Get ready to celebrate freedom. Juneteenth National Independence Day and the Fourth of July are just around the bend – Juneteenth being June 19, 2023.
For many years I was only vaguely aware of Juneteenth until I finally did some research to learn of its importance. Juneteenth is sometimes known as Black Independence Day, Freedom Day and Jubilee Day. It is comparable to the Fourth of July during which we Americans celebrate our national independence.
Juneteenth is short for June nine-teenth. It commemorates and celebrates the day in Texas when slaves learned suddenly that they had been declared free from bondage 17 months earlier by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The approximately 250,000 slaves in Texas had been kept unaware of Lincoln’s decree and thus kept toiling on, enslaved.
On June 19, 1865, about 2,000 Union Army troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas and announced to one and all that an executive order had freed all 3.5 million slaves in the United States, including those in Texas.
Lincoln’s proclamation later became enshrined in the U.S. Constitution when Congress approved the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on Dec. 6, 1865. The amendment states that “Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States or any other place subject to their jurisdiction.”
The 13th Amendment certainly did not stop the horrendous suffering and humiliations endured by Black people in America – far from it. The decades that followed brought sharecropping (slavery by another name), entrenched poverty, vicious prejudices, Jim Crow laws, segregationist practices and monstrous cruelties that included beatings, burnings and lynchings. But Juneteenth and the 13th Amendment did at least start this country on the long journey toward justice for all, a journey still underway.
Juneteenth was declared a national American holiday on June 25, 2021. On Feb. 3 of this year, Gov. Tim Walz signed a bill making Juneteenth a state holiday. It had been approved by the State Legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support.
This is what Walz said at the signing ceremony:
“Juneteenth is an important opportunity for communities across the state and nation to celebrate freedom, recognize the history and contributions of Black Americans and recommit to building a more just and equitable society for everyone. Creating Juneteenth as a state holiday is a long overdue celebration of independence.”
The bill was sponsored in the Minnesota House by Rep. Ruth Richardson (DFL-Mendota Heights) who said these eloquent words at the signing ceremony:
“I am the great-great-granddaughter of enslaved peoples. I am the great-granddaughter of a traditional Black midwife, granddaughter of sharecroppers. And I am the daughter of a mother and father who grew up picking cotton in the fields of Mississippi and Alabama, having their labor exploited. It is not lost on me that I am in fact my ancestors’ wildest dreams.”
Minnesota is the 26th state to declare Juneteenth a state holiday.
Slavery, sometimes called America’s “original sin,” began 400 years ago. In late August 1619, a ship dubbed White Lion landed at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va. The ship’s “cargo” included about two dozen African slaves whom the crew of the White Lion had seized at sea from a Portuguese slave ship. At the Hampton harbor, the Africans were “traded” in exchange for supplies needed for the ship. And thus began the long, torturous, poisonous legacy of enslavement in this country.
Sen. Bobby Joe Champion (DFL-Minneapolis), who sponsored the bill in the Senate, had this to say:
“Juneteenth is a look back, but it is also for us to recommit ourselves to the future.”
Yes, exactly. As we celebrate Juneteenth and the Fourth of July, let’s remind ourselves that the long march on that road to freedom and justice for all must continue full force from the dark past into a brighter future.
