Celebrating Juneteenth
Juneteenth is a testimony of how an imperfect nation bore the pain of death and division so that the right of liberty might expand its reach.
I first blogged about Juneteenth in 2015. As I noted then, the day’s significance is almost criminally under appreciated.
Over the last few years, the 19th of June and its significance, are slowly gaining national popularity, reverence, and acknowledgment.
Because there are only so many ways to recount historical events, my post from 2015:
Through the course of conversation, I found many of my freedom-loving friends had never heard of Juneteenth.
Being a native Texan living right up the road from Galveston, maybe I’ve taken for granted that the 19th of June has always been a day of significance and celebration. President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 two years into the Civil War, but the proclamation’s issuance didn’t trigger nationwide freedom for the enslaved.
While the Civil War came to a welcome end on June 2, 1865, it wasn’t until June 19th that the last slaves learned they were free. It was on Juneteenth that Union General Granger read “General Order No. 3” on the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa.
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
The day has been celebrated ever since.
You can watch Part 2 and Part 3 by clicking the links.
President Trump issued the following message to commemorate Juneteenth:
Melania and I send our best wishes to those celebrating Juneteenth.
On this day in 1865, Major General Gordon Granger of the Union Army arrived in Galveston, Texas, to declare the end of the Civil War and issue a long-awaited order freeing the remaining slaves in Texas. Although President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation more than two years earlier, the freedom of most slaves depended on the advancement of the Union Army, which brought with it enforcement of the Proclamation. In Texas, General Granger’s order was a major step in our Nation’s effort to abolish slavery forever.
This historic moment would not have been possible without the courage and sacrifice of the nearly 200,000 former enslaved and free African Americans who fought for liberty alongside more than 2 million Union servicemen. These brave individuals fought to defend the God-given rights of those unjustly held in bondage.
As a Nation, we vow to never forget the millions of African Americans who suffered the evils of slavery. Together, we honor the unbreakable spirit and countless contributions of generations of African Americans to the story of American greatness. Today and every day, we recommit ourselves to defending the self-evident truth, boldly declared by our Founding Fathers, that all people are created equal.
Juneteenth is a testimony of how an imperfect nation bore the pain of death and division so that the right of liberty might expand its reach.
“But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.”
-From Ralph Ellison’s unfinished work, Juneteenth
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
I suppose people can celebrate what they want, but already today I have received not one but two e-mails from my school telling me how I can celebrate Juneteenth.
Doesn’t seem like pandering at all.
I look forward to receiving no e-mails about Independence Day.
Few even call it Independence Day anymore. It’s Forthage Ally.
Respond with an email thanking President Trump for bringing this day to the attention of the American people.
That’ll rustle their jimmies.
We’ve celebrated Juneteenth here in East Texas for 150 years! There’ll be a big parade up on MKL Jr. Blvd today, full of bright purple convertibles with 26″ Wagon Wheel rims. (no joke, I’ve got pictures!)
And now if you’e going to celebrate Juneteenth, you have GOT to get the menu right, it has been done the same way every year – although I suspect some of the wokesters may not like it.
“Watermelon and red soda water are the oldest traditional foods on Juneteenth,” said Myers, head of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation. “And there’s always been soul food served. Fried chicken and barbecue and greens and black-eyed peas.”
so go buy a bunch, and serve it up today!
Wait! What? Watermelon? Isn’t that a black stereotype?
Being a native Texan living right up the road from Galveston, maybe I’ve taken for granted that the 19th of June has always been a day of significance and celebration.
That’s because the celebration only mattered to Texas, since they were the only state affected by it.
The day has been celebrated ever since.
In Texas.
This is only becoming nationwide because of the racialists continued insistence that the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement made no difference in America. Until they acknowledge the extant equality under the law, and stop trying to call me a racist, I couldn’t care less.
Oh, BTW, a local bank here was going to give just blacks today off (it can’t actually close its doors for the day, since it isn’t a federal holiday, I guess). They quickly reversed course to allow an extra flex holiday for all their employees.
And yet, this is a holiday I can get behind. To me, this is a holiday that we need. We have holidays celebrating other large pivotal moments with War: the Revolutionary War (July 4) and WWI (Veteran’s Day); arguably, the best thing (maybe the only good thing) to come from the end of the Civil War was the Emancipation of the slaves.
As a country built on the ideals of freedom and liberty, the fact that we did keep people enslaved for 90 years is a bad thing. BUT unlike the godless SJW, I believe in repentance and change and Redemption. And we did rectify that wrong. We did shed blood to make sure that the ideals of our founding could apply to everyone. And we are still not perfect, but I believe that we can get there.
