Ink Tea Stone Leaf

The other day, I was picking my wife up from work at the library. I arrived on the periphery of her conversation with a coworker, who was exasperated by a recent interaction with a patron. This patron was a person I have never knowingly laid eyes upon, but I understand her to be a white lady, which perhaps goes some part of the way toward explaining her attitude.

As it was explained to me, this patron had inquired about hours of operation in the coming week, and asked why the library was closed on Thursday, the 19th. She had apparently forgotten that Juneteenth has been recognized as a Federal holiday since 2021, or perhaps that things tend to close on Federal holidays; in either case she expressed in frustration thoughts akin to the following: “I don’t know why I’m expected to celebrate Juneteenth, it has nothing to do with me.”

Another day in the life of post-racial America, right? This kind of bewildered and resentful ignorance about an old/new holiday may not be the number one problem we face today, but this lady’s opinion is indeed a problem, reflecting not only a misunderstanding of history but of the purpose of holidays in civic life. I’d like to correct it, if I can, and offer some perspective for those who struggle to explain why Juneteenth matters to all of us.

Juneteenth is celebrated on June 19th, the anniversary of the day in 1865 when the Emancipation Proclamation went into full effect in Texas, on the orders of General Gordon Granger. The Proclamation had been issued by Abraham Lincoln at the beginning of 1863, and while it is popularly known for “freeing the slaves,” its actual approach was more constricted. It stated that any enslaved person residing at that time in territory controlled by the Confederate States was now free, and permanently so; they only had to escape into Union territory, or await liberation by the Union army, to claim that freedom. However, it did not apply to enslaved people in territories controlled by the United States government, either in those slave-holding states (such as Kentucky, or Delaware) that had remained loyal to the Union, or in most Confederate states or sections of states that had already been recaptured by the Union (such as Tennessee, or West Virginia). The purpose of the Proclamation was primarily to weaken the Confederacy and strengthen the Union by providing an extremely powerful incentive for enslaved people to flee their oppressors and possibly join the army, and was not meant to be the final word on the legality of the institution of slavery per se. Nevertheless, on paper it meant the immediate emancipation of more than three million people, whose freedom was then gradually effected as the Union army captured more Confederate territory and enforced the proclamation along the way.

By June 19th of 1865, the Civil War was over, and Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated; nevertheless, the official enforcement of the Proclamation in Texas marked the culmination of Lincoln’s order, with the final emancipation of all those not covered by the Proclamation arriving later that year, upon the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December. Juneteenth was therefore originally a holiday specific to Texas, celebrating a momentous occasion in the history of the African-American people of that state. It was only over time, particularly with the rise of the Civil Rights movement of the 20th century, that it took on the larger role of commemorating the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the end of institutionalized chattel slavery throughout the United States.

Certainly it is not unusual for the reach and meaning of holidays to evolve in this way. Thanksgiving as we now know it was originally a regional celebration in New England, and every year Americans celebrate independence from Great Britain in states that have never been under British rule. The feast days of St. Valentine and St. Patrick were of specifically religious significance before they became general celebrations of romantic love and being Irish, respectively. While Juneteenth had its origins in a particular piece of military paperwork, it has come to stand for something grander: the expansion of freedom.

It is a bitter thing, that people like the white lady in the library can’t see what Juneteenth has to do with themselves—or if they do, they see it as a humiliation, another occasion for Black people to saddle them with collective guilt for a historical crime they’d rather sweep under the rug. After all, in the gaining of freedom for Black people, white people collectively lost billions of dollars in the value of keeping them in chains, as well as the moral prestige of being a master race and the unchallenged presumption of innocence in the causation of their suffering. This sort of zero-sum thinking leaves them convinced that whatever Black people have to celebrate must be at their expense, that greater freedom for them must mean less for us.

