Congress this week passed legislation making Juneteenth a national holiday. Many Americans don’t know what Juneteenth celebrates, although awareness is rising. Here’s Vox with an explanation:
A portmanteau of “June” and “nineteenth,” Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when a group of enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally learned that they were free from the institution of slavery. But, woefully, this was almost two-and-a-half years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. As much as Juneteenth represents freedom, it also represents how emancipation was tragically delayed for enslaved people in the deepest reaches of the Confederacy.
The first Juneteenth in 1866 was celebrated with food, singing, and the reading of spirituals — and it commemorated newly freed Black people taking pride in their progress. Today, Juneteenth celebrations span the world, with the global diaspora adopting the day as one to recognize emancipation at large.
Texas made Juneteenth a state holiday in 1980 and it is today observed by forty-eight states and the District of Columbia. Many African American families and communities have celebrated Juneteenth over the years but it was barely acknowledged by the rest of America until last year when many communities and corporations during the month of protests following the murder of George Floyd began recognizing it as a holiday.
It will be interesting going forward now that Juneteenth is a national holiday to see how the day is commemorated by the country as a whole. Hopefully it won’t be ignored or treated as just another day off work. At the same time, any celebration should be respectful of African American traditions that have grown up around the holiday so that the cultural significance of the date is not hollowed out or appropriated.
The most intriguing consequence of making Juneteenth a national holiday, however, is how it has the potential to change the way Americans—check that: white Americans—think about the Fourth of July, given the holidays’ proximity in time to one another. They are only separated by a fortnight, making it easy for Americans to regard the summertime holidays as siblings. And, of course, there is also the fact that both holidays are concerned with the same theme—freedom—although Juneteenth should prompt people to examine that idea more critically.
On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass (pictured above) delivered a speech commonly titled today as “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” in Rochester, New York. Douglass was an extraordinary man. Born into slavery in Maryland, Douglass taught himself to read and write after his overseer put an end to reading lessons Douglass had been receiving from the overseer’s wife. Sent to work for a “slave-breaker,” Douglass eventually rebelled and physically fought his new overseer; Douglass triumphed and was never physically beaten again. Douglass escaped slavery in 1838 and obtained his legal freedom in 1846. In the North, he became noted as one of the country’s most powerful abolitionists. His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, is a classic slave narrative. He was also an advocate for women’s suffrage and attended the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention (although he opposed for strategic reasons language that would have granted women the right to vote in the 15th Amendment.) According to John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Douglass was probably the most photographed man of the 19th century, a deliberate move on his part to use the new technology to counter racial stereotypes propagated by minstrel shows with real-life images of a sophisticated, serious, educated black man.
Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” lays bare the hypocrisy at the core of antebellum America—that a nation that celebrates individual liberty also maintains a system of legalized slavery—and prompts his white listeners to put themselves in the shoes of the country’s nearly four million slaves when it comes time to celebrate Independence Day.
I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn….
By today’s standards, Frederick Douglass could be considered woke. Given the raft of laws state legislatures have recently passed designed to prohibit the teaching of critical race theory in public schools (it’s worth noting a lot of the politicians who support these laws have no idea what “critical race theory” even means and are really just trying to keep schools from teaching kids uncomfortable truths about the United States’ legacy of racism) one has to wonder if teachers in those states could still require their students to read Douglass’ 170-year-old speech, since it may prompt inquisitive minds to think about other moments since 1852 (some fairly recent) when the blessings of liberty were not exactly extended equally to Americans of all racial backgrounds. And just imagine how a knee-jerk reactionary might respond to reading Douglass’ words today: Douglass would be accused of hating America, not having enough appreciation for the opportunities this country has given him, focusing on the negative instead of the positive, sowing discord rather than bringing people together, and wanting to cancel the Founding Fathers and all they stood for.
Actually, that last point is way off. Douglass actually expressed admiration for the achievements of the Founding generation.
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too, great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory….
So Douglass valued the ideas of the Founding Fathers. He thought the ideals of liberty and equality were worth aspiring to. But he drew attention to a paradox: The country that celebrates those principles and the men who championed them in the 1770s did not always live up to those principles. In one big way—slavery and, by extension, matters of race—they failed miserably, and the lived experience of the millions of Americans held in bondage was a testament to that. For these black Americans, the Fourth of July was not a day to celebrate but instead a reminder of the country’s shortcomings. That’s a feeling that resonates with many today.
So perhaps the best way to honor the ideas articulated in the Declaration of Independence and those who stood for them (like its author, Thomas Jefferson) is to acknowledge their sins and fix them. Today some on the right consider that a radical idea. Maybe they don’t like critics who tarnish the legacy of the Founding Fathers because they prefer to view the Declaration and Constitution as immaculately conceived. Maybe they like to think we’ve overcome all these problems, if not in 1865 then in 1965, and that anyone who insists on revisiting the country’s racial shortcomings just can’t appreciate how much progress has actually been made over the past 240+ years and is ignoring just how good things are right now and just trying to stir things up. But that “radical” idea—that the country should be bothered to make sure the promises of the Declaration are extended to everyone—is actually a fairly old idea and one the country always seem to end up honoring after years of righteous struggle.
Douglass was ahead of his time in wanting Americans to think about the meaning and demands of the Declaration of Independence. Prior to 1860 and throughout the first years of the Civil War, the debate over slavery in the United States was mainly viewed through a constitutional lens, specifically whether the federal government could regulate slavery in the states and, later, if states could secede from the union. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which begins by evoking the Declaration of Independence (“four score and seven years ago” in 1863 was 1776) reconfigured the Union’s reason for prosecuting the war away from constitutional issues to the aspirational moral issues that animated the Declaration. Once slavery was ended, Lincoln implied, the nation would experience a “new birth of freedom,” a second sort of birthday. The Civil War, previously a legal matter about the nature of the federal union, was now about abolishing slavery and making the country live up to its principles.
Juneteenth is an outcome of that conflict. The holiday is sometimes viewed as the nation’s “true birthday” since it marks the day slavery was finally destroyed and every natural born American could finally say they were a free and independent person under the law, created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. True equality and freedom, of course, would be delayed by a century for many African Americans, and social disparities remain to this day. Women, American Indians, and LGBTQ Americans would continue to face discrimination. There is still much work that needs to be done, but it will be accomplished by referencing the words of Jefferson, a slaveowner who, despite his obvious flaws, provided this country with its moral creed. The United States was born with both a crooked soul and the light to fix it.
What will the 4th of July look like now in light of a national holiday commemorating Juneteenth? I think it will be harder to go out there on the 4th and wave the flag and sing the songs and recite the platitudes about freedom and liberty and equality and justice without recalling that just two weeks earlier we were celebrating the date that marked the end of slavery in the United States, which occurred some 89 years after the events of July 4th, 1776. And that will be a good thing. Perhaps the meaning of Juneteenth can prompt a yearly reckoning with the 4th of July and what it really means (too often taken for granted and reduced to shallow sentimentalities) and reframe the latter holiday to encourage deeper reflection on the events of American history, the reasons we study that history, the principles that animate our nation, and what it takes to honor those principles.
Thanks for reading.
Photo credit: WBUR
Further reading: “Recognizing Juneteenth as a Federal Holiday is a Hollow Victory” by Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, June 17, 2021
Exit music: “As” by Stevie Wonder (1976, Songs in the Key of Life)