And I think that Juneteenth could be a great way to celebrate that we CAN change, and go forward with a better vision for the future. And as long as I don’t get in trouble for cultural appropriation, I plan to acknowledge it and maybe even celebrate it a bit with my family (as much as we do any holiday around here; which is to say, almost nothing… a bit of green on March 17, a fish on Giorno di Pesce, a poppy on Veteran’s Day, a random rendition of the Opening bars of “O, Canada” on July 1; July 4th, 24th, Easter and Christmas get more 🙂
And I actually agree – as long as it isn’t a continuing source of grievance culture. It (or Emancipation Day, tied to the signing of the Proclamation) would be an even better holiday than MLK day, as the one celebrates the ideal and the other a man.
And, I think we should celebrate in the fashion suggested for the 4th of July:
It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.
off topic, how do you get bold and italics in these comments?
Start here, the web host: https://help.salsalabs.com/hc/en-us, and the comment platform is WordPress
People also ask
How do I get help from WordPress?
When you are logged into WordPress.com, click on the blue and white ? icon in the lower right corner to access all of our Help resources. Then, click the Contact Us button. Type your question in the box under “How can we help?” and then press Chat with us to begin the chat session.
Live Chat Support – WordPress.comwordpress.com › support › live-chat
Search for: How do I get help from WordPress?
Use the < and > symbols around the appropriate tag: ’em’ for italics, ‘strong’ for bold, and ‘strike’ for strikethrough. Then a closing tag when you’re done.
So to get this: italics
you type: <em>italics</em>
But you *really* have to watch your closing tags! Or you can get an entire comment get all bolloxed up.
<i>This is italics.</i>
<b>This is bold.</b>
<s>
This is struck through.</s>so I can try
This is italics.
This is bold.
This is struck through.Thank you all 🙂
Yeah, like we need a holiday for ForteNite players and Kimchi eaters.. I’ve been black for nearly 50 years and I’m not gonna get butt hurt if it never becomes a holiday.
Geeze, our nation is filled with ethnocentric wusses. So sick of this and it’s embarrassing. Panderdemic.
It shouldn’t need to be ethnocentric. It should be (I know, I know…) a celebration of another step on our journey to being what the Founders were aiming for.
But, the grievance-mongers will screw that up, too. *sigh*
By its very nature Juneteenth is ethnocentric. There is no way you can remove blackness from the holiday anymore than you could remove Mexican from Cinco de Mayo or Jews from Holocaust Remembrance Day (week here in the United States). Neither of those are ever going to be national holidays and neither should Juneteenth.
ever since it occurred it has either been oversold or forcefed to the public–in our time, has been consistently forcefed to all the snowflakes to re-inforce their ” white guilt ” so important to the racists/leftists in order that they might discriminate against non-blacks with supposed justification
an outgrowth of the constant and consistent myth promulgated by the libtards the the war was about slavery–” see! it was about freeing the slaves! ”
no, it wasn’t
Yes, it was. And, no, it wasn’t.
Slavery was the political issue over which the states were fighting in the lead-up to the Civil War. There was a very righteous effort to end the heinous practice of chattel slavery.
The southern states saw that as tantamount to ending their independent status within a federal government. And (most importantly to your statement) a great many Southerners agreed on that point. Even the ones who detested slavery (for moral or economic reasons, or both).
So, many Southern patriots went to war to try and retain their independence, as they saw (rightly or wrongly) the Northern states trying to bend them to their will.
Interesting, isn’t it, how similar that sounds to today? Just substitute “coastal elites” for “Northern states” and “flyover country” for “Southern states”. Without even the moral high ground of abolition the North held then.
And I buggered the ‘strong’ tag. *sigh*
It’s supposed to end after “…agreed on that point.”
Can we PLEASE get the preview function working?
And, can we get the down-tick moved away from “Reply”? I’m no HTML or JavaScript expert, but even the little bit of web writing I did way back in them thar olden days tells me that it would be a 10 minute task to perform.
Come on, LI. Please?
Some celebrate the day, somw use it to urgw neurotics to gasoline-bomb people to burn them alive Obama & company are the latter.
Don’t lose sight of evil people exploiting this day.
This is a freedom holiday, and it is a good thing.
This country was founded on principles antithetical to slavery, but England brought it here, over and against the desires of the colonists, and it was very difficult to uproot.
The Civil War remains the bloodiest war fought by the US, so far.
This holiday has been celebrated in Texas ever since I can remember. I understand that it’s being exploited by panderers right now, and I don’t care.
