Reflections on Juneteenth

....and other history we never learned

Juneteenth - Finally Free? I never experienced Juneteenth as a national holiday during my worklife. It was signed into law just as I was retiring in June of 2021. The shame is that I never even heard about it until a year or so before it became a holiday.

Perhaps it is still new to you. In case that’s so, Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. That was achieved when Union forces under General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, about two-and-a-half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation proclamation. He and moved to enforce the Emancipation proclamation which read:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves and the connection heretofore existing between them, becomes that between employer and hired labor. The Freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

This came about two-and-a-half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."

Practically speaking, it took the defeat of the Confederate states to actualize emancipation, and it took the “national reckoning with race” brought on by the death of George Floyd to provide the impetus to recognize Juneteenth as a federal holiday.

When Juneteenth became “a thing” I was taken aback that it was a historical event that I had never learned about, despite being privileged to attend what most people would regard as pretty good schools.

The Burning of Greenwood and “Black Wall Street.” And at about this same time I learned about the Tulsa Race Riots, which was ignited by attempts by a mob to lynch a young black man who was accused, apparently without evidence, of assaulting a young white woman (shades of “To Kill a Mockingbird”). Mobs of white folk - many deputized by the “law” - attacked, vandalized, and burned the relatively successful and affluent “Black Wall Street” and Greenwood section of Tulsa. Old WWI planes were actually used to drop bombs on the area as it burned. ¹

Despite my love of history, I had never heard of this incident, and I’m pretty sure that goes for all of my generation. It was whitewashed and swept under the rug, just as the horror and scope of the almost 5,000 lynchings that took place on our soil between 1882 and 1968. Lynchings were used primarily by white mobs to “control” the Black population, to “keep them in their place” and intimidate them from trying to vote.

I was almost fourteen when three young people, including two white northerners, were killed by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, who colluded with a deputy sheriff in Neshoba County, Mississippi with the help of “law enforcement,” for helping to register black folk to vote. So it was contemporary history, and the textbooks couldn’t hide that from me.

More than a decade later the symbolism was not lost on me when Ronald Reagan launched his Presidential campaign with a speech touting “states rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a stone’s throw from the earthen damn where the KKK assassins had buried those kids.

Quashing Workers’ Rights and the Labor Movement. Nor did my history classes discuss events such as “The Battle of Blair Mountain,” which took place in the summer of 1921 and “…saw 10,000 West Virginia coal miners march in protest of perilous work conditions, squalid housing and low wages, among other grievances. They set out from the small hamlet of Marmet, with the goal of advancing upon Mingo County, a few days’ travels away to meet the coal companies on their own turf and demand redress. They would not reach their goal; the marchers instead faced opposition from deputized townspeople and businesspeople who opposed their union organizing, and more importantly, from local and federal law enforcement that brutally shut down the burgeoning movement.”² A couple of decades later (1937) and hundreds of miles away West Virginia native Walter Reuther and other United Auto Workers union activists were severely beaten by Henry Ford’s thugs for trying to hand out union literature.³ I DO recall learning about this event and other labor struggles to achieve a better life for workers, and that government was usually on the side of corporate interests in those struggles. Not sure if I learned that in history classes, or on my own.

The Whitewashing of History Persists. Politicians - almost always Republicans - are making a big deal about shielding students (read “white kids”) from history that might make them feel bad about things their country and forebears might have done. That’s the excuse these politicians make when they conjure up the bogeyman of CRT (critical race theory). What is “critical race theory”? According to Stephen Sawchuk, an assistant managing editor for Education Week, “Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.” It is a subject that is taught in law school courses, NOT in K-12. But it is a useful hot-button sham “issue” for right wingers, who would rather not reckon with the roots and bitter fruits of America’s original sin of slavery, and the generational inequality that resulted. And talking about it and other culture war nonsense instead of the improving economy, infrastructure investment, and lowering drug prices is their comfort zone.

Ron DeSantis and the gang want you to be outraged about the “woke” (my least favorite word) Disney Corporation and trans girls in sports (do you know any?) to distract you from his efforts to curtail voting, pad the wallets of his donors, and build a template for authoritarian rule.

Don’t be fooled. Keep your eye on the ball.

Thanks for reading. If you see any value in these posts, forward them to a friend.

“As dawn broke on June 1, thousands of white citizens poured into the Greenwood District, looting and burning homes and businesses over an area of 35 city blocks. Firefighters who arrived to help put out fires later testified that rioters had threatened them with guns and forced them to leave. According to a later Red Cross estimate, some 1,256 houses were burned; 215 others were looted but not torched. Two newspapers, a school, a library, a hospital, churches, hotels, stores and many other Black-owned businesses were among the buildings destroyed or damaged by fire.” https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/tulsa-race-massacre

1.

2. What Made the Battle of Blair Mountain the Largest Labor Uprising in American History, Smithsonian Magazine https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/battle-blair-mountain-largest-labor-uprising-american-history-180978520/

3. Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University https://reuther.wayne.edu/ex/exhibits/wpr.html