Opinion: Happy Juneteenth: America’s other Independence Day

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Juneteenth, Time notes today, ‘was truly a day of mass emancipation.’ It was not Jan.1, 1863 — the day that Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation — but a day two and a half years later, on June 19, when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas and announced that the state’s quarter-million slaves were free men. While more than half of the states commemorate the occasion one way or another, only in Texas is it a legal state holiday.

But for all its historical importance and cultural significance, Time goes on to say, Juneteenth no longer seems as prevalent or powerful as it once did.

Paltry news coverage this year seems to indicate the same thing. ‘We are focusing on next year’s celebration’ in honor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s 100th anniversary, the NAACP’s Gerald Hampton told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Looking through the LA Times archives, I came across an Op-Ed by James Thomas Jackson from three decades ago, in remembrance of Juneteenth’s heyday:

There’s something so much more potent about this version of Juneteenth. It’s an interesting contrast to today’s sociopolitical climate, when celebrations seem focused on the more politically correct ‘diversity.’ (Barack Obama, who frequently cites ‘unity’ as a political/social value, has previously supported efforts to make Juneteenth an official holiday.)

The next excerpt from Jackson’s piece may have uncomfortable resonances for some, what with the controversy surrounding certain African American churches — as well as Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright:

Click below to read the whole Op-Ed.

*Photo: Kurt Rogers / AP

TEXAS BLACKS HAD IT ALL TO THEMSELVES
Juneteenth Was Freedom Day — a Long Time Ago

By James Thomas Jackson
June 19, 1978

In the long receded used-to-be, Father’s Day was marked on our calendars as today, June 19. That was before it was changed to fall on Sunday and the widely commercial shenanigans of merchants the country over.

But to my own humbly parented family in Texas, being black and now far into its third generation in this land, the 19th of June has a much deeper meaning. That meaning applies not only to me as a black Southerner but also to other blacks, North or South, who may sit in silence about it, who may still seem to feel a shame in observing this particular day.

Supposedly we black Texans — and the white folks too, I imagine — got the word late about the Emancipation Proclamation. News that it had been signed, they say, arrived in Texas about June 19, 1863. At any rate, from my cradle up, “Juneteenth” was black folks’ day. Freedom. No blacks worked. More than most had that day off as an official holiday from their white employers — as opposed to their former masters and mistresses.

We’d have picnics galore, riding in mule-drawn wagons, bedded down in fresh-cut hay, heading out to some isolated pasture or undulating meadow in the Texas plains outside Houston where birds sang and crows cawed. Red soda pop bubbled, and the pink barbecue assailed our nostrils from the crack of dawn till way past twilight’s last gleaming. We children romped and ate and sprinted and yelled with abandon, until our throats were hoarse and our bellies distended.

As the years passed and we grew older, many of us still could not completely embrace America’s Fourth of July — Independence Day — because it had no direct connotation for us. We saw it mostly as sort of a big day for white folks. Oh, some blacks had to figure in what it was all about, since we figured in so much else. So that gave us sort of a right to join in the celebration, to whoop it up right along with the whites. At most, the white folks’ Independence Day gave us an extra holiday.

We were Americans and no longer slaves, it’s true, but our special segregated day, June 19, said that America was as much our country as it was theirs. A source of pride. A weird paradox at best: The most outrageous sort of social separateness within our still-floundering country was forcing, inexorably, the nation’s growth toward humaneness.

Perhaps it was uneasiness over this blacks-only holiday — our own “Fourth of July”, you might say — that caused our Southern black society to shy away from the June 19 celebrations that we kids had once so revered. For it didn’t just involve gorging ourselves on barbecue and soda pop, or the black male adults overimbibing the “hard stuff.” We had solemn ceremonies too, with prayers and speeches by some of the most eloquent black speakers of Texas. Their thunderous rhetoric rained like blockbuster bombs on our attentive ears.

We were somebody then. We had come from a mighty, mighty long way; we were the chosen few, and we were proud to beat the band. It was one wonderful black world on that day, June 19, the one day in the year that was entirely ours. Hundreds of blacks scattered over so wide an area, having programs just like ours—it was magnificent. Unbelievable. Most of all, we didn’t feel alone. We were not only family; we also knew that we were many in the family. A nation within a nation, whose great and only pride came from our hands, our sweat, our minds and our sacred black honor.

On those grassy Texas plains in the 1930s, it was, to borrow from Charles Dickens, the worst of times, and the very best of times. Because we brought back to our shacks and shanties a new Jerusalem that was to outdo that of antiquity. And for that vision we rejoiced. Oh, how we rejoiced!

Perhaps it was because of our youth that the impression stayed so long with us. Youth is so easily impressed. But, by the time I entered the Army Air Corps soon after my 19th birthday, I couldn’t remember “Juneteenth” having been celebrated for several years. By the time I had finished my hitch in the service, there was barely a whisper of “Juneteenth” in Houston, the city where I grew up. It was only when I visited the small town of my birth — Temple, Tex. — that I found some vestige of it yet observed on that date — half-hearted, and lacking any real fervor, or even remembrance of its significance.

The Fourth of July now was the big event, even in Temple. And blacks — like whites — took it as their very own. Right along with Father’s Day, they made much ado about whatever. The times had gone a-changing.

But in the long memory I have cultivated over my lifetime, the “Juneteenth” of my preadolescent years will always linger. For it meant much more than Negro Freedom Day; it was Negro History Day. Even in our youth, we were not only learning our roots, we were also planting seeds: in our own inherited land, and in our own time. That was all we had, then.

Looking back on those “Juneteenths,” I find no shame, nothing to forgive. But I am sure not about to forget, either. None of us should ever forget what slavery was really like — not when our foreparents were part of it. Because freedom is that part of a person’s life that is ever sacred. Once it is trodden on, that’s where, and when, the fight for emancipation begins. And the fight continues forever — through life everlasting.

So what June 19 commemorated was the indomitable spirit in every man. As we celebrated that day, we blacks knew only this: that freedom can always be taken away. And that wouldn’t do. No. That wouldn’t do at all.

-- Amina Khan

James Thomas Jackson lives in Los Angeles. An original member of Budd Schulberg’s Watts Writers’ Workshop, he is preparing a book of essays.