Juneteenth

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It is a real holiday now, so celebrate! Long ago, if not that far away, we built a new office and moved in. Came to work one day and could barely get into our parking lot. People and cars everywhere. Took the elevator up and asked our receptionist what the hell is going on out there?

Juneteenth was the answer. Spent a lot of the day and night there and, thanks to some wonderful people, got educated on what it was and meant. The memory of the food and music still seem like it was yesterday.

It is a great day. Celebrate it.

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57 replies
    • bmaz says:

      Right? My awakening moment was in 1986 or 1987 or so. How did I not really know? One of the best days ever by the time it was over.

      Also, what a great video!

      • DrFunguy says:

        Exactly!
        How did I not know? I was raised in a former slave state and won awards for my history scholarship in grade school, yet this never came across my radar until the past decade or so.
        Certainly one of the ugliest residues of our colonial history.

        • bmaz says:

          YES! I wish you, and everybody here, could have spent that day, and it really went into the night, with me and where I did. One of the most memorable days ever. It was a walk into a history I had specifically not known well enough before but will never forget.

    • Steve Sandeen says:

      Thanks, I’ve been enjoying listening to Louie the last couple of nights. This particular song is new to me.

    • harpie says:

      Smithsonian: https://twitter.com/NMAAHC/status/1670760274511396865
      7:47 AM · Jun 19, 2023

      #OnThisDay in 1865, General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, TX to read Order No. 3, which affirmed the end of slavery in the states of the former Confederacy. This momentous occasion has been celebrated as #Juneteenth — a combination of “June” & “19th” — for over 150 years. [VIDEO] [THREAD]

  3. Rayne says:

    Happy Juneteenth!

    This day in 1865, Texas was forced to acknowledge slavery ended after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation two and a half years earlier.

    Intransigent Texas had been a pain in Mexico’s ass thirty years earlier; the Battle of the Alamo in 1836 was fought to keep Texas a slaveholding region, while Mexico had already banned slavery. The future state wouldn’t give up slavery easily if they were willing to fight to the death to keep it.

    Here’s an excellent overview of the history and background of Juneteenth:
    What Is Juneteenth? by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

    • Bears7485 says:

      Great and informative link. Thanks for sharing.

      It’s a damn shame I didn’t learn about Juneteenth in public school, I had to discover it on my own after graduating high school in the early 90s while working in kitchens with far more diversity than my lily-white overtly segregated grade school (Of which the district paid an extremely hefty price when they lost a federal civil discrimination case, with the Magistrate opining that the district had “Raised discrimination to an art form”, and a Lutheran jr & sr high school.

      This line from W.E.B. Du Bois really struck me with its pertinence; “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

      • Rayne says:

        So much of American’s history has been sanitized or purged at various times in many ways. I’ve written before that my high school text book circa 1970s contained exactly two paragraphs and a footnote regarding the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinese Americans have tried to recover their erased history, yet Florida under DeSantis has now banned property ownership by Chinese thereby scoffing at the history of Chinese in America who’ve fought for their equal human rights..

        I dread to think what DeSantis will do with slavery if Black Americans’ history is likewise re-erased and purged. It’s not the enslaved who moved moved back again toward slavery but the class who benefited most from enslaving other humans.

        • Bears7485 says:

          “It’s not the enslaved who moved back again toward slavery but the class who benefited most from enslaving other humans.”

          That’s exactly how I interpreted Du Bois’ quote.

          I very much appreciate your perspective here. One of my fellow employees was Errol, who caught my attention as a green fry cook by saying, in his deep Barbadian accent, “Sinkorswimuddfucka” and “Commintru HOT” also, during less stressful times in the kitchen imparted to me a credo that I continually pass down to my son and other younger kids “NEVER stop learning, you’ll die!”