Freedom—real freedom, that is—doesn’t work that way. The unfortunate truth is that many of America’s founding generation regarded freedom as something reserved for the one class of people to dominate another, and passed this understanding on to the generation that took up arms for the preservation of slavery and what they called their own liberty, who then passed it on to the generations who wrote discriminatory Jim Crow laws, who passed it on to generations who countered the advance of civil rights with claims of “reverse racism.” America’s founding generation could not give up this notion arising from antiquity, that the free are those who have power over the slave, even as the philosophy of their age pointed them toward a greater, self-evident moral truth, that “all men are created equal.” The evil of slavery does not lie in who is made to wear the chains by whom, but in the chains themselves, whether they are chains of iron or of discriminatory laws and customs.

Frederick Douglass, the former slave and great abolitionist leader, once asked “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” In the 1852 speech of that name he illuminated the hypocrisy of a country that proclaimed liberty as a national ideal, while legally accommodating the systematic deprivation of liberty to millions of people who were Americans by birth. The United States of that day was mired in a deadly contradiction: a proud democratic republic of equal citizens, but one that could only be regarded as such for a privileged minority: white males. For Black Americans, their country was not an enlightened republic but a cruel, arbitrary tyranny. Juneteenth, from its first occasion thirteen years later, has represented a major step toward the correction of the disparity and the eventual resolution of the contradiction: to become not a republic for some and a tyranny for others, but a republic for all.

The axes of oppression are treacherous machinery. A country that aspires to democracy but reserves most civil rights for an elite, no matter how broadly defined, has no logical endpoint for discrimination. A person may be white, or male, or straight, or gender-conforming, or wealthy, or educated, or healthy and able in body and mind, or Christian, or a natural-born citizen, or a speaker of English with no marked accent, and enjoy all of the real social benefits that come with being any one of those things, but the number of people who are all of these things at once is incredibly small. There is no one facet of identity that can fully protect you if your country decides that another facet is reason enough to deny you some of the rights and privileges it affords to others. So what does it mean to be an unfree person in a free country? Furthermore, what does it mean to be a free person in a country where most people are stuck with varying degrees of unfreedom?

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr, a resident of Georgia, was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for his activities supporting the cause of civil rights in that state. As he wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail,

…I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.

King fought for his whole life to convince all Americans that the cause of freedom for “his people” was their cause as well, because the United States could not be a free country in truth until it achieved social justice for Blacks, for the poor, and for all those looked down upon by those who were privileged to stand apart from their struggle. Far too many white Americans, in King’s time and in ours, have thought of African-Americans as a people apart from the “American people,” and as a people whose freedom and economic interests are a separate issue that does not figure into their own freedom and economic interests, except perhaps as competition.

This is the attitude that informs the opinions of people like the white lady patron at the library, who doesn’t understand what Juneteenth has to do with her. She could just as well ask the same about the Fourth of July, a day that celebrates the adoption of a document (the Declaration of Independence) that says nothing about her rights as a woman, and founded a nation that mostly denied women the right to vote for over a century, curtailed their rights to hold property in their own name, and kept them out of the best schools and careers. Alternatively, she might think about how fully half of the people whose emancipation from slavery we celebrate on Juneteenth were women and girls like her, and how the vast majority of them were born on the very same soil as she was, and how every single one of them was a human being with the same kinds of hopes for the future as herself.

What corrective lens must we look through before we can begin to see cause for solidarity, and recognize that Juneteenth is a great day, commemorating a moment when the entire United States became more free, and more like the embodiment of its founding ideals? Will white people ever be able to see far enough beyond their own whiteness to recognize another perfectly good opportunity to barbecue and fly their flags on a fine summer’s day? Will the concept of freedom born out of the Age of Enlightenment ever fully supplant the one that was current in the days of the Roman Empire? Some of these questions may not be satisfactorily answered in our near future, but they must be asked and asked again until they are.

So if you encounter hostility to Juneteenth, or attempts to write it off as merely the parochial concern of a minority and not an important part of the greater American story, remember that that story is not the property of a dominant class, but the whole of our people, and educate them as best as you can. It should not be a cause for anybody’s frustration, but rather a cause to reflect on what is possible even in dark and destructive times.