I was named Denise, and the Scipio (Sipio) ancestors of my cousins Mandy and Bea.
Petition of Hugh W. Throckmorton, 5 May, 1862:
Your Petitioner, Hugh W. Throckmorton of Washington City D.C. by this his petition in writing, represents and states, that he is a person loyal to the United States, who, at the time of the passage of the said act of Congress, held a claim to service or labor against the following persons of African descent of the names of Lewis Sipio, Solomon Ford, Henry Weaver, Patsy Jackson, John Jackson, Dennis Weaver, Winney Ford and Joseph Ford for and during the life of said Persons and that by said act of Congress said Persons was discharged and freed of and from all claim of your petitioner to such service or labor; that at the time of said discharge said Lewis Sipio was of the age of Thirty Years and of the personal description following:(1) Light Coloured, Solomon Ford Twenty Nine Years of a Dark Coloured, Henry Weaver aged Twenty Six Years, Dark Coloured Patsy Jackson, aged Twenty two years, Dark Coloured John Jackson aged Eight Months. Light Coloured Dennis Weaver aged Eighteen years. Dark Coloured Winney Ford aged Sixteen years, Dark Coloured and Joseph Ford aged fifteen years. Dark Coloured all very healthy and No defect excepting Henry Weaver who has a Broken Leg; and at Present Writing on Crutches but improving That your petitioner acquired his claim to the aforesaid service or labor of said Negroes in manner following:(2) Partly by inheritance and partly by Purchase. having formerly Belonged to his father Mordicai Throckmorton. Who died in Loudoun Co. State of Virginia. Leaving Said Negroes, as aforesaid, he the said Hugh, Paying the debts due by his said father, thereby partly receiving them by inheritance and partly by Purchase as aforesaid
One of the things that has always bothered me about the history of enslavement in the U.S. is that too often we use the term, "slaves," which makes those enslaved persons faceless, and is dehumanizing. I'm grateful that I've got some pictures and family narratives to add detail to that time. For those of you who don't have these details, there are portrait photos of freed people in the Library of Congress, many from the U.S. Works Progress Administration (WPA), Federal Writers' Project that put faces and stories to places and people, like this one from Texas:
Finally we come to that last emancipation day in Texas:
Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.
Granger read the proclamation: "The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer." The response was electric.
The reactions to this profound news ranged from pure shock to immediate jubilation. While many lingered to learn of this new employer to employee relationship, many left before these offers were completely off the lips of their former 'masters' - attesting to the varying conditions on the plantations and the realization of freedom. Even with nowhere to go, many felt that leaving the plantation would be their first grasp of freedom. North was a logical destination and for many it represented true freedom, while the desire to reach family members in neighboring states drove the some into Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Settling into these new areas as free men and women brought on new realities and the challenges of establishing a heretofore non-existent status for black people in America. Recounting the memories of that great day in June of 1865 and its festivities would serve as motivation as well as a release from the growing pressures encountered in their new territory. The celebration of June 19th was coined "Juneteenth" and grew with more participation from descendants. The Juneteenth celebration was a time for reassuring each other, for praying and for gathering remaining family members. Juneteenth continued to be highly revered in Texas decades later, with many former slaves and descendants making an annual pilgrimage back to Galveston on this date.
This documentary below, produced by the Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture, tells the full story.
Part 2 and Part 3.
Sadly, we know all too well that Black folks continued, and still continue, to suffer under the legacy of past enslavement and systemic racism. For the history following emancipation, I suggest reading Slavery by Another Name by Douglas Blackmon or viewing the PBS documentary.
It wasn’t until I started researching another branch of my family that I found a link to Galveston, and Juneteenth. One family member in my tree, Idella Gibson, was born enslaved in Galveston in 1861. Her mother, freed by the proclamation was able to escape Texas, move north with her children and leave a life of rape and coercion behind her.
Why do I bring up rape? You see here a picture of a Black woman. She has a fair complexion, and hair that has a straight texture. She inherited her phenotype from an owner or overseer. Such was the case for far too many enslaved women.
My family tree includes Black people of all hues, from ecru to ebony. Not all are the result of enslavement—more recent examples come via interracial marriages, but I have used many of the photos of the earlier group to teach students about the unscientific construction of “race” here in the U.S. Pay a visit to Teaching about Race: 101 and take the quiz. See how well you do.
Sitting here today at the dawn of a movement which is once again attempting to call attention to a buried history, as I call friends and family to wish them a “Happy Juneteeth,” the names and faces of those who have passed on stay with me.
I think also of the young people who are out marching and fighting back. I salute them all. I can no longer march, my health won’t permit it, but I can add my support in other ways. I’m looking forward to November, when we can start to clean house, and hopefully celebrate Juneteenth 2021 on the road to eliminating the racism that cripples us.
Lift your voices, raise your fists … and don’t forget to register to vote!
Pass me that plate of collard greens, with some watermelon and red soda water on the side.