"We're celebrating the 4th of July today."
Juneteenth marks the end of slavery in the U.S. Many are pushing for it to become a federal holiday...
Juneteenth marks the end of slavery in the U.S. Many are pushing for it to become a federal holiday...
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00:00Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration honoring the end of slavery.
00:04So you have to remember in 1776, when the Patriots were celebrating the Declaration of Independence,
00:11most Black Americans were still slaves.
00:13So we're celebrating the Fourth of July today.
00:16We've got to revisit the past.
00:35We've been putting band-aids on systemic racism for centuries.
00:39And it's finally time to look back to our past and make sure that we are celebrating
00:43the history of everyone that makes this country great, and not just a select group of people.
00:53Texas at the time was part of the frontier, you know, it was part of the far western regions
00:59of the country at that time.
01:03And so it took news a while to get there.
01:06But it's also really important to note that one of the biggest reasons that it took so
01:11long to learn about the end of the war and about the Emancipation Proclamation is that
01:18the enslavers, the people whose, you know, the emblems and the substance of their wealth
01:24lay in their enslaved property, you know, they did not want to lose that.
01:29They didn't want to lose their power and their wealth.
01:33And so they refused to comply or to act in accord with the Emancipation Proclamation as well.
01:43I would say that the very first celebrations happened right there underneath that balcony.
01:49When General Granger actually read the order announcing that, you know, enslaved people
01:56were free and that the war was over.
01:59I mean, there are people I know who probably hooped and hollered, you know, and cried and
02:04celebrated right there in the streets of Galveston.
02:09But at the same time, you can imagine that they were also really fearful.
02:15The order itself really had a kind of a slap in the face.
02:22And in one breath, it promised the formerly enslaved people that they, you know, now shared
02:28equality with their former masters.
02:30And then in the next breath, it told them to go quietly back, you know, to their plantations
02:36and continue to work, but for wages, for those same former masters.
02:43So even then it was a mixed celebration.
02:46It was in June 19th, 1866, when you had thousands of African-Americans in their freedmen's colonies
02:55and their free people communities who continued to mark that day as their day of jubilee.
03:46What I think makes Juneteenth really significant actually is that tension.
03:52It is that, you know, that gap between the promise of freedom, but also the pain of freedom denied.
04:01There were new forms of bondage, you know, that came, sharecropping, convict leasing,
04:06mass incarceration, and this kind of economic marginalization, violence.
04:11So it didn't, it may have officially marked the end of slavery, but it certainly wasn't
04:17the beginning of freedom.
04:28It's really inspiring to see different companies like Nike and Twitter giving their employees
04:33paid days off for Juneteenth, because it really is showing that today you have to make a stance.
04:39You can't just stand on the bylines and hope that tomorrow no one will notice.
04:43And I really believe that consumers are going to have more trust into companies that have
04:47ideals and shared values that they believe in.
04:50Juneteenth is just a perfect holiday that encapsulates that hopefulness, the hopefulness,
04:57but also the hard work that people have been putting in now for centuries, you know,
05:03to get us to this moment.
05:09you