"JUNETEENTH"

“JUNETEENTH”

            In his fine biography of Frederick Douglass, David Blight notes a truly awful meeting that President Lincoln had with a small group of black ministers in DC on August 14, 1862.  Lincoln had called the meeting to “discuss” the colonization movement, the desire of white people to end the “slavery” problem by “enticing” (forcing) African-Americans to leave the country.  Lincoln basically lectured the ministers and urged them to support colonization.  The ministers demurred and said that they would get back to him on it.  Frederick Douglass and many others were not so nice – they blasted Lincoln on this.

            Lincoln was already thinking about the Emancipation Proclamation, and it is not clear why he had this meeting and said many awful things about people of African descent.  Or, actually it is clear.  Lincoln, for all his leadership powers and vision, was still captured by the racism that has infected America since its European beginnings.  He did not see a way for black people and white people to live together as equals.  This has not changed for most of us who are classified as “white” – for a contemporary version of it, see Derrick Bell’s “Faces at the Bottom of the Well:  The Permanence of Racism.” It has a parable of extra-terrestrials coming to our world, offering solutions for all the world’s problems – all they ask in return is for all black people to be exported from the world into their spaceships.

            Yet, circumstances of the Civil War got to Lincoln.  The bloody battle of Antietam gave him a small opening, and on September 22, 1862, he issued his Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all those held as slaves in the Confederacy as of January 1, 1863, if the Civil War was not over by then.  It also authorized black men to sign up to fight for the Union side in the War.  Frederick Douglass began to see a shift in Lincoln, and he welcomed the Proclamation.  It was a long wait until January 1, and as Blight puts it, “For Douglass, his family and the entire abolitionist community, the fall of 1862 was a sleepless watch night that lasted three months.” 

January 1 came, and the Proclamation went into effect, though it would take the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg and the beginning of the march to Atlanta to turn the tide.

            Many folk will celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation this week on “Juneteenth,” the name given to the event in Texas, where news of the Proclamation  and the Union defeat of the Confederacy did not reach African-Americans held in slavery in Texas until June 19, 1865.  At that time, U.S. General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston with 2,000 federal troops and made this General Order #3:

“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 personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

            Juneteenth has become the most recognized national celebration of the end of legal slavery in the country.  Many other dates could qualify, and some are celebrated:  watch night services in African-American churches on December 31 of each year, similar  to the ones in 1862;  January 31, when the 13^th Amendment abolishing slavery passed Congress;  December 6, when the states ratified the 13^th Amendment. Yet, Juneteenth has held on for any reasons.

            Perhaps the biggest reason is that Juneteenth expresses both celebration and ambivalence.  Celebration that there was finally some recognition of the humanity and equality of people of African descent.  Ambivalence because there was so much reluctance to get this news to the people of Texas.  The racism that would eviscerate the Union victory over the next 40 years could be seen in the last sentence of Order #3 – though African-Americans had built the wealth of much of America, they were still seen as being “in idleness.”  The order arrived over 2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.  As WEB Dubois put it:  “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

            So, this Wednesday, find a way to celebrate the great American vision of the fundamental equality of all people.  Find a way to acknowledge how deeply white supremacy still has a hold on our hearts and vision.  Find a way to work against that captivity, as did Frederick Douglass and Abby Kelley and William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Tubman and Ida Wells and Alice Paul and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker and many others have done.  Let us find our voice.