American Legacy
Juneteenth
by Jessica B. Harris
For
American Legacy
(Summer 2005), pp. 15-18
It began as a whisper that president Lincoln might be making a decision to free all the slaves in the South. At first it seemed like just another rumor from the nation's capitol. But then the rumor became truth. On September 22, 1862, President Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation that gave the slaveholding states 100 days to abandon slavery. Could it really happen?
On January 1,1863, abolitionists both black and white gathered in the free states to await the news that Lincoln had signed the final document. At Tremont Temple Baptist Church in Boston, an anxious group sat from morning until night. Prominent antislavery activists, including Frederick Douglass, made speeches, but the crowd was restless. Finally word came, carried by a runner from the telegraph office: Lincoln had done it! The people went wild with joy, celebrating well into the night, and the news was repeated in churches and meeting halls from Maine to Michigan.
But exactly what Lincoln had done is often lost in the romance of the story. The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to those states that had seceded from the United States. Most of the slaveholding states had done so at the start of, the Civil War two years earlier. Most, but not all of them. Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri, which also held slaves, had remained in the Union, so their slaves were not emancipated. The citizens of what would become West Virginia had voted to split off from the state of Virginia and remain in the Union; their slaves, too, were exempt. Union-occupied territories in the South, including the entire state of Tennessee, were not obliged to free their slaves. In the enemy-held territory of the Confederacy, the proclamation could not be enforced. Lincoln's seemingly powerless decree was designed to confirm his support of abolition, punish the slaveholding states that had rebelled, yet keep those that had not revolted on the Union side.
The tidings were, nevertheless, magnificent, if slow in getting to the people they benefited most. Many plantation owners simply chose to withhold the news. Yet the word passed through the tobacco fields of Virginia, through the rice growing marshlands of the Carolina and Georgia low country, across to the indigo plantations of the Sea Islands, and through the cotton fields of Mississippi and Alabama. It moved along the canebreaks on Louisiana's sugar plantations, where some of the slave owners were black themselves. Many slaves met the news with singing and dancing; others stayed more somber. Finally it made its way to the hinterlands of Texas.
"The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free." So pronounced the Union general Gordon Granger in Galveston on June 19, 1865. Freedom had taken two years, six months, and 19 days to arrive in Texas---two months after the Confederate general Robert E.Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, and two months after the assassination of the President who had written and signed the proclamation.
Spontaneous and joyous celebrations broke out among the state's 250,000 ex-slaves. Black Texans observed the date, which they eventually called Juneteenth (a combination of the month and the day), with a fervor that rivaled that for Christmas, the only occasion when in the past they had ever had a few days' rest. "Master calls up all the slaves and says we was free, but if we stayed and worked for him we'd have plenty to eat and wear, and if we left, it'd be root, hawg or die," said 87-year-old Rube Witt in an interview for the Works Progress Administration in 1937. "Most of 'em left but I stayed a year. You'd ought to seed 'em pullin' off them croaker-sack clothes when master says we's free." Recalled one woman from Galveston, "We all walk down the road singin' and shoutin' to beat de band."
But free on paper didn't necessarily mean truly free. Many [former] slaves took off for the North, but others who had nowhere to go stayed and became sharecroppers, or worked for meager wages on the same land they had farmed as slaves, regularly intimidated by a growing number of white-supremacy groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Magnolia. Annual Juneteenth celebrations were one way to reaffirm that they were free, no matter how hard some people tried to make it seem otherwise. Early commemorations featured prayer meetings and religious services giving thanks for deliverance from bondage. People sang spirituals---"Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel? / Then why not every man?"---and wore new clothes, an expression of newfound freedom. They walked in somber processions to meeting grounds to hear the proclamation read. Ex-slaves sat as guests of honor at dinner tables in private homes and at banquets. Later the prayers of thanksgiving offered up by preachers in sonorous tones gave way to cakewalks and parades with cowboys riding high-stepping horses.
