“It may have marked the end of slavery, but it certainly wasn’t the start of freedom.” Juneteenth has become a national holiday. Here’s what it commemorates ...
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00:00On that summer day 156 years ago, the enslaved people of Texas learned the news.
00:09They learned that they were free and they claimed their freedom.
00:23So you have to remember in 1776 when the patriots were celebrating the Declaration of Independence,
00:29most Black Americans were still slaves. So we're celebrating the 4th of July today.
00:51We've got to revisit the past. We've been putting band-aids on systemic racism for centuries and
00:57it's finally time to look back to our past and make sure that we are celebrating the history
01:02of everyone that makes this country great and not just a select group of people.
01:11Texas at the time was part of the frontier. It was part of the far western regions of
01:19the country at that time. And so it took news a while to get there. But it's also really
01:25important to note that one of the biggest reasons that it took so long to learn about the end of the
01:31war and about the Emancipation Proclamation is that the enslavers, the people whose emblems
01:40and the substance of their wealth lay in their enslaved property, they did not want to lose that.
01:48They didn't want to lose their power and their wealth. And so they refused to comply or to
01:56act in accord with the Emancipation Proclamation as well. I would say that the very first
02:03celebrations happened right there underneath that balcony when General Granger actually read
02:10the order announcing that enslaved people were free and that the war was over.
02:17I mean, there are people I know who probably hooped and hollered and cried and celebrated
02:23right there in the streets of Galveston. But at the same time, you can imagine that they
02:31were also really fearful. The order itself really had a kind of a slap in the face. In one breath,
02:41it promised the formerly enslaved people that they now shared equality with their former
02:48masters. And then in the next breath, it told them to go quietly back to their plantations
02:54and continue to work, but for wages, for those same former masters. So even then it was a mixed
03:03celebration. It was in June 19th, 1866, when you had thousands of African-Americans
03:12in their freedmen's colonies and their free people communities
03:15who continued to mark that day as their day of jubilee.
03:45What I think makes Juneteenth really significant actually is that tension. It is that gap between
04:14the promise of freedom, but also the pain of freedom denied. There were new forms of bondage
04:22that came, sharecropping, convict leasing, mass incarceration, and this kind of economic
04:27marginalization, violence. So it may have officially marked the end of slavery,
04:34but it certainly wasn't the beginning of freedom.
04:45Today, you have to make a stance. You can't just stand on the bylines and hope that tomorrow
04:50no one will notice. Juneteenth is just a perfect holiday that encapsulates that hopefulness,
04:58and the hopefulness, but also the hard work that people have been putting in now
05:03for centuries to get us to this moment.