During the height of the racial reckoning last year the US Congress declared Juneteenth a federal holiday. Juneteenth commemorates the freedom of enslaved Black people in Galveston Bay, Texas on June 19, 1865. Their freedom, like most Black people in the United States, was contingent. As the Civil War came to an end, arriving Union troops enforced the Emancipation Proclamation which had been signed nearly two and a half years before by President Abraham Lincoln.
While Congress recently designated Juneteenth an official holiday, the meaning of Juneteenth for Black people has been a lived reality for 156 years: freedom without safety. Whether this new holiday will inspire Americans to take it upon themselves to understand the past to confront present-day systemic anti-Blackness remains to be seen. The question that loomed after the end of slavery remains as relevant today: is it possible to be Black and safe in the United States?
For Black communities, Juneteenth has served as a touchstone to reflect on the enslavement and exploitation of Black people while bearing witness to the ongoing struggle and suffering for full participation in America society. The day challenges the comforting national narrative of the making of the first modern democracy through principled political independence from the British empire. For most Americans, July 4th is a patriotic occasion to celebrate the making of a new nation while conveniently overlooking the centrality of slavery in its founding documents, the wealth of its founders, and economic development of the country.
Juneteenth replaces this willful amnesia with the true horror of national memory. Whereas July 4th is an occasion to celebrate democracy not enjoyed by (or extended to) women, and Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color. Juneteenth commemorates a travesty that should never have occurred—slavery. In the name of civilization, religion, and commerce Black bodies were exploited, brutalized, raped, and cast off as things. This system of de-humanization was never a crime against humanity because Black people were not considered fully human. Instead, slavery was a method to build a country, enrich people, endow universities and churches, and establish white supremacy as a condition as natural as Black subordination.
Frederick Douglass memorably captured this intrinsic contradiction in his 1852 speech entitled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July”.
“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloodier, than are the people of these United States, at this very honor.”
On June 28, 1870, Congress declared Independence Day on July 4th a federal holiday. The meaning of Juneteenth assumed even greater significance as the country increasingly wanted to move past the Civil War to unify the nation. Again, Black suffering became a condition for giving the country meaning and coherence. The constitutional rights of Black people—only recently granted by Congress—became a fiction in 1877 when President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal troops from former Confederate states in the South. During the restoration of white supremacy Black people were free but never safe. Their citizenship status in the South, North and West did nothing to protect them from racist terrorism in the form of lynching and intimidation, nor guaranteed voting rights and civil rights. Even schools and universities ignored or whitewashed slavery. In this context, Juneteenth served as a powerful space to sustain and transmit the truth about the making of the United States while drawing strength in community to seek racial justice as the modern movement for Civil Rights gather momentum.
To be sure, the Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965) and Fair Housing Act (1968) began the process of dismantling the formal structures of white supremacy. Juneteenth did not become less relevant. If anything, Juneteenth provided public platforms in cities across the country to draw attention to the persistence of systemic anti-Black racism in American life and institutions. This was especially the case as national efforts at integration began to stall as the Republican Party successfully pulled white working Americans away from the Democratic Party by tapping into rising resentment against racial justice for Black people. Grounded in Black cultural pride, political self-determination, and economic empowerment, Juneteenth advanced an agenda of full participation. It challenged racist stereotypes in popular culture; protested criminal justice policies that over-policed Black communities and hollowed out families; and demanded an accounting of and accountability for the costs and consequences of slavery and its afterlife.
For more than a century and a half, Juneteenth has served as a touchtone for bearing witness to slavery and its afterlife, a space for mobilization against white supremacy, and a platform for racial justice. These lessons have largely been neglected or ignored by most Americans. Instead, they would rather wait for the return of yet another racial reckoning to momentarily consider the cruel riddle of America: Black freedom without safety. Now that Juneteenth is an official holiday all Americans have a clear choice: exploiting the benefits of Black suffering or building a society and economy where Black people thrive.
