What is Juneteenth and why should we care?

 

When President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, our nation was literally divided and locked in a vicious civil war of the secessionist southern states versus the northern states that remained in the union.

 

Upon the advice of his cabinet, Lincoln waited to announce the proclamation until the Union achieved a significant victory over Confederate forces. That victory came in September 1863 at the Battle of Antietam in Maryland, when the Union forces halted the northern advance of General Lee’s army.

 

The proclamation called on all Confederate states to rejoin the Union within 100 days, by January 1, 1863, or all slaves in the states then rebelling against the Union “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

 

In practical terms, the proclamation did not free any actual slaves as it applied to areas outside the President’s direct control at the time. It only applied to the Confederate states currently at war with the Union, exempting the four border slave states and most of three Confederate states already controlled by the Union Army. There were still two more bloody years of fighting to come between the North and the South.

 

However, the words “forever free” had enormous and enduring symbolic impact. Important foreign powers, such as France and Britain, which also grew to oppose slavery, stopped any consideration of assisting the Confederate states. By the end of the war in 1865, over 200,000 Black Americans had served in the Union Army.

 

The Civil War petered out after General Lee’s surrender in April 1865 in Virginia. Lincoln had already been assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer a short time before. Confederate states began disbanding their armies, but the process of Union forces taking control took months.

 

Texas, which had sided with the Confederacy, was the furthest slave state with a low concentration of Union troops. Hence, on June 19, 1865, upon arriving in the port of Galveston, Union General Granger read federal orders in public that all enslaved persons in Texas would now and forever be free.

 

After the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation led to the abolition of slavery with the adoption of the 13^th Amendment to the United States Constitution in December 1865. Rebelling states could only be readmitted to the Union after ratifying the 13^th Amendment.

 

Juneteenth—June plus nineteenth—celebrates this emancipation in Texas as the last slave state to be back in Union control.  Juneteenth has grown from a local celebration in Texas in 1866 on its first anniversary to one celebrated in most major American cities today.  Since Texas declared Juneteenth (or the third Sunday in June) as a state holiday in 1986, forty-six other states have also recognized Juneteenth as a celebration of African-American culture and heritage.

 

Today, Juneteenth is the longest running commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. While not yet a federal holiday, the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation is working toward that goal. Juneteenth even has its own red, white and blue flag, which can be viewed at their website.

 

Freedom, liberty, equality, and justice are core American values. Juneteenth recognizes that for many Americans, especially Black Americans, these values do not reflect their lived experience. And we all should recognize that and do our utmost to create a multi-ethnic community wherever we may live.

 

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