What is Juneteenth?

On September 22nd 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed into effect the preliminary portions of the Emancipation Proclamation which took effect on January 1st 1863 and officially freed all of the slaves that were held by the Confederacy but did not free the approximately 4 million slaves held in territories and states that were not a part of the rebellion.  While much of the delay for the creation of the Emancipation Proclamation and President Lincoln's efforts were due to the tedious politics surrounding the state of the Union during the Civil War it was still an unprecedented development in race relations in the United States.  However it was not the immediate destruction of slavery that many of us have come to believe.

As a practical matter the Civil War would not even be over until the Confederate forces had been summarily beaten.  While General Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9th 1865 the remaining slaveholders of the confederacy fled to Texas in the hopes of leaving the  reach of Lincoln behind.  Over 150,000 slaves were taken towards the west since the Confederacy lost the city of New Orleans in 1862.  One former slave said it was as if the whole world was going to the west and it must have felt that way to be caught up in such a large forced relocation.  In Texas the last holdouts of the Confederate military would not concede defeat until June 2nd and even after the news arrived many plantations delayed delivering the news until after their crops had finished growing.

Even after the Civil War ended many blacks were forced to work for the same people who had enslaved them.  In Galveston Texas the mayor, and former Confederate, tried to assert dominance over Union forces by forcing the recently freed back to work.  And while they were now legally protected many former slaves experienced extreme acts of violence as they attempted to act upon their new found freedom.  The most infamous group to take arms against the newly freed slaves was the Ku Klux Klan.  The Klan was firmly affixed to the idea of White Supremacy, or the belief that white people were inherently superior to a number of ethnic and religious groups including blacks, hispanics, jews, immigrants and Catholics.  They were responsible for innumerable acts of violence during the period after the Civil War known as Reconstruction.  Assassinations, public murders, robbery, mob violence and the infamous lynching were common tools that the KKK used against both blacks and Republicans who had championed abolition and were now trying to protect the newly freed blacks.

While the Republican Party of the 19th century is widely known for its efforts to end slavery it was also heavily involved in trying to provide more protections and civil rights to blacks during Reconstruction.  These included the right to vote and the extension of the Freeman's Bureau, an agency that was supposed to help blacks by providing legal protection, schools, churches and labor contracts.  However these were stymied in part by the former members of the Confederacy and President Andrew Johnson who was nearly impeached for his opposition to Republican civil rights legislation.  As the situation in the South continued to deteriorate, Congress passed the Enforcement Acts which allowed the Union Army to return to the South in order to combat the Ku Klux Klan as well as guaranteeing the rights of blacks to vote, serve on juries and receive equal protection under the law.  While the Klan was largely destroyed the overall goals of Reconstruction ended in what can only be described as an abject failure.  It is widely believed that the failure of the Republicans' efforts during Reconstruction is the reason that race relations in the United States continued to deteriorate, culminating in the policies of Jim Crow and racial segregation and made it a necessity for those affected black communities to rise up and attempt to force these changes during the Civil Rights Movement.

All of these events are directly related to the formation of the Juneteenth tradition.  While it is not as widely known as events such as Martin Luther King Day, Juneteenth is an important American tradition.  The name derives from the day that Union forces declared to the state of Texas that all enslaved people were now freed by order of the deceased President Lincoln.  Since then many black people have commemorated the day that slavery had finally been officially outlawed across the reformed United States.  Sadly, the struggles for the black community have continued in this country as despite the efforts of various politicians and activists over the past two and a half centuries there remains a divide and lack of equality between whites and minorities in these United States of America.