    • Badger Robert says:

      General Grant sent Phil Sheridan and several USCT units to Texas.
      1. Sheridan was one of Grant’s most hard nosed liberationist generals.
      2. If USCT troops were in Texas, the whole state, including the formerly enslaved would know emancipation was real.
      3. There was the looming problem of the French occupation of Mexico. Sheridan understood how to leave surplus arms within reach of the Republican forces in Mexico, according to Sherman’s memoirs. Eventually John Schofield went to Paris and told the French ministers to not test Grant’s patience.

  4. Barringer says:

    Regrettably, I am one of those who only learned about Juneteenth from Watchmen. Horrible legacy.

      • stillscoff says:

        In the article linked below the Zinn Education Project provides some interesting history about Juneteenth and how it has been celebrated over time.

        https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/juneteenth-emancipation-day/

        “Even following the arrival of the power to enforce the emancipation order in the form of the United States Army, enslaved people were left with much of the responsibility to seize their own freedom. As had been the case since the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the position of the federal government on ending slavery in much of the country offered the enslaved the chance to take their freedom into their own hands and promised that if they could get themselves to an area not controlled by rebels, that this theoretical freedom would be fulfilled. This drive and requirement for self-emancipation has been consistent through the story of Black American history.”

    • PeteT0323 says:

      Me as well. And I don’t even have the excuse of it being because of Florida as old as I am.

      Rosewood (FL) and Greenwood (Tulsa) weren’t taught either. Probable delayed Post Civil War backlash.

      And DeSantis would say this is all CRT. I say BullHockey.

      • Sheila says:

        I think we need to start calling it CRH–“Critical Race History”…..

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  5. Tsawyer8 says:

    The emancipation proclamation was a remarkable historical event to contemplate.
    In the 1860s, steam power was just beginning to mature. Every other thing that was moved from here to there on land was moved by human labor, or by animals loaded by humans. No powered equipment other than water wheels existed. The wealthy people, North and South, used human labor for everything imaginable. In a mass act of cognitive dissonance, many decided that owning people was the best way to avoid the extremely hard work required in a settler colonial society. Emancipation, and the 13th amendment which followed, were long overdue, but still impacted those people in myriad ways. Imagine if the army came to town today and confiscated, without compensation, every electric or gas vehicle, tool, or appliance.

    All of society would face a life of toil like eden evictees Adam and Eve in my grade school Bible story.
    I am not asking for sympathy for the people who found themselves in the same circumstance as the average settler in the North and West. But I think it’s worth contemplating.

    • timbozone says:

      Slavery was slowly being ended in many parts of the world, the trend beginning in 18th/early 19th Century CE. The French Revolution ended slavery in all of France and its colonies. Britain ended slave trading in 1807 and fully abolished it in its colonies in 1837. Mexico banned slavery in 1829. Texas became a slave republic before it joined the US. In the Yucatan, slavery continued for many decades, and the states of the Yucatan were keen to join the Union as slave states after the Mexican-American war of 1846-48… Etc.

      My point is that slavery (and things like universal suffrage, etc) aren’t just US institutions but global movements. What we can agree on is that ending slavery in the US was a good thing and does deserve a national holiday to celebrate this event in our nation’s history. I’m glad that we eventually did get there after decades of advocacy.

      I became aware of Juneteenth in the 1970s but wasn’t around people who were actively trying to get it made a national holiday until the late 80s… I regret not immediately joining the chorus for it until 20 years later. Celebration in the progress of human dignity is definitely something to advocate for.

  6. Fancy Chicken says:

    Read this morning an opinion piece in WAPO, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/18/juneteenth-how-to-celebrate/ , that felt really important.

    Its gist was twofold; that while Juneteenth may be about black folk it’s for all Americans to celebrate and in that, it is a second Independence Day. Juneteenth gives Independence Day meaning by celebrating it’s foundational values for all races
    and ejecting the contradiction of slavery from a Republic founded on equality of all men.

    It also stressed the importance of defining the rituals that will mark this holiday before commercialization sets too deeply in and makes an argument for framing Memorial Day to The 4th as a time for national reflection on our values and their cost.

