Tomorrow is the federal holiday honoring Juneteenth, the celebration of the announcement on June 19th, 1865, in Texas that enslaved Americans were free. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army, but it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico.
As Rev. Al Sharpton said today, it should be a celebration for everyone, to celebrate how far we have come and to seriously consider what still needs to be done.
“Beginning there in Texas, the Black Americans celebrating Juneteenth emphasized that emancipation in the United States meant not just freedom from enslavement, but also freedom to shape the nation’s future.”
Yet, it’s devastatingly sad that these words still lack absolute veracity on so many levels — on both visible and invisible spectra.
I am encouraged by the diversity shown in the George Floyd protests compared to the protests of less than 60 years ago. The arc of history is bending toward justice all too slowly, but it is bending. We just need to defend these gains and prevent those who tout originalism (as a pretext) from rolling back the gains that so many have worked so hard to achieve.
“Racists are immune to persuasion because, as my homesteading Florida Cracker ancestors would say, There are white folks and there are coloreds and there are the animals. My great-grandfather, the one with KKK on the pedestal of his gravestone in Palatka, proudly said that, like his other animals, he let his coloreds have a day of rest.”
I replied,
“Thank you for this personal history. I find it curious how brain-dead a person has to be in order to treat dark-skinned humans like pets, or cattle, or workhorses, or sex toys. It takes a very low level of consciousness to identify hierarchies of humans, like in Nazi Germany and in slavery societies … American society is barbaric. We are talking Cro-Magnon here people.”
It boggles the mind. Slavery is completely incomprehensible to me. Cattle. Workhorses. Pets. Sex toys. Truly, trying to understand slavery is like entering The Twilight Zone.
If you haven't already, read Isabel Wilkerson's _Caste_. It's brilliant and eye opening, and to know the US is peer to Nazi Germany and India in establishing a degrading hierarchy is both a great disappointment and a challenge.
The emancipation from slavery was proclaimed in now what is known, as the most divisive state in the union. The “slave owners” still exist under an umbrella which I call the Pro-Rape Party. Juneteenth should be celebrated without any conflict but I am holding my breath. May the festivities be enjoyed throughout the land.
The Juneteenth holiday celebration seems to of taken entirely too long to have crystallized in the minds of most Americans about the need to memorialize and honor the end of legal slavery in the United States. It was certainly never mentioned in mixed company where I was present until about eight or nine years ago (I'm 80 years old this week), and I've always wondered why this is so. It's not that people didn't know about it. The Book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible is all about the Israelites being liberated from slavery in Egypt. In the Christian faith, the Last Supper was the Passover Seder where the remembrance of God's liberation of the Israelites was annually celebrated. President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and the story behind it, is universally understood within the United States to signal the demise of slavery as Union armies fought their way into the heart of the Confederacy, where each foot of liberated ground officially and forever afterward ended slavery then and there. With President Abraham Lincoln's strong exhortation, Congress debated and passed the 13th Amendment, officially removing slavery from the United States Constitution, as one of the president's final political acts before his untimely death in April 1865. The 13th Amendment was submitted to the states for ratification on February 1, 1865, and it was declared effective in a proclamation of the Secretary of State on December 18, 1865, reciting that the amendment had been ratified by the legislatures of 27 of the 36 states then comprising the federal Union, and six months after General Granger's proclamation in Galveston. Likewise, the successes of the Civil Rights movement spanning much of the post-World War II era between 1945 and 1965 which laid the legal groundwork for the abolition of state-enacted 'Jim Crow' laws and governmental practices, was never formally acknowledged by a congressionally-enacted celebratory holiday. Perhaps we can attribute this to bad faith on the part of the former seceding states of the Confederacy, or more broadly all of those states which in 1860 permitted slavery to exist within their borders, which would include all of the Border States, including Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Where, at least in the Northern states where I lived earlier in my life, New York and New Jersey, celebration of the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were fixtures. George Washington was our first president, whose excellent example was supposed to be followed by those who succeeded him; most did, but there were important exceptions. Abraham Lincoln's birthday was one whose celebration we could actually feel. And ending slavery by whatever means Lincoln found necessary in order to build a national consensus that slavery would no longer be tolerated was part of the American culture that I was steeped in for my earliest school days. These were not neighborhoods dominated by wild-eyed liberals. Most of my neighbors and all of my friends were practicing Roman Catholics at the time, and this was a decade before Vatican II under Pope John XXIII; and politically, this feeling transcended partisan politics. When my family relocated to California's San Francisco Bay Area, it was pretty much the same.
That said, white people and descendants of former slaves largely live separate lives apart from one another, and the cycles of challenge and accommodation have not necessarily been peaceful, and consensus in many areas remains the elusive. But that is always the problem of disparate groups looking for common ground, and sometimes taking decades to find it. That gradual acknowledgment and acceptance does not tarnish the basic understanding that American slavery as treating certain class of people as property, was wrongful then, as it is wrongful now. We often hear the admonition that we should not judge people living in past eras by the standards we hold now, as we can expect to be judged harshly by those who follow us in the future. But on this point, the social acceptance of race-based slavery cannot be justified under any theory of constitutional government. Our forebears in the states in which I grew up and lived as an adult would generally agree with that proposition, certainly in Massachusetts, where I lived for twenty years would be foremost among those saying so.
We now have a new national holiday that commemorates the emancipation from slavery of persons of Black African descent. So, belated as it is, having such a holiday gives us all a chance to reflect on what it means to be free. There is nothing to be gained by treating it as less worthy than, say, Memorial Day, or Labor Day. It is a day of opportunity looking towards participation by everybody, from Mayflower descendent to today's newly arrived refugee from Ukraine. Ukrainians know a lot about de facto slavery from their centuries of experience with Imperial Russia. Let's make this a party that anyone can feel wanted, and will want to participate in.
Not meaning to co-opt the significance of this day, but in a tangential way, women are finally receiving acknowledgement that a woman's place is literally in the House and the Senate. Here's a gifted WaPo article that describes that slow march, with highlights of Vice President Harris' role.
And there you have it. That which should have been fundamental since our founding, that all "men" are created equal eventually reaches to the final holdout that is Galveston. "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."
The Trump Republicans of today will never accept defeat regardless of what the polls say and isn’t it interesting that the former Confederate states hold the majority of those who have sworn allegiance to him. Willful ignorance continues to abound.
This June 19th date is so significant, it can't be over-stated. What had been since the early 1600's in the American colonies that started in Virginia was now over for all time going forward. No more slaves...anywhere in America. But that was just the beginning of a process that we are still wrestling with. The emotional aspect of slavery that made it possible to justify was that white folks were better than...smarter and created to control black folks who were born to serve. They were actually doing black folks a favor by bringing them here and exposing them to our Bible. Bobby Lee was supposed to be the "savior". He would vanquish the "damn Yankees". Buy it didn't turn out that way. Life in the south was turned upside down by Abe Lincoln...US Grant...Sherman & Sheridan. So now 160 years later some of us, are still hanging on to ideas that our ancestors believed and acted on for over 200 years. Slaves good. Still rallying around statues to dead Confederates and their battle flag...and calling it "Heritage...not Hate" on bumper stickers. That's what we are dealing with here. The idea that white folks with Bibles were born to rule.
Confederates justified slavery by referring to Rome and the longevity of the institution. But Roman slaves could purchase their freedom, earned their freedom in most cases eventually became free and always had a day of rest. In the USA the arc of history regarding slavery bent backwards!
"The news arrived in a state [Texas] consumed by chaos." Not much has changed. The Texas ruling party says that federal elections were fraudulent. It supports vigilante abortion "justice" and wants to assure the widest, unfettered access to guns and aspires to make all "gun free zones" illegal even as children in the state are assault-weapon slaughtered by the dozen. It attacks gay rights and mocks its own war-hero Navy Seal Congressman (Dan Crenshaw) with the moniker "Eye-Patch McCain", ridiculing yet another Republican war hero . The party wants to repeal the federal income tax and abolish popular election of US Senators (returning same to the state legislature). It supports the "nullification" of numerous Federal laws and judicial decrees And just in case you were wondering, yes, party leaders are considering secession and want a referendum on the same!
If it weren't for the near 50% who vote for the other party and have to live in Texas, I would wish them success in their efforts to be gone..
If only reconstruction and reconciliation had taken hold back then, but hate and greed won out. And we live with more of the same 156 years later. And Texas leads the way, led by an immigrant from Canada and one from Australia. And, of course, our home-grown bigots and greedy bastards are on board with the evil. Hard to imagine that love and reason have a chance. Also, hard to imagine that white supremacists blather has any adherents, considering that they are the best evidence, almost to a man, against their position of, across the board, superiority. They are an unfunny joke on the rest of us.
In the spirit of celebration and openness I tried to read the Texas Republican Party platform. Had to stop before I gouged my eyes out. It compares, almost word for word, certainly concept by concept, with the Articles of Confederation. It is clear that I am not welcome in Texas. I am not Christian. I don't know whose "traditional family" the platform refers to, but it's nothing like anything I'm familiar with. I consider gender to be a social/cultural construct. I hope they exercise their desire to secede.
Yesterday I heard from a young neighbor that voting makes no difference in this country because she finds the system so warped. She is a millennial. I have millennial colleagues who also do not vote because they just feel that their votes don't count. On some level I suspect that their lives are comfortable enough that it has not seemed to matter to them and they don't think that others have fought to make that possible. One has Mexican American parents, but he does not speak any Spanish and considers himself white. His wife has a Chinese mother and White father. My millennial neighbor has a White mother and Filipino father. She considers herself Brown. She views this land as stolen from Indigenous people, and that the Black people who were forced here by slavery should be considered as well, and all policies should be recognizing the primacy of these two groups who are at the bottom of the barrel in a White Supremacist system. Her mother wants to leave the USA, and she said her mother doesn't get to leave the system that her people created and messed up without fixing it first. Voting within this system is a waste of time. It is painful for me to hear this because I wonder how many other people will not be voting because they feel that way. She is a lawyer that works with women who have been incarcerated. We had coffee with another lawyer neighbor who was giving us some advice. He is retired and works for free to help poor people who have been duped out of their homes by the system, mainly poor Black people, and he votes. He also helps teachers and others who are unfairly treated by their employment. He has a Native American mother and a White father. He is 75. When his father went to fight in the war, he was taken from his mother and given to a White family to raise. Both are lawyers who help poor people, mainly Black people who suffer from generational poverty. Each has a different view of the world. Some of it is life experience I suspect. While I still see possibilities within our system, and how to try to make it work more optimally and others who are even older than me do too, I see that others do not feel that it serves them at all and wonder whether this is why so many younger people are not voting. I was raised that one of the most important parts of participating in a democracy is to vote. I see it as an obligation.People fought and died for me to have this right. Recently on my way to a political march men were asking my friends and me about our signs. Two men were telling us that they had not voted for 30 years but said they would vote in this election after talking with us about issues. These were middle aged Black men. I had assumed they would be voting, and was surprised to hear that they had only voted in the beginning. I wondered whether voting had been that disillusioning. Thanks to my younger neighbor working with women who have just gotten our of prison I am reminded that we still have slavery in the United States thanks to the 13th Amendment which says that those who are incarcerated can be enslaved. A lot of companies have prison insourcing of labor. This does not prepare people to be on the outside at all. So, in essence Juneteenth does not really represent the end of slavery in the United States, and our prison system does not make our country look good. That is something that needs to change.
June 19, 2022
As Rev. Al Sharpton said today, it should be a celebration for everyone, to celebrate how far we have come and to seriously consider what still needs to be done.
“Beginning there in Texas, the Black Americans celebrating Juneteenth emphasized that emancipation in the United States meant not just freedom from enslavement, but also freedom to shape the nation’s future.”
Yet, it’s devastatingly sad that these words still lack absolute veracity on so many levels — on both visible and invisible spectra.
I am encouraged by the diversity shown in the George Floyd protests compared to the protests of less than 60 years ago. The arc of history is bending toward justice all too slowly, but it is bending. We just need to defend these gains and prevent those who tout originalism (as a pretext) from rolling back the gains that so many have worked so hard to achieve.
On June 9, Rosalind Gnatt posted,
“Racists are immune to persuasion because, as my homesteading Florida Cracker ancestors would say, There are white folks and there are coloreds and there are the animals. My great-grandfather, the one with KKK on the pedestal of his gravestone in Palatka, proudly said that, like his other animals, he let his coloreds have a day of rest.”
I replied,
“Thank you for this personal history. I find it curious how brain-dead a person has to be in order to treat dark-skinned humans like pets, or cattle, or workhorses, or sex toys. It takes a very low level of consciousness to identify hierarchies of humans, like in Nazi Germany and in slavery societies … American society is barbaric. We are talking Cro-Magnon here people.”
It boggles the mind. Slavery is completely incomprehensible to me. Cattle. Workhorses. Pets. Sex toys. Truly, trying to understand slavery is like entering The Twilight Zone.
If you haven't already, read Isabel Wilkerson's _Caste_. It's brilliant and eye opening, and to know the US is peer to Nazi Germany and India in establishing a degrading hierarchy is both a great disappointment and a challenge.
The emancipation from slavery was proclaimed in now what is known, as the most divisive state in the union. The “slave owners” still exist under an umbrella which I call the Pro-Rape Party. Juneteenth should be celebrated without any conflict but I am holding my breath. May the festivities be enjoyed throughout the land.
The Juneteenth holiday celebration seems to of taken entirely too long to have crystallized in the minds of most Americans about the need to memorialize and honor the end of legal slavery in the United States. It was certainly never mentioned in mixed company where I was present until about eight or nine years ago (I'm 80 years old this week), and I've always wondered why this is so. It's not that people didn't know about it. The Book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible is all about the Israelites being liberated from slavery in Egypt. In the Christian faith, the Last Supper was the Passover Seder where the remembrance of God's liberation of the Israelites was annually celebrated. President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and the story behind it, is universally understood within the United States to signal the demise of slavery as Union armies fought their way into the heart of the Confederacy, where each foot of liberated ground officially and forever afterward ended slavery then and there. With President Abraham Lincoln's strong exhortation, Congress debated and passed the 13th Amendment, officially removing slavery from the United States Constitution, as one of the president's final political acts before his untimely death in April 1865. The 13th Amendment was submitted to the states for ratification on February 1, 1865, and it was declared effective in a proclamation of the Secretary of State on December 18, 1865, reciting that the amendment had been ratified by the legislatures of 27 of the 36 states then comprising the federal Union, and six months after General Granger's proclamation in Galveston. Likewise, the successes of the Civil Rights movement spanning much of the post-World War II era between 1945 and 1965 which laid the legal groundwork for the abolition of state-enacted 'Jim Crow' laws and governmental practices, was never formally acknowledged by a congressionally-enacted celebratory holiday. Perhaps we can attribute this to bad faith on the part of the former seceding states of the Confederacy, or more broadly all of those states which in 1860 permitted slavery to exist within their borders, which would include all of the Border States, including Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Where, at least in the Northern states where I lived earlier in my life, New York and New Jersey, celebration of the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were fixtures. George Washington was our first president, whose excellent example was supposed to be followed by those who succeeded him; most did, but there were important exceptions. Abraham Lincoln's birthday was one whose celebration we could actually feel. And ending slavery by whatever means Lincoln found necessary in order to build a national consensus that slavery would no longer be tolerated was part of the American culture that I was steeped in for my earliest school days. These were not neighborhoods dominated by wild-eyed liberals. Most of my neighbors and all of my friends were practicing Roman Catholics at the time, and this was a decade before Vatican II under Pope John XXIII; and politically, this feeling transcended partisan politics. When my family relocated to California's San Francisco Bay Area, it was pretty much the same.
That said, white people and descendants of former slaves largely live separate lives apart from one another, and the cycles of challenge and accommodation have not necessarily been peaceful, and consensus in many areas remains the elusive. But that is always the problem of disparate groups looking for common ground, and sometimes taking decades to find it. That gradual acknowledgment and acceptance does not tarnish the basic understanding that American slavery as treating certain class of people as property, was wrongful then, as it is wrongful now. We often hear the admonition that we should not judge people living in past eras by the standards we hold now, as we can expect to be judged harshly by those who follow us in the future. But on this point, the social acceptance of race-based slavery cannot be justified under any theory of constitutional government. Our forebears in the states in which I grew up and lived as an adult would generally agree with that proposition, certainly in Massachusetts, where I lived for twenty years would be foremost among those saying so.
We now have a new national holiday that commemorates the emancipation from slavery of persons of Black African descent. So, belated as it is, having such a holiday gives us all a chance to reflect on what it means to be free. There is nothing to be gained by treating it as less worthy than, say, Memorial Day, or Labor Day. It is a day of opportunity looking towards participation by everybody, from Mayflower descendent to today's newly arrived refugee from Ukraine. Ukrainians know a lot about de facto slavery from their centuries of experience with Imperial Russia. Let's make this a party that anyone can feel wanted, and will want to participate in.
Not meaning to co-opt the significance of this day, but in a tangential way, women are finally receiving acknowledgement that a woman's place is literally in the House and the Senate. Here's a gifted WaPo article that describes that slow march, with highlights of Vice President Harris' role.
https://wapo.st/39AamEA
And while the House is seeing a rising tide, notably, the Senate is lacking in making strides towards a more inclusive body of lawmakers.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/25/us/black-us-senators-history-trnd/index.html
And there you have it. That which should have been fundamental since our founding, that all "men" are created equal eventually reaches to the final holdout that is Galveston. "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."
Think I'll join in the celebration.
The Trump Republicans of today will never accept defeat regardless of what the polls say and isn’t it interesting that the former Confederate states hold the majority of those who have sworn allegiance to him. Willful ignorance continues to abound.
This June 19th date is so significant, it can't be over-stated. What had been since the early 1600's in the American colonies that started in Virginia was now over for all time going forward. No more slaves...anywhere in America. But that was just the beginning of a process that we are still wrestling with. The emotional aspect of slavery that made it possible to justify was that white folks were better than...smarter and created to control black folks who were born to serve. They were actually doing black folks a favor by bringing them here and exposing them to our Bible. Bobby Lee was supposed to be the "savior". He would vanquish the "damn Yankees". Buy it didn't turn out that way. Life in the south was turned upside down by Abe Lincoln...US Grant...Sherman & Sheridan. So now 160 years later some of us, are still hanging on to ideas that our ancestors believed and acted on for over 200 years. Slaves good. Still rallying around statues to dead Confederates and their battle flag...and calling it "Heritage...not Hate" on bumper stickers. That's what we are dealing with here. The idea that white folks with Bibles were born to rule.
Confederates justified slavery by referring to Rome and the longevity of the institution. But Roman slaves could purchase their freedom, earned their freedom in most cases eventually became free and always had a day of rest. In the USA the arc of history regarding slavery bent backwards!
"The news arrived in a state [Texas] consumed by chaos." Not much has changed. The Texas ruling party says that federal elections were fraudulent. It supports vigilante abortion "justice" and wants to assure the widest, unfettered access to guns and aspires to make all "gun free zones" illegal even as children in the state are assault-weapon slaughtered by the dozen. It attacks gay rights and mocks its own war-hero Navy Seal Congressman (Dan Crenshaw) with the moniker "Eye-Patch McCain", ridiculing yet another Republican war hero . The party wants to repeal the federal income tax and abolish popular election of US Senators (returning same to the state legislature). It supports the "nullification" of numerous Federal laws and judicial decrees And just in case you were wondering, yes, party leaders are considering secession and want a referendum on the same!
