Black History: Special Delivery!
Check out our Juneteenth Ezine!
LAB
Every June 19th America asks Black people to celebrate. But celebrate what exactly? The announcement of a freedom that was already two and a half years late? The beginning of a refugee crisis with no aid? The first chapter of a promise broken before the month was out?
Here is what Juneteenth actually is, and what Black America has always known it to be. Not a celebration of what was given. A commemoration of what was survived. And those are not the same thing.
“We are not celebrating what America did for Black people on June 19, 1865. We are celebrating what Black people did for themselves, before, during, and after a system specifically designed to make their survival impossible.”
Four million people were freed into nothing. No land. No money. No documents. No protection. Within months 40 acres promised by Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 were taken back and returned to Confederate landowners. The Freedmen’s Bureau was defunded. The KKK was founded in December 1865. And the 13th Amendment contained a loophole that immediately authorized re-enslavement through the criminal justice system.
And yet, Black literacy went from 5% to over 70% within one generation. Black people built schools, churches, banks, newspapers, and entire towns. They placed thousands of Information Wanted advertisements searching for children and parents sold away, and some of them found each other. That refusal to accept that love was gone forever is the real Juneteenth story.
Emancipation Park in Houston, where Juneteenth has been celebrated since 1872, was purchased by formerly enslaved people because they were banned from celebrating in public parks. They pooled $800 to buy the land themselves. That park still exists today.
General Granger reads General Order No. 3 in Galveston, announcing freedom 2.5 years late. Four million people are freed into homelessness, landlessness, and immediate legal peril through Black Codes.
The 13th Amendment exception clause still exists. According to the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances (2022), median white family wealth is $188,000 vs. $24,000 for Black families, the compound interest of 40 acres stolen in 1865. Juneteenth became federal in 2021.
Ponder, reflect, and pass it on.”
