Juneteenth Remembered

19 Jun Juneteenth Remembered

On the new federal holiday of Juneteenth, we celebrate the end of slavery in the United States and the emancipation of every citizen. This marks the third week of my month-long summer course, Outdoors For All at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. We’re half-way through. As I remind my students, this is not a “Black” holiday. Today we acknowledge that everyone has the inalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Taught at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies this class explores the disparities of access to natural resources and public land that fall along the margins of race and socio-economic privilege in communities across the U.S. So far in class we have thoroughly examined the many contradictions of a nation predicated on the idea that “all men are created equal”, yet through legislation and cultural customs encouraged the institution of slavery. As much I love that fact that the principles of governmental enforced joy are embedded into the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, they are not binding under the rule of law. Even today, though the legal institution from which Black Americans were emancipated on January 1, 1863 in the midst of a bloody civil war no longer exists, there are still mechanisms of systematic oppression that deprive human beings of their most intrinsic human rights.

Juneteenth is the celebration of a single moment in our history along a contiguous spectrum of events and circumstance in our journey to form a more perfect union. One hundred and fifty-eight years ago today, on June 19, 1865, United States Union Army General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas to deliver a presidential directive known as General Order Number 3.

“The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free,” the document read.

This unique moment in time was naturally cause for celebration and today we mark the occasion as Juneteenth. Recognized by many in the Black American community as a day to acknowledge our liberation from bondage, the commemoration is now formally designated as a national holiday like Independence Day, better known as the Fourth of July. But it should be said that this date, June 19th better represents the true freedom of all Americans and signifies the moment when all human beings in this nation were finally declared not only free but equal.

The Emancipation Proclamation was brought to Galveston more than two years after it had been formally declared on January 1, 1863. The events of Juneteenth, 1965 occurred two months after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at the courthouse of Appomattox, Virginia on April 9th. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14th. By the time the last of 4.3 million formerly enslaved people got the news of their emancipation, a concerted effort was underway to not only grant Black Americans their freedom, but also to formally secure their rights United States citizens.

It’s important to remember that an executive order issued by one U.S. President could just as easily be overturned by another. In the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Supreme Court had decided that Black Americans had no rights as citizens under federal law. Writing for the majority Chief Justice Roger Taney stated. “[Black Americans] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Lincoln was dead. His successor, the newly inaugurated President Andrew Johnson, a southern Democrat, was a devote racist who intended to relegate Black Americans back to a condition of abject servitude.
“This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men,” Johnson once said. “Blacks are not citizens but serfs, totally under the dominion of white people, except white people would not have the capacity to turn them into legal chattel.”

In order for emancipation to have any real value to Black American’s, it would have to be codified into law. Commonly known as the Radical Republicans, legislators from across the country led the charge to abolish slavery and were soon on task to make amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 guaranteed that “all persons born in the United States were entitled to be citizens, without regard to race, color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude.” Supported by a majority of Congressional leaders this legislation, though vetoed by President Johnson, was approved on April 15, 1866. This was the first time the U.S. Congress ever overrode a presidential veto for a major piece of legislation.

Though slavery had been abolished formally by Congress under the 13th Amendment in 1865, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted the rights of citizenship. The 14th Amendment overturned the provisions of “Three-Fifths Compromise”, which in 1787 deemed enslaved Black Americans as less than human for the purposes of Congressional representation. These measures also nullified the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required escaped enslaved people to be returned from free states in the North to their place origin. And of course, the new amendment voided the precedent set by the Dred Scott V.S. Sandford decision of 1857. Finally, the 15th Amendment, ratified on March 30, 1870, prohibited the federal government and each state from denying or abridging a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Each of these three amendments to the U.S. Constitution would usher in the Reconstruction Era. The abolition of slavery, birthright citizenship and the right to vote formally secured the freedoms of all Americans that we now celebrate on Juneteenth. Unfortunately, the 13th Amendment still allows slavery as punishment for the commission of a crime. The 14th Amendment has been challenged in recent years to jeopardize the legal status of children born to undocumented migrants. The 15th Amendment is under threat by legislation that requires voter identification, gerrymander legislative districts or limits the availability of polling places in rural or tribal communities.

We must indeed celebrate the events of June 19, 1865. Juneteenth is a holiday that commemorates the deliverance of liberties to all American citizens regardless of their race, color or ethnicity. Though they were codified by law into the U.S. Constitution, however, many of these rights were stripped away through legislation during the Jim Crow Era and would not be restored until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, almost one hundred years later. Recent events such as the overturning the Roe V.S. Wade decision of 1973 that protected the reproductive rights of women and rumblings to outlaw gender affirming health care for transexual youth and adults demonstrate that despite all of the freedoms we enjoy as citizens our rights can be taken away. Today more than ever we must remember the triumphs of the past, learn the lessons they have to teach and work diligently to keep ourselves from repeating them in the future.