If it weren't for the near 50% who vote for the other party and have to live in Texas, I would wish them success in their efforts to be gone..
If only reconstruction and reconciliation had taken hold back then, but hate and greed won out. And we live with more of the same 156 years later. And Texas leads the way, led by an immigrant from Canada and one from Australia. And, of course, our home-grown bigots and greedy bastards are on board with the evil. Hard to imagine that love and reason have a chance. Also, hard to imagine that white supremacists blather has any adherents, considering that they are the best evidence, almost to a man, against their position of, across the board, superiority. They are an unfunny joke on the rest of us.
In the spirit of celebration and openness I tried to read the Texas Republican Party platform. Had to stop before I gouged my eyes out. It compares, almost word for word, certainly concept by concept, with the Articles of Confederation. It is clear that I am not welcome in Texas. I am not Christian. I don't know whose "traditional family" the platform refers to, but it's nothing like anything I'm familiar with. I consider gender to be a social/cultural construct. I hope they exercise their desire to secede.
Yesterday I heard from a young neighbor that voting makes no difference in this country because she finds the system so warped. She is a millennial. I have millennial colleagues who also do not vote because they just feel that their votes don't count. On some level I suspect that their lives are comfortable enough that it has not seemed to matter to them and they don't think that others have fought to make that possible. One has Mexican American parents, but he does not speak any Spanish and considers himself white. His wife has a Chinese mother and White father. My millennial neighbor has a White mother and Filipino father. She considers herself Brown. She views this land as stolen from Indigenous people, and that the Black people who were forced here by slavery should be considered as well, and all policies should be recognizing the primacy of these two groups who are at the bottom of the barrel in a White Supremacist system. Her mother wants to leave the USA, and she said her mother doesn't get to leave the system that her people created and messed up without fixing it first. Voting within this system is a waste of time. It is painful for me to hear this because I wonder how many other people will not be voting because they feel that way. She is a lawyer that works with women who have been incarcerated. We had coffee with another lawyer neighbor who was giving us some advice. He is retired and works for free to help poor people who have been duped out of their homes by the system, mainly poor Black people, and he votes. He also helps teachers and others who are unfairly treated by their employment. He has a Native American mother and a White father. He is 75. When his father went to fight in the war, he was taken from his mother and given to a White family to raise. Both are lawyers who help poor people, mainly Black people who suffer from generational poverty. Each has a different view of the world. Some of it is life experience I suspect. While I still see possibilities within our system, and how to try to make it work more optimally and others who are even older than me do too, I see that others do not feel that it serves them at all and wonder whether this is why so many younger people are not voting. I was raised that one of the most important parts of participating in a democracy is to vote. I see it as an obligation.People fought and died for me to have this right. Recently on my way to a political march men were asking my friends and me about our signs. Two men were telling us that they had not voted for 30 years but said they would vote in this election after talking with us about issues. These were middle aged Black men. I had assumed they would be voting, and was surprised to hear that they had only voted in the beginning. I wondered whether voting had been that disillusioning. Thanks to my younger neighbor working with women who have just gotten our of prison I am reminded that we still have slavery in the United States thanks to the 13th Amendment which says that those who are incarcerated can be enslaved. A lot of companies have prison insourcing of labor. This does not prepare people to be on the outside at all. So, in essence Juneteenth does not really represent the end of slavery in the United States, and our prison system does not make our country look good. That is something that needs to change.
https://sites.tufts.edu/prisondivestment/prison-labor/
https://scheerpost.com/2022/01/06/corporations-are-making-millions-of-dollars-from-u-s-prison-labor/
http://maltajusticeinitiative.org/12-major-corporations-benefiting-from-the-prison-industrial-complex-2/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-workers-low-wages-exploited