    As a Southern child of the 70’s and 80’s I didn’t learn about Juneteenth until my Occupy days even with plenty of black friends from my childhood and early adulthood. I didn’t leave the South and the unspoken lines that still culturally separated me and my friends until I was in my early 30’s, and as with the opinion above find that my best teachers on issues that impact black folk have always been black folk- a diversity that I have lost in WV to gain chickens and the quietude of trees.

    It will be fun to learn what I can do as an ally in a low diversity area to bring Celebration, not just acknowledgement of Juneteenth to my community. But I bet it’s gonna involve a cookout 😋

    So Happy Juneteenth ya’ll!

    • Purple Martin says:

      Here’s an outside-the-paywall WaPo gift link: https://wapo.st/3XhF8Xs

      I followed Ted Johnson back when he was primarily a military affairs writer, long before WaPo picked him up.

      Theodore (Ted) R. Johnson is the director of the Fellows Program at the Brennan Center for Justice and a writer for The Bulwark. He is also a retired commander in the U.S. Navy and the author of When the Stars Begin to Fall (Grove Atlantic, 2021).

      A couple years ago I sent his Memorial Day column to my family, and posted it here too as I recall (if you’ve never read it it, here, it’s worth the time: https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/memorial-dayfor-all-americans )

      Yesterday, I sent his Juneteenth column to the same group of family members. Included this paragraph from the column, for a couple who had made clear in the past that they just do not approve of all this…modernity.

      It comes just a few weeks after Memorial Day and a couple weeks before Independence Day. After a solemn remembrance of those who have given their lives in service to the country, but before celebrating another year of existence, Juneteenth represents the pride and resolve necessary to keep the nation moving forward. It admonishes us not to squander the sacrifices of previous generations.

      • Fancy Chicken says:

        Thank you Purple Martin! Since I subscribe I forget about that paywall thing. Next time I post something from there I’ll test it first.

        Glad to see that it moved you too and am going to read that Bulwark article right now. Thanks again.

        Chicken

  7. ernesto1581 says:

    “Juneteenth,” Ralph Ellison.
    epigraph he chose begins:
    This is the use of memory:
    For liberation — not less of love but expanding
    Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
    From the future as well as the past.
    (TS Eliot, Little Gidding)

  8. klynn says:

    Great post!
    Here’s an interesting reel making the historic case that today is not the day of “collective emancipation.”

    https://www.instagram.com/reel/CtoUL1QsDs1/?

    (Hopefully the link posted correctly)

    Not trying to stir the pot. It’s just great to keep on learning the emancipation journey and listen to “good trouble” history lessons.

  9. Rayne says:

    Upthread, community member Bears7485 and I discuss erasure, the excision of American history which prevented Americans from learning about their country’s past.

    Even Black Americans have been prevented from learning their own history, and I don’t mean by the banning of critical race theory in university curriculums.

    Leah Olajide, Newsletter editor for the Detroit Free Press, wrote today:

    Good morning. It’s Monday.

    For years, on July 4, I would read or recite the speech given by Frederick Douglass titled “What to the slave is the fourth of July?”

    It was the only date I knew about freedom in America.

    It wasn’t until a little over a decade ago when I learned the significance of June 19, 1865 during a tour at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. I was floored. How did I not know about this? How did my parents not know about this?

    After this revelation, I began reading and researching different books, essays and articles about Juneteenth, and the period that followed closely after: reconstruction (a period I’m still fascinated by).

    I’ve also tried to imagine what it must have felt like to have been declared free, and then further knowing that your freedom had been granted two years prior because of the Emancipation Proclamation that was signed in 1863. What would have been the first thing I would’ve done as a free woman? Who would I have looked for first? My own thoughts leave my brain jumbled.

    So, yes, like much of the country, I was late to the party when it comes to Juneteenth. But as the saying goes: better late than never.

    Here are a few things you can look forward to today and throughout the week to celebrate Juneteenth.
    Also, as we recognize the 158th anniversary of this historic day, Juneteenth could soon become a state public holiday thanks to House-passed bills last week.

