“Juneteenth marks both the long, hard night of slavery and subjugation, and a promise of a brighter morning to come.” With those words, President Joe Biden reminded the nation of this transformative moment when he made Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021.
The end of slavery became a cause célèbre.
However, viewing Juneteenth through an emancipation lens yields a more complex narrative. It becomes not the tale of the end of slavery conferred by government, but the story of how four million former slaves forged a path towards true liberty despite the obstacles.
When General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, with his union troops on June 19, 1865, and triumphantly read General Order No 3. to the nation’s last remaining enslaved people, he proclaimed that the former slaves now had “absolute equality of rights.”
Instead, emancipation brought new horrors.
The Galveston bondspeople would eventually discover that life set against a backdrop of hostility and economic precariousness does not add up to liberty but to a new form of social oppression and injustice.
Violence too was ever present which moved Frederick Douglass to ask “What does it all amount to, if the Black man ... after having been freed from the slaveholder’s lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder’s shot-gun?”
With little basic needs support, for example, tens of thousands of that first generation of the newly freed slaves succumbed to illness and starvation. Congress provided some help through the Freedman’s Bureau which provided former slaves with food, clothing, healthcare, education, and legal help. The Freedman’s Bureau was also responsible for helping establish several historically Black colleges and universities including Howard University.
But the bureau only lasted for seven years.
Former slaves also faced the hardening of the walls of segregation. According to folklorist William H. Wiggins, “Juneteenth planted firm roots within the racial caste system known as Jim Crow, and it bloomed at the same time as the self-proclaimed sons and daughters of the Confederacy decorated that same Southern landscape with memorials to slavery, thereby planting new seeds of white supremacy.”
Yet our ancestors endured, collaborated and progress was made.
A century after Granger read his order of freedom, President Lyndon Baines Johnson gave the commencement address at the 1965 graduating class of Howard University.
“But freedom is not enough. You don’t wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: ‘Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the ladders you please.’ You do not take a person, who for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.’”
Surely a class of students graduating from a HBCU was the dream of the ancestors, but for African Americans today life is still no crystal stairs.
According to the National Urban League’s 2023 State of Black America, by almost every measure the work of gaining freedom is far from complete. Blacks are poorer, sicker, and twice as likely to be unemployed or underemployed than white Americans. But this was the story we faced in 1863.