Three Tune Tuesday: Juneteenth -- What's It All About?
Juneteenth was celebrated yesterday, on June 19, and is the United States' newest federal holiday, but has been celebrated in the state of Texas by African Americans since June 19, 1865, the day Union soldiers finally arrived in Galveston, TX, took control, and declared the end of chattel slavery -- and then, AT LAST, freedom for African Americans finally began to ring from sea to shining sea. At last, from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, those cruelly enslaved were freed.
It is said that July 4 is a lie without Juneteenth, and that is correct. The very men who wrote the Star Spangled Banner, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence were men who offered Africans in America two choices: be chattel to be worked to death while also enduring every imaginable brutality at these men's whim, or, die sooner for rebelling in any way, including learning to read, maintaining your own language, music, and traditions, or burying your dead with dignity, to say nothing of trying to escape. The United States has long had its own domestic terrorism. We just don't like to admit it ... but every ancestor of mine in Texas could have told you that, hundreds of years ago. The United States did not live up to its "land of the free" billing EVEN A LITTLE BIT until June 19, 1865, 89 years after the first Independence Day in 1776.
My ancestors were from Texas, so I have always celebrated Juneteenth. My elders made sure I understood what it was about -- FREEDOM FOR ALL, at great price. Our ancestors had to fight to survive to see freedom, and the Civil War had to be won at a cost of 750,000 combatants and uncountable collateral deaths. The Emancipation Proclamation, dating from Jan. 1, 1863, had to be enforced, Union victory by Union victory.
Freedom is beautiful ... and costly. Nor was the first Juneteenth the beginning or end of my people's journey to freedom, because by AUGUST, 1865, the first Southern laws to return my ancestors to slavery were already on the books. The Ku Klux Klan, oldest known domestic terrorists in the country, would be riding by January 1866 -- and since those men could not have their way with the Union, guess who they would spend another 100 years attacking, lynching, burning, looting -- TERRORISM? Jim Crow laws would be on the books in the late 1870s, as the South insisted on reverting as close to chattel status for African Americans as it could get away with. It would be 1965 before the federal government paid any more attention to STOPPING THE FOOLERY, and it would be costly then too. Many, many people died in the struggle for full civil rights for African Americans. People -- including little children -- were MURDERED by those still insisting on injustice.
But Juneteenth, and my people, keep coming for freedom, decade after decade, generation after generation! Confederate and Nazi flags still come out to try to frighten, to terrorize -- but we KEEP COMING, even though our nation seems to be letting another rollback of rights happen now -- but we KEEP COMING for what is rightfully ours, and every human being's with us: FREEDOM!
The incomparable Shirley Verrett ... at the time she sang opera, she wasn't supposed to be allowed to do that ... but my people KEEP COMING, and BLESSING!
The incomparable Paul Robeson ... listen to him thunder a righteous command to the Bible's most famous slave holder ... and KNOW that the command rolls down, INEVITABLY, to all who would DARE reduce human beings to chattel, and WILL BE ENFORCED!
The incomparable Aretha Franklin ... you better THINK before listening to those who are against FREEDOM FOR ALL!
Just so we know on the legal part .... the linked videos are not owned by me, I am sharing just the link to the copyright owner's video. No copyright infringement is intended.
Used under fair-use section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976.
I loved reading this passionate condemnation of the domestic terrorism of your people. I have read so much about those times and always with sadness, horror, anger and compassion. Of course literature only gets you so far - the lived experience of your people is another thing entirely.
May all the oppressed continue to fight for freedom, and may they be supported by the so called privileged, all to the sounds of freedom tunes!
Thank you for reading, this and all of it -- I spent a long time thinking about that post, and then decided to call it what it is. No surrender, no retreat over here ... the march toward freedom (and the fight when necessary) has to continue, because LITERALLY, there are people who want to revert the United States to its old hypocrisy! Not on my watch!
I think there's been enough silence and submission. Xx
I always feel we have a responsibility to learn about these things and literature has always been my in in that regard. It helps us have empathy. I wonder if half the problem is that they refuse to make any attempt to understand history and what people have suffered..
That is half the problem ... because that means what they have been taught about their worth through the stories of THEIR ancestors, and about American exceptionalism, is a lie, and if they accept that, they will then have to rebuild their entire identity. If the land of the free and the home of the brave is NOT, then who are THEY? Most people do not want to embark on the kind of journey my ancestors were forced on to even understand their PERSONHOOD -- and when I say most people, that includes most African Americans. A lot of us are living by what we are TOLD instead of going on that journey... we are not a reflective culture in the United States, so it is hard for us to consider things deeply enough to discover new ways forward. It is easier to default. In order to consider ourselves HUMAN, African Americans have to realize that 90 percent of what we have been taught about our history in these United States is a LIE, by COMMISSION. In order for other people to consider us as human as they see themselves, they will ALSO have to realize that 90 percent of what THEY were taught about their ancestors is also a LIE, by OMISSION.
I am not familiar with Shirley Verrett. What a stupendous voice! Paul Robeson and Aretha Franklin are names I know, and it was fun to hear their recordings from your post.
It can be argued that we are all slaves now, slaves to the government. It's a more subtle variety of slavery, but the phrase "this is a free country" rings hollow nowadays. We all need to fight for freedom, and I think you said that, too.
I would almost agree with you... except that you cannot be killed for reading, or leaving, or burying your dead in the manner you see fit, or practicing any faith you wish. We are not chattel slaves. We still have more freedom ... if we can keep it.
That's true, and, unfortunately, a big "if." And there are plenty of lessons still to be learned from the days of chattel slavery.
As George Carlin once said,
"This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free."
And it is one of the bitter ironies of history,
that if the US had not become independent from Great Britain,
all slaves would have been free sooner,
since purchase or ownership of slaves would have been illegal,
in all British colonies from 1833 onward
with the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.
YEP. BINGO. I marvel at how many people do, and how many people do not, know that.