Juneteenth was celebrated yesterday, on June 19, and is the United States' newest federal holiday, but has been celebrated in the state of Texas by African Americans since June 19, 1865, the day Union soldiers finally arrived in Galveston, TX, took control, and declared the end of chattel slavery -- and then, AT LAST, freedom for African Americans finally began to ring from sea to shining sea. At last, from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, those cruelly enslaved were freed.
It is said that July 4 is a lie without Juneteenth, and that is correct. The very men who wrote the Star Spangled Banner, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence were men who offered Africans in America two choices: be chattel to be worked to death while also enduring every imaginable brutality at these men's whim, or, die sooner for rebelling in any way, including learning to read, maintaining your own language, music, and traditions, or burying your dead with dignity, to say nothing of trying to escape. The United States has long had its own domestic terrorism. We just don't like to admit it ... but every ancestor of mine in Texas could have told you that, hundreds of years ago. The United States did not live up to its "land of the free" billing EVEN A LITTLE BIT until June 19, 1865, 89 years after the first Independence Day in 1776.
My ancestors were from Texas, so I have always celebrated Juneteenth. My elders made sure I understood what it was about -- FREEDOM FOR ALL, at great price. Our ancestors had to fight to survive to see freedom, and the Civil War had to be won at a cost of 750,000 combatants and uncountable collateral deaths. The Emancipation Proclamation, dating from Jan. 1, 1863, had to be enforced, Union victory by Union victory.
Freedom is beautiful ... and costly. Nor was the first Juneteenth the beginning or end of my people's journey to freedom, because by AUGUST, 1865, the first Southern laws to return my ancestors to slavery were already on the books. The Ku Klux Klan, oldest known domestic terrorists in the country, would be riding by January 1866 -- and since those men could not have their way with the Union, guess who they would spend another 100 years attacking, lynching, burning, looting -- TERRORISM? Jim Crow laws would be on the books in the late 1870s, as the South insisted on reverting as close to chattel status for African Americans as it could get away with. It would be 1965 before the federal government paid any more attention to STOPPING THE FOOLERY, and it would be costly then too. Many, many people died in the struggle for full civil rights for African Americans. People -- including little children -- were MURDERED by those still insisting on injustice.
But Juneteenth, and my people, keep coming for freedom, decade after decade, generation after generation! Confederate and Nazi flags still come out to try to frighten, to terrorize -- but we KEEP COMING, even though our nation seems to be letting another rollback of rights happen now -- but we KEEP COMING for what is rightfully ours, and every human being's with us: FREEDOM!
The incomparable Shirley Verrett ... at the time she sang opera, she wasn't supposed to be allowed to do that ... but my people KEEP COMING, and BLESSING!
The incomparable Paul Robeson ... listen to him thunder a righteous command to the Bible's most famous slave holder ... and KNOW that the command rolls down, INEVITABLY, to all who would DARE reduce human beings to chattel, and WILL BE ENFORCED!
The incomparable Aretha Franklin ... you better THINK before listening to those who are against FREEDOM FOR ALL!
Just so we know on the legal part .... the linked videos are not owned by me, I am sharing just the link to the copyright owner's video. No copyright infringement is intended.
Used under fair-use section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976.