On Juneteenth, an opportunity for reflection

Wednesday is Juneteenth, a relatively new federal holiday but one that has been celebrated for nearly 160 years.

It marks the day when the last of America’s enslaved people learned of their freedom. It took more than two years for enslaved people in Texas to learn that the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed.

But this holiday should not focus only on Union soldiers arriving in Galveston, Texas, and liberating the last of the 10 million Black people who had been enslaved. Rather, it should serve as an opportunity for all Americans to pause and learn about the years leading up to emancipation, and the decades afterward. It should make us ask how, as a nation, did we get here?

The journey began with 240 years of torture and an estimated 410 billion hours of forced labor as Black people’s blood, sweat and tears built our nation’s economic foundation and enriched hundreds of families and institutions.

While Juneteenth marked the day when all Black people were to be “free,” it also ushered in short-lived protection of the formerly enslaved by the Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction. Then followed decades of lynchings and Black Codes, followed by Jim Crow laws, followed by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education, and the re-segregation of public schools. Those actions were followed by the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Almost 50 years later we witnessed the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act with Shelby County v. Holder and with extreme gerrymandering in some states and other actions of voter suppression.

Then came the creation of affirmative action and the dismantling of affirmative action by the Supreme Court, and the creation of Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiatives and now efforts to dismantle them.

All of these actions can be traced to the issue of race, and thus slavery. Attempts toward progress are often met with backlash.

Three champions of freedom warned us of such, yet gave us a road map to overcome any obstacle.

Frederick Douglass, the 19th century orator and abolitionist, said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

The late U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan, who in 1967 was the first African American elected to the Texas state Senate since Reconstruction, said: “What the people want is very simple — they want an America as good as its promise.”

The latest backlash comes in the form of attacks on teaching America’s history. Juneteenth should remind us of that as well. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “If the cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail.”

Juneteenth is more than a symbolic gesture by Congress that even those who constantly oppose civil rights voted to approve. 

On this day, as we acknowledge Juneteenth and its significance to Black Americans, may all people and generations learn of the struggle, remember the fight and work toward the possibilities of true freedom.