Juneteenth

Juneteenth, celebrated today on June 19, is now a federal, state, and local holiday.

It memorializes the several days in 1865 when many slaves in the Confederacy were made aware from Union forces that they had been freed by Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Until then, that proclamation had been largely an empty promise.

This was a monumental and profoundly life changing event for almost every slave who received the news. But it is a complex memory, because it was also only one huge and critical step in the very long process that still isn't complete. It was an absolutely necessary step, but it wasn't a sufficient one to chance society enough to do justice to those who heard it by itself.

Reparations, in the popular imagination, forty acres and a mule, never materialized. Reconstruction was short lived, and was followed by about ninety years of lynchings, discrimination, and Jim Crow. Many freed slaves continued to do work similar to what they had done while they were slaves, but while migrating from one plantation to another as they saw fit, rather than being bound to a master. Their economic well being improved, but more incrementally than dramatically. Their path to education and business ownership and gaining the skills to be competitive in the economy was winding with one step back for every two steps forward.

A parity of legal rights on paper finally started to be achieved in the 1950s and 1960s, but it took decades longer for even those legal rights to be anywhere close to being fully realized. And, even then, having legal rights, and being able to use them in a way the secured the descendants of the freed slaves who heard the news in the Juneteenth days of 1865 something approaching parity in social and economic well being has taken longer than that. In 2024, we still aren't all of the way to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s promised land.

So, Juneteenth is an important day, but was not a moment of a singular victