How to Celebrate Juneteenth

My family always taught me that the textbooks got it wrong. No, President Lincoln did not really “free the slaves” by signing the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862. Instead, all enslaved people finally achieved freedom three years later, on June 19, 1865. It was on this date that Union Major General Gordon Granger rushed into Galveston, Texas with 2,000 federal troops and announced his intention to enforce President Lincoln’s decree in Texas, ending slavery once and for all. My family told me that Granger gave his big speech on the balcony of Ashton Villa, a big, beautiful home in Galveston that had served as the headquarters for the Confederate Army. June 19 was important because nobody is ever really free until everybody is free.

For years, Ashton Villa sat in my head as a lightning bolt in American history: a physical separator between America’s slaveholding past and an officially free future. As a Black kid from the American South and a political science nerd, Ashton Villa was on my “must see” list. So, when I made my first trip to Galveston in July 2017 with my wife and brother-in-law, I mentioned that I wanted to drive by the Villa. They both grew up hearing about Juneteenth and they were excited to go by. So went to see it.

Despite what I had been taught, everything was not what it seemed.

Ashton Villa was nice, but not as grand as my imagination had made it.

Here’s the first kicker: while we know that Granger did visit Galveston to give teeth to the Emancipation Proclamation, there is no evidence that Granger made any public speech at Ashton Villa. Instead, Granger came to Texas with an old-school press release — General Order №3 — and it was circulated in every newspaper and printed on handbills. Although June 19, 1865 did happen, my reverence of Ashton Villa was misplaced.

Here’s the second kicker: even after that very first Juneteenth, Kentucky and Delaware refused to recognize the end of slavery. The 13th Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on December 18, 1865, when three-fourths of the state legislatures approved it. But Delaware and Kentucky would wait until the 1900s to ratify the 13th Amendment: Delaware in 1901 and Kentucky in 1976. It is egregious that Mississippi did not actually ratify the 13th Amendment until 2013.

These two truths cracked my view of Emancipation Day. A place that I thought was crucial to the narrative proved to be a footnote. A date that was significant now has an asterisk.

Concerning Juneteenth, I grew up learning most of the story, but I did not know all of it.

On a different scale, most Americans probably think they know the American story, but by their own admission, more than 60 percent of Americans know “nothing at all” or only “a little bit” about Juneteenth.

Many Americans are in step with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said that “1776, the Declaration of Independence; 1787, the Constitution; 1861–1865, the Civil War, are sort of the basic tenets of American history.” Obviously 1776, 1787, and 1861 are important, but if we fail to highlight the beginning and ending of American slavery (as well as its modern effects on us), we will know some of the story, but we will not know all of it.

Let me ask you, If you only know part of a thing, do you really know it at all?

For most Americans, Juneteenth is a forgotten day, but it has immense importance to people who feel forgotten.

Last summer, after we witnessed the extra-judicial murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor as well as the hateful civilian killing of Ahmaud Arbery, many companies pledged to become “anti-racist.” They started with recognizing Juneteenth as a company holiday. While many corporate leaders had good intentions, announcing June 19 as a company holiday mere weeks before the day off would happened felt hasty. I would never pretend to speak for all Black Americans, so I will make this personal: I feel that many companies hopped on the Juneteenth bandwagon just to placate us. These companies promised that the summer of 2020 would be a sea change in diversity and inclusion, but I fear that these Juneteenth celebrations will miss the mark.

Here’s the thing corporations don’t understand: a Juneteenth celebration must be a celebration of the end of slavery.

A celebration of the end of slavery must cause us to consider the impacts of slavery today. I am afraid that companies will make Juneteenth a bland corporate event. Our employers will pay celebrities to talk about the “Black experience” and the importance of “having a seat at the table,” but will not improve diversity, equity, or inclusion. I am afraid no one will talk about slavery. I am afraid we will never talk about the land that was promised to freed Blacks but never came. I am afraid we will never talk about how the promise of Reconstruction was destroyed by white supremacy and lies about Black people. I am afraid we will never talk about Jim Crow, which helped maintain segregation, which kept Black people out of “white” jobs, schools, and neighborhoods, which led to the wealth gap. One of my favorite comedians, Kevin Fredericks, is likely 100 percent on point when he predicted that companies will eventually commodify June 19. They will use Juneteenth as an excuse to run summer sales. This is what I’m afraid of.

This tension between the corporate spin on Juneteenth and the actual meaning is nothing new. Consider the words of General Order №3:

The people of Texas are informed that…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.

It’s not just that enslaved people became free people with free will. By federal order, the enslaved automatically became employees of their former masters. If you believe in the traditional American mythology, you’d think that enslaved people were granted the full rights and privileges of an American citizen the moment the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Instead, here’s the real story: if you were in bondage on June 19, 1865, you were just in a different type of bondage on June 20, 1865. You were told you had to keep living where you were living, doing what you were doing, under conditions that were less than human.

Now, just one year after corporations vowed to be anti-racist, nearly half of the states in the U.S.A. have introduced legislation banning any examination of social, cultural, and legal issues as they relate to race and racism. How do corporations plan to be anti-racist if their future employees grow up without any discussions of racial equity and privilege? As I said above, I’m afraid.

So, how do we properly celebrate Juneteenth? I have a simple request.

First, resist the urge to treat Juneteenth as a blanket celebration of Black History and “equality.” Instead, focus on America’s history of slavery. Second, ask yourself and your friends if we have really lived up to the promises we made to each other. Have we fulfilled the promises of our country’s founding? Have we fulfilled the promises of the end of the Civil War? Third, rather than dismissing Juneteenth as just another federal holiday, read about Ms. Opal Lee’s journey to make it a holiday and consider why it might be important for a forgotten people to have you join our celebration of a forgotten day.