Juneteenth. What? Juneteenth???
I had never heard of Juneteenth until this year. I don't feel embarrassed or guilty.
I am just reporting what I knew and didn't know.
Juneteenth is now a federal holiday. It commemorates the day Union General Gordon Granger announced General Order Number 3 proclaiming the emancipation of slaves in Texas. The Emancipation Proclamation had been announced in September, 1962 freeing slaves in states that were in rebellion, i.e. where it was unenforceable. Texas was the most remote state in the Confederacy and had the fewest federal troops, and even after the war ended in April, 1865 enforcement of emancipation had been inconsistent. General Granger ended that. General Order 3 read:
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.
By order of Major General Granger
I had a general knowledge--more an assumption than knowledge--that after the surrender at Appomattox people in the South got the word that the war was over and that slavery morphed into whatever arrangements people who owned nothing--but were now free--did to survive. General Granger's announcement gives some insight. They were told to stay right where they were and keep working for the same people, but now for wages.
In high school I took every History course taught, both required and elective. I studied American history in college at Harvard and started a Ph.D. program at Yale and got a Master’s Degree before dropping out with the dream of making the world a better place through politics. By coincidence, my brutally intense year-long graduate seminar course on American History at Yale was taught by David Bryon Davis, a leading authority on slavery and abolition, author of 17 books on the Civil War and slavery, including one that won the Pulitzer Prize shortly before my time studying with him.
I never heard of Juneteenth. It never came up.
I consider my ignorance anecdotal evidence about what a public school system in the western U.S. found worth teaching and what academic historians thought significant. Juneteenth was not one of them. Now--suddenly, at least to me--it is important enough to become a federal holiday. The vote to establish the holiday passed unanimously in the Senate and 415-14 in the House.
I am happy to learn of the new holiday. I cite my ignorance--and perhaps that of readers--not to suggest my disapproval of the new holiday. Rather, I consider its prior national obscurity an essential element of the holiday being possible. Most people didn't care very much, so why not?
The 14 House members who opposed it were all Republicans. A few said they objected to it’s being called "Independence Day" rather than "Emancipation Day." One said that it was just stirring up bad feeling about racial conflict long past. A couple of them said the holiday was part of a greater leftist agenda to stir up trouble and push Critical Race Theory. Click: Washington Post Still, the overwhelming majority of GOP officeholders went along.
A Juneteenth holiday is a simple gesture, like naming a courthouse or post office building. It is a harmless way for Republicans to try to show Black voters they are not anti-Black.
The holiday is a victory for Biden. He got his photo-op. Biden delivered something. It is a thank-you note to Black voters. This holiday would not have glided through if were Trump president.
The holiday is a symbolic victory for Democrats, but too little to be meaningful, and may backfire on that account. It is like bringing a bottle of very cheap wine to a dinner party. Worse, this holiday makes more remote something that might have had genuine, tangible benefit to the Democratic enterprise of making voting easier to do--making Election Day a federal holiday. Insofar as Democrats still represent the working poor, especially the harried working mothers of the country, then an Election Day holiday might enhance voter turnout. Republicans oppose it, which demonstrates that it is something worth fighting for. Democrats gave it up.
The holiday is a soft and indirect bank shot on behalf of racial justice, far enough in the past and obscure enough that few feelings are hurt. After George Floyd's murder people wanted to do something, but anything meaningful was off limits.
Juneteenth is 166 years old, and the moment involved asserting "absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property" while in fact leaving freed Blacks in peonage. But it did end legal slavery in Texas and that is good. It seems so little, but that is what Congress in 2021 can agree on.
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