    Juneteenth is an important day in American history. But where do we stand on racial equality as a state and as a country? One writer weighs in on this important question.

    What does this say about the U.S. when an editor at one of the two major newspapers in the city which has had the largest Black population in the U.S. for decades until this year did not grow up learning of Juneteenth in grade school? Even in a Black majority city curriculums have curtailed Black Americans’ history.

    Juneteenth isn’t just a day of celebration. It’s a day of education, filling the gaps missed by white supremacist-dominated and -developed curriculum. We should be learning and passing on the knowledge of freedom belonging to all just as Union troops notified enslaved Americans in Texas in 1865.

  10. Chetnolian says:

    Juneteenth is virtually unknown in the UK, as if it has nothing to do with us and we did not start it all.

    But it is amazing how deeply ingrained in our society slavery has become. I grew up in small-town Scotland. Opposite my house was a public park and golf course which had been a private estate, and beyond it was a grander estate, then still owned by a minor member of the aristocracy, with a splendid mansion.

    I knew these estates had been public land “sold” by the town to their founders. I doubt the town saw much benefit after the councillors had taken their share. I never asked as a child why they had French sounding names and I doubt anyone could have told me.. But of course it turns out that these names, Belleisle and Rozelle, were the names of the slave sugar plantations in Jamaica, the proceeds of the sale of which to other grander and more ambitious Scotsmen, had been applied to buying the Scottish estates.

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      Probably true of every major landed estate in the British Isles. Sugar, coffee, tea, and tobacco made fortunes, paid for the land and slave labor from which they came, and fueled the industrial revolution, keeping laborers at work for longer, with less pay.

  11. Otto1951 says:

    I comment very infrequently, and I recall using a name that no longer passes muster. I will stick with this one in the future.

    In 1976 I dropped out of UT grad school, and eventually was hired as an entry level clerk at the soon to be renamed Texas Department of Public Welfare. I was relatively new to Texas, and was given the Juneteenth explanation with a hint of an eye roll by an Anglo coworker.

    A noticeable number of others, including my manager, had taken a day of annual leave to celebrate with family and friends at Zilker Park. All of these individuals had attended segregated schools and ridden in the back of the bus. Jim Crow was a recent reality, not a chapter in a banned text book.

    Juneteeth, the end of chattel slavery in Texas is well worth a day of celebration and reflection in a state that still celebrates Confederate Heroes Day.

    [Thanks for updating your username to meet the 8 letter minimum. /~Rayne]

    • bmaz says:

      And great comment and story. Just wonderful. Comment more often, this is the stuff of why we are here.

    • Attygmgm says:

      I worked in the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice from 1979 to 1986. During my entire tenure in that great job, I never heard anything about Juneteenth from colleagues or any other source, showing that even an interested and receptive observer, one trying to help move life a millimeter in a positive direction, has much to learn. My first exposure came in the 1990s, to my chagrin. I was delighted when my youngest child was born on Juneteenth, and when it became a holiday. The new beginning of the 13th and 14th Amendments continues to be just getting started with a long way to go.

  12. SFTexian says:

    I learned about Juneteenth when my 1st wife (trumpet) & I (trombone) joined a soul band in Houston. My wife was 3 years younger and had attended fully integrated high school, so she had some contacts. We played dances & night clubs all around Houston, Baytown, Galveston, little East Texas towns. We were usually the only white people in the band, the club, and maybe the town, but were always treated no differently than anyone else. And the music/ dancing/ spirit was intoxicating! It was well named: Soul Music!

  13. Adam_19JUN2023_1937h says:

    great

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  14. orvillej says:

    I’m going to try to post a YouTube link to a song written by my friend and music playing buddy, Laura Love. It tells a story of her ancestor, Mexi Love, who lived as a slave in Galveston and got the news from Gen. Grainger about the freeing of the slaves. She wanted to leave Galveston and head north to a land that was a fantasy for her-Saskatchewan. This link is to a live performance of the tune by she and I. It’s also available on one of her recordings.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZwC71oBmA

    Let me know if there’s any problem with the link and Happy Juneteenth!

