Why do Americans celebrate Juneteenth?
At a time when we are bizarrely still debating confederate statues, bases, and flags (the vast majority of which were erected not in commemoration after the Civil War but as part of the violence and oppression of Jim Crow) and when we are contemplating finally acknowledging slavery in some kind of federal holiday, which black Americans have been covertly doing for over a hundred years, I would like to gently remind folks that we were not “freed” and no one was our “Great Emancipator.”
Nobody gave black folks the gift of freedom. Emancipation, which is a whimsical term to describe the decision to legally end over 200 years of entrapment, degradation, assault, torture, murder, rape, and forced labor of millions of people, was most certainly complicated and dynamic, but fantasizing that black folks waited around to be saved is erasure.
A story of movement and preservation.
Why do Americans celebrate Juneteenth? Hundreds of thousands of black folks fought in the Civil War and many black folks fled enslavement during that time. The presence and actions of black folks helped force history’s hand. Juneteenth then is joyful resistance, not gratitude, and while this holiday is sacred and holds special meaning for black folk, non-black Americans must also grapple with the day and develop their own way of understanding its historical import.
Juneteenth is a black holiday because we have chosen to seize on an otherwise erased history, hold a space for the pain and the jubilance of black existence, but honoring it is not allyship: this is your history too. You must do the work of grappling with it yourself.
Black Americans celebrated a variety of emancipation days as abolishment hit the country in uneven waves, but Juneteenth mostly took hold because of the Texas diaspora. Black Texans carried and flung the joy of the day everywhere as they traveled, particularly during The Great Migration, and the holiday is even celebrated in Nacimiento, Mexico, where there was a huge Underground Railroad.
Juneteenth quieted during Jim Crow but became a roar after Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign honored the day—and black folks brought the tradition back home with them. It is solidarity and communion across centuries and borders, a historical handshake and hugs.
Happy Juneteenth Day, my loves! ❤️ off to go be blackity-black while doing blackity-black things! ✊🏿✊🏾✊🏽
By Niara Savage
Opportunity after the Confederacy
At the stroke of 12 PM on January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation happened and pronounced subjugated individuals in the Confederacy free-relying on the prerequisite that the Union won the conflict. The announcement transformed the conflict into a battle for the opportunity and before the finish of the conflict 200,000 Black troopers had joined the battle, getting out the word of opportunity as they battled their direction through the South.
Since Texas was one of the last fortifications of the South, liberation would be a long-lasting coming for subjugated individuals in the state. Indeed, even after the last clash of the Civil War was battled in 1865-an entire two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was marked it is accepted that many subjugated individuals actually didn’t realize they were free. Supposedly, approximately 250,000 oppressed individuals were just educated of their opportunity after Union General Gordon Granger showed up in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, and declared that the president had given a declaration liberating them.
