A Juneteenth Message
"The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” These were the words spoken in 1865 by Union Major-General Gordon Granger to the people of Galveston, Texas on June 19th and heard by the enslaved people held there.
Freedom. Freedom is what we celebrate on Juneteenth which was finally recognized as a federal holiday in 2021.
Before Juneteenth, our celebration of independence and freedom was incomplete.
In his oration from 1852, Frederick Douglass describes how the celebrations of the Fourth of July meant little to enslaved Americans:
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the 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 all 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 bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
A decade later, in 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation stating that “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State […] shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
However, slavery persisted in the South for another 2 years and the Emancipation Proclamation was not enforced until Robert E. Lee’s surrender in 1865.
On Juneteenth we celebrate freedom, we celebrate our country’s striving to do what’s right and just. We celebrate the end of nearly 300 years of the brutal practice of holding people in bondage in this country.
Celebrating the Juneteenth milestone is therefore one step on this country’s bumpy journey to achieving a more perfect union, where indeed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Wishing you all a happy Juneteenth.
Dr. Allison Lee and Dr. Maya Jalbout Hastie
Co-chairs, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force