  15. Retired guy says:

    I first heard about it when my parents moves the family to Houston in 1968. I had the impression it was a regional celebration, from the proximity to Galveston, where the event originally happened. I had not heard about it previously as we lived in Louisiana and in several Rocky Mountain states.

    I recall minor local reporting, visible fromthe mostly white newly built suburbs. My all white public high school was integrated before my senior year – We were the Westbury Rebels and flew the Confederate flag at sporting events. One of our sports rivals were the Robert E. Lee Generals, down the street. The largest black high school in Houston was named after Confederate General Dick Dowling. It took until around 2012 for the district to change these names. That was Texas, and mostly still is.

    In the 1980s, Juneteenth was a bigger deal in local Houston media, but still treated as a regional thing.

    I moved to the Dallas Fort Worth area in 2008 and learned that the activist who pressed for the national Juneteenth holiday, Opal Lee, has lived her adult life in Dallas. At age 96, she marched in today’s Dallas parade in the dangerous heat we are having. It is a remarkable American story.

    Texas is still screwed up. I have lived my entire voting life in savagely gerrymandered districts, each watering down my suburban vote in a finger connected to, now, 6 rural counties. The one safe Democratic (read black) district nearby is a spectacular wandering snake, that rivals the crazy things around Austin.

    We talk about moving, but we have family, friends, and a good life here.

  16. William Allen Simpson (DayDreamer) says:

    Growing up a white protestant in a mostly white catholic suburb of Detroit in the 60s and 70s, there was never a mention of Juneteenth. As a musician in the Detroit classical, jazz, and ethnic scene, there were no Juneteenth celebrations. I’m not surprised that a Detroit Free Press editor had never heard of it.

    My first memory of Juneteenth is from Mississippi in the late ’90s early naughts. I’d helped found the first Internet Service Provider there, and we hosted the website for the 2001 flag referendum (we lost). Juneteenth was mentioned only as a day without celebration, as Mississippi celebrated Confederacy instead. (I’m fairly sure it still does.)

    Until recently, I’d thought that Juneteenth was only a Southern thing. But the plethora of Confederate flags that sprung up during the Trump administration has shown we northerner Michiganders need the holiday as much as anywhere else.

  17. Lisboeta says:

    In 1835, the British government created a £20 million fund (an enormous sum at the time) to pay for ‘slave reparations’. Not reparations to the enslaved, but to compensate the slave owners for their lost assets. The government had to borrow to raise the money; it wasn’t until 2015 that they (i.e. generations of taxpayers) finally paid off that debt. Few people in the UK are aware of this sordid history.

    https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/29/slavery-abolition-compensation-when-will-britain-face-up-to-its-crimes-against-humanity

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  18. rattlemullet says:

    Born in 1950 Georgia, white and colored only signs are vivid memories, klan burning crosses on highways were very freighting to me as a young white boy, could not imagine being a young black child even though I thought about it. Being a radical in the sixties, on all forms when asked to identify race I always put human. Any day that celebrates human freedom from bondage is a great day to be celebrate. Sadly June 19 took so long to be recognized formally. More tragic still that I now live in Florida where the electorate just elected a racist that now resides in the governors mansion and has a super majority to wield his racist ambitions. Progress for blacks is very slow here in America having structural racism built into all our institutions that they must deal with everyday. But lets us raise a tankard for June 19 and the wisdom of the politicians of the day for the emancipation and blood of the soldiers who died achieving the goal of freedom for the enslaved.

    Without June 19, July 4 was not a complete Independence Day for America.

  19. CovariantTensor says:

    I knew nothing of Juneteenth until a few years ago, from an episode of the TV show “Blackish”. Things moved pretty quickly after then to make it an official holiday, so I imagine that show was a catalyst for awareness of it in white America. I have to say, here in the northeast, the weather is usually a heck of a lot nicer (as it was yesterday) than on MLK Day.

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