Today the holiday, which has grown to include people of all races and ethnicities, is just as likely to feature beauty pageants, baseball games, spoken-word and step competitions, and even black-tie galas. But now as in the early days, picnics and barbecues are a big part of the celebration. In 2002 I was fortunate to spend the holiday in Dallas. Even though the temperature was over 90, folks poured into Fair Park, the state fairgrounds, to spend the day. Coolers were unpacked, lawn chairs pulled into convivial circles and portable grills fired up. Groups of people listened to blues music, sampled different kinds of homemade barbecue, slurped down gallons of supersweet red soda---a must at Texas barbecues---and just enjoyed the day. Walking past the booths that offered food of every kind, arts and crafts, black-interest books and memorabilia, and the like, I was struck by how far black people had come. Afterward, I visited a Haitian art show and ended the day with a meal at a Brazilian restaurant. It was somehow fitting that this Juneteenth had grown beyond a celebration only of African-American emancipation into a salute to the creativity of the descendants of ex-slaves throughout the diaspora.
In Austin, the holiday is kept alive on a nearly daily basis, thanks to the efforts of Bernadette Phifer and her colleagues at the George Washington Carver Museum & Cultural Center. There, visitors can learn about Juneteenth in a permanent exhibit. "Every year, some reporter sticks a microphone in a child's face and asks him what the holiday is about," says Phifer, the director and curator of the museum. "The kid shrugs his shoulders and says, 'It's a parade,' or, 'We have barbecue and lots of food.' Sure, a lot of eating goes on, but we want people to know that there are more important reasons for celebrating the day; and they should be brought out." .
The exhibit includes videos of people reminiscing about how they have celebrated, not just in Austin but across the United States. Indeed, although Juneteenth was born in the Lone Star State, other places have been celebrating their own versions since the proclamation was signed, variously called Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, or Jubilee. Legend has it that President Lincoln sent a black Union soldier on a mule south to Texas to spread the word that the slaves were free, and today's celebrations mark his arrival in the towns along his route. And the holiday isn't confined to June. Near Hurtsboro, Alabama, the community of Battle holds a three-day festival that begins on May 28---its 1867 emancipation date-complete with fancy riders and drumming to honor African ancestors. Rather than Juneteenth, the residents call their version the Twenty-eighth. Some in Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio claim September 22, the date of Lincoln's initial 1862 proclamation. Across the country, black churches hold Watch night services on December 31, with congregations gathering to commemorate the New Year's Eve of 1862, when crowds waited eagerly to hear the news of emancipation.
Still, June 19 prevails, mostly because transplanted Texans have packed it up and taken it west to California, where this year San Francisco will hold its fifty-fifth annual event, and east to Maine, north to Alaska, and to distant corners of the globe, especially overseas military bases where a number of African-Americans live. At www. juneteenth.com, a Web site dedicated to the holiday, people from around the world post messages about such events as a fraternity [S Q M ] step show at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, a domino tournament at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, and a tennis tournament at the La Maddalena Naval Support Activity base in Italy.
Elissa Russell, who teaches English as a foreign language at a Montessori School in Taiwan, co-founded a group called the Descendants of African People (DAP), which plans social events for its members and seeks to share with the Taiwanese the full spectrum of black heritage. The group uses Juneteenth as a way of bringing its members together. Many of them are from Belize, Dominica, and countries in Africa, and the holiday is new to most of them. "We are quite culturally diverse here and had a lot to learn about each other," Russell says. She adds that the Taiwanese "greatly respect and admire certain aspects of black culture." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech was read in both English and Chinese at DAP's Juneteenth commemoration in 2004.
Most people see Juneteenth as a joyous holiday, a contrast to Martin Luther King's birthday. Many think it should be given the same status. Since 2000 the Reverend Ronald V. Myers, Sr., chairman of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation, based in Washington, D.C., has led an annual commemoration at the Capitol on the third Saturday in June. "A presidential proclamation by President Bush is all that is required for Juneteenth to be recognized as a National Holiday Observance, similar to . . . Flag Day," he says on the foundation Web site,
www.juneteenth.us.
"Should it be a national holiday?" says Holly Hogrobrooks, a Houston native and professor of communications at Texas Southern University. "I think so. In fact, why don't we celebrate it longer, from Juneteenth to Independence Day? We can call it the Season of Freedom."
Jessica B. Harris is the author most recently of Beyond Gumbo: Creole Fusion Food From the Atlantic Rim. Her article on the Caribbean festival Junkanoo appeared in the Spring 2003 issue [of Legacy].
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