Juneteenth holds a promise for all Americans and a lesson that we can all learn from If we could only embrace the significance of this historic day, when the last enslaved people in the United States learned that they were free. This freedom is commemorated each year on June 19th because it was on June 19th, 1865 two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day, takes place annually on June 19. The holiday is a combination of the words “June” and “nineteenth.” On January 1, 1863, ahead of the third year of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all enslaved people in the rebellious Confederate states—Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia—were free. But Lincoln’s executive order did not fully abolish slavery in the U.S., as it didn’t apply to those held as property in bordering states who were loyal to the Union.
- Advertisement -
Despite the proclamation, in Texas, slavery was largely unaffected. The confederates considered the state a safe space for slaveholders, as it remained generally unoccupied by Union Army soldiers during the war.
But on June 19, 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, and just two months after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered, with the Union Army winning the war, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston; he issued General Order No. 3 to inform enslaved people that they were free and that the Civil War was over.
For generations Black Americans have recognized the end of one of the darkest chapters in US history with the joy of knowing of their freedom and have over these many decades celebrated Juneteenth.
The US government has been slow to recognize and embrace this occasion; it was only in 2021 that President Biden signed a bill passed by Congress to set aside Juneteenth (June 19th) as a federal holiday. The fight for this federal holiday was one that took several years, and one of the key people credited for this achievement was Sheila Jackson Lee, the Congressmember from Houston, Texas. Sheila Jackson Lee is known as a fighter for human and civil rights.
She also has Caribbean roots that go deep, and found the fight for freedom as a common cause with people of all color from whatever area or region they might be from. The Juneteenth celebration holiday is a celebration for truth, justice, freedom for all, and it’s a direction that is unstoppable as enslaved people, colonialized people and people who are oppressed continue in their battle and struggle for freedom.
It was on Juneteenth that more than 300,000 persons enslaved in Texas were advised that the war had ended and slavery was no longer the law of the land. The celebration of Juneteenth goes to the core of what it means in this country to be an African American and goes to the core of what freedom means and how the promise is still yet to be fully realized. Juneteenth is a strong signal in that direction; it is important to recognize the institutional and systemic bias and discrimination that led up to Juneteenth’s creation.
It was the government’s effort to keep people uninformed and unengaged; they were left behind by an institution that failed to inform and to protect them. Today, many of the freedoms being fought for or realized in the spirit of Juneteenth are under attack. There is an outright effort to suppress the votes of black people throughout this country.
It takes form in different levels of suppression, but all lead to a way of denying votes to black people. Our voter rights are under attack and it’s the same institutional and systemic operation that kept black Americans in slavery without their knowledge for so long. It’s the same institution that is now trying to deny your right to vote, your sacred right, your voice.
Our votes are our voice, and we need to proclaim loudly the importance of voting in spite of all the efforts that are being made now to suppress our votes.
Just like the Union forces, we need the power for voices of our votes to create a more perfect union for all. The next area that is under systemic and institutional attack in this country is the ability to educate our people, our children, as to the evil and destructiveness of slavery.
Books are being banned and removed from shelves in libraries and in schools, that talk of the horror of slavery under the criticism of the critical race theory. They are now attacking the education of our people, the knowledge base that every American should know on the darkest side of this country of its darkest history, and of the fight for freedom and the values of that fight and the true history, and that is under severe attack around the country. So as we celebrate Juneteenth, we must remember the history, we must be alert to the forces, systemic, institutional, and otherwise that are at work even today to disenfranchise us as a people, to miseducate us as a country, and to keep us in the darkness away from Freedom, Liberty, and Justice.
Juneteenth represents the hope, the change and the future of this country. It appeals to the best in the United States in all of us. It represents what can be looked at as what is right in America. While racism is still strong and alive in the United States against black people, proactive measures such as Juneteenth and the significance provide the fuel to continue the struggle that we must win.
