TheLoop21.com

By: Susan Anderson (follow this member)
Wed, 06/17/2009 - 00:00

This week, many of us are celebrating Juneteenth with picnics and public ceremonies. But Juneteenth isn’t just a time to drink red soda water and eat barbecue ribs and potato salad. For 144 years, it’s been a way for African Americans to join with others and remember the slavery our people endured, and their freedom movement. 

Some call it Independence Day for blacks, echoing Frederick Douglass’ 1852 address, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.

Juneteenth is named for the date June 19, 1865, when a Union fleet arrived in Galveston Harbor with General Gordon Granger and his troops to declare that the Emancipation Proclamation was in effect in Texas. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued more than two years before, by President Abraham Lincoln, liberating slaves in the Confederacy as a key strategy in winning the Civil War.

In Galveston, General Granger pronounced: "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 lag in time between the proclamation and the news of it in Texas is a reminder of the difficulties of obtaining freedom. After the Emancipation Proclamation, liberation wasn’t automatic. Some slave masters used violence to resist the loss of their property. Illiterate slaves often heard the news of freedom through their own networks. Some stayed put. Others risked death to escape. Thousands fled to Union lines as the Union army moved across the South. 

By 1867, the Freedmen’s Bureau organized a Juneteenth celebration in the Texas state capital of Austin which became an annual event. In 1872, two black church congregations bought the land for the 10-acre Emancipation Park, which still operates today near downtown Houston, and where Juneteenth is still celebrated every year. After years of lobbying, in 1979, Texas became the first and only state to pass legislation declaring Juneteenth a legal holiday.

As black Texans migrated to other states, they took the holiday with them. Juneteenth was part of the many popular observations of Emancipation by African Americans in the first decades of the 20th century. Starting with the Great Depression, the commemoration nearly disappeared. But since the Civil Rights Movement, new black consciousness, and an awareness of history, fueled the multiplication of Juneteenth celebrations in all 50 states. Now, it seems, Juneteenth is “a true testament to humanity,” the oldest national commemoration of slavery’s end in the United States.

Susan D. Anderson teaches, speaks and writes about African American history, politics and culture. She is the author of Nostalgia for a Trumpet: Poems of Memory and History, published by Northwestern University Press. She has been a Visiting Professor at Pitzer College, a contributor to the Los Angeles Times Sunday Opinion since 1999, and currently manages an archival program at the USC Libraries.