06/19/2020
"For this JUNETEENTH holiday I highly encourage every person to purchase and listen to this audiobook.
I enjoyed it so much better than the printed book because of the various characters employed to bring it to life in powerful ways.
Come to think of it...I think I'll begin listen to it again...it's that powerful and enlightening to a passage of American History intentionally untaught but holds to keys to millions of lives loved and lost." - A. David Griffin
....And they carried themselves with the dignity that had been denied them and their forebears for 246 years..... On this day, June 19, 1865 -- two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and months after the end of the Civil War -- word finally reached the last of the enslaved Americans that “all slaves are free.”
Union General Gordon Granger read these words, directed toward recalcitrant slaveholders, from the balcony of the former Confederate Army headquarters in Galveston, Texas, 80 miles west of the Louisiana line.
This is the day when our country's original sin of enslavement finally came to an end. There are several theories as to the delay that left enslaved people in Texas in particular toiling for so much longer than they should have. One theory is that a messenger had been killed on the way to what was then a distant outpost to relay that their freedom was now official. Another is that slave owners purposely withheld the news or refused to comply (which would have been all too easy in the days before the technology we now take for granted).
In the end, it took 2,000 union troops to capture the state to enforce the law. Only then could General Gordon read the Proclamation stating that the enslaved people were now to be employees rather than property. The reactions among the newly freed people ranged from shock to jubilation. Some stayed to see what employment would mean. Others left the plantations immediately and set out to find family members spread out over the region.
Slavery was quickly replaced with sharecropping and a Jim Crow caste system that would hold formerly enslaved people and their descendants in the grip of a brutal new social order which millions would ultimately flee.
Here in this photo, survivors of slavery soberly observe Juneteenth in their hats, canes and bonnets in Austin, TX, 1900. In the early years, the newly freed people and their descendants took pains to dress up for Juneteenth, as laws had forbidden slaves to do so in certain jurisdictions, even in the rare instances when owners would have been so inclined to provide them with decent clothing.
Juneteenth has been a state holiday in Texas since 1980, and has long been celebrated, with parades and the staples of barbecue and red soda pop, in California, where many Texans journeyed during the Great Migration. Now, a majority of the states, along with the District of Columbia, recognize it as a state holiday or special day of observance. The building from which General Granger read the Proclamation all those years late is now a historic landmark.
In honor of the last enslaved Americans to be set free.....
-- Listen to my brief discussion of this history on public radio's "The Takeaway":
www.wnyc.org/story/juneteenth-america-can-shine-light-its-dark-past/
-- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
www.thewarmthofothersuns.com
