Juneteenth! Celebration of Freedom

January 1, 1863. If you are a history buff you more than likely know the significance of this date. That’s right, Emancipation Proclamation. If you are like most everyone who sat in an American history class you were taught that this was the sacred document that freed the slaves. The evil slave owners were defeated, and the nation was whole again with one swipe of a pen. All hail President Lincoln, freer of slaves, savior of nations.

Well actually, not quite. It wasn’t instantaneous and it wasn’t that clean cut.

I won’t leave you hanging. Let’s unpack this.

Lincoln issued the EP, but that only applied to slaves in the Confederate territories that were in rebellion. Not Union-held territories or confederate states that were under northern control. Remember the confederate states of America? The “bad guys.” So we have the EP, signed and in effect, but you couldn’t just pick up the phone or shoot an email over to the confederate states like “Hey, you gotta let ‘em go now.” It took over 2 years after the issuing of the EP before word of emancipation reached the enslaved brothers and sisters of the Confederate states. The word finally reached Galveston Texas in 1865 and the final slaves of the confederacy were freed.

I mean they were told to stay on the plantations and work for wages but that didn’t really go over well. Hundreds of thousands of slaves fled to the Union, where slavery wasn’t officially abolished until December 1865 with the ratification of the 13th amendment.

So what are we celebrating on June 19th? To me Juneteenth represents the true beginning of the end of one major oppressive system in the United States. Eventually cascaded by another, eerily similar, oppressive system by another name, but THIS is not about about THAT. Today we celebrate FREEDOM.

I took the day off from work. How about you? Happy Juneteenth!

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