There was a time when the chattering class claimed that advertising showing a smiling black kid and a slice of watermelon at the grocery store was “stereotyped” and “racist.” I knew better, because I knew is was a celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, something the ignorant self-described intellectuals of this country failed to take into account.
It so happens that watermelons ripen and come to market in the middle of June, and many black families would refuse to eat it, until Juneteenth. People wouldn’t buy the early crop.
We really need to reform our education system. The first step would be to get rid of all the ignorant political operatives in fake academic positions. The Chinese paid dearly for their Cultural Revolution. They and other would-be oligarchs are trying to inflict the same misery on us. We can put a stop to it.
I can see it being celebrated in Texas, but as far as I’m concerned the Emancipation Proclamation is of more national significance.
With that said, I wouldn’t oppose June 19 being declared a holiday, as long as it isn’t done with the intention of making it a “remember how evil white people are” holiday…keeping in mind that over 2 million whites fought and over 300,000 of them died to end the scourge of slavery in the US.
The Emancipation Proclamation was restricted to Union held areas of the Confederate States of America and was not applicable to the United States of America at all. Kentucky and Delaware, both Union states, had legalized slavery until December of 1865, when the 13th Amendment was officially ratified.
The Civil War is very interesting in that the Confederate States did not violate any provision of the US Constitution when they seceded. There was no prohibition against leaving the Union. When they seceded, and assembled as the Confederate States of America, they technically constituted an sovereign nation, separate from the United States. Nor was the war about slavery, as evidenced by the fact that slavery was legal within the boundaries of the United States for 6 months after the end if the civil war. It was about economics, especially foreign trade, and the threat to US Manifest Destiny that the CSA represented.
And how many we maimed?
“Juneteenth” is simply stupid. It is a made up holiday a la KWANZA. And, historically, it does NOT mark the end of legal slavery in the United States of America. That occurred in Kentucky and Delaware, as well as several other areas of the Union, on December 16, 1865, nearly 6 months after the end of the Civil War, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
No, it is not a made-up holiday.
You are right, however, that it does not mark the end of slavery in the US. It marks the end of slavery in TEXAS.
It is also one of the only end-of-slavery holidays/celebrations in America. So, naturally, it will get co-opted.
It IS a made up holiday, nationally. If Texicans want to celebrate losing the civil war, that is up to them. But, the date in question does not signify the end of slavery in the US. That would be December 18. And, it ignores the fact that the Union continued to practice legalized slavery, within its borders, throughout the Civil War.
Now, ask yourself why we would celebrate the end if slavery in Texas, nationally? Do we celebrate the end of indentured servitude in Massachusetts? Do we celebrate the repeal of the Page Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act, of 1882, which was repealed in 1942? If you want ti celebrate the end of legalized slavery in the US, then we have to celebrate Decemberteenth [December 18], not Juneteenth.
Nickelodeon had a Juneteenth spot in between Paw Patrol, you the German Shepard police dog that the left hates so much, and they positively connected it to BLM and I called and wrote them
Such BS, bend the knee.. screw them, there are other channels and here I was supporting them and our little Chase
Assholes all
Here in New York State, where I live, the legislative process of abolishing slavery began in 1799, was finally achieved on March 31, 1817, and went into effect on July 4, 1827, making New York the first state to pass a law totally abolishing slavery. Does that date merit any significance?
You don’t celebrate the first rock in the landslide. You celebrate when the whole thing is done.
Yes, that’s a lousy metaphor. It’s Friday afternoon. :p
GWB: In 1799, the ink on NY State’s first constitution was barely dry when its legislature started officially preparing to make certain all the state’s residents enjoyed the new nation’s hard-won independence. I thought doing the right thing in a peaceful, lawful manner as soon as humanly possible was in itself a good thing, worthy of note.
. . . and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
Promises, promises . . .
My little Texas community has celebrated Juneteenth for longer than I’ve been alive. It’s always been about celebrating history and real survival, the Buffalo Soldiers, life on the frontier, how many communities didn’t wait around for help, but helped themselves and educated themselves. It’s been about historical music, the blues and jazz. The families who have kept the tradition have always made it something to be proud of and celebrating success. It will be sad to see it co-opted into political theatre and grievance mongering.
Actually, it is of little significance outside of Texas. And it should be noted that it was Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that ‘freed’ the slaves in Texas and now Lincoln statues must go is interesting.
Of course, slavery wasn’t actually ended until December 1865 when the ratification of the 13th Amendment was proclaimed.
What is really need here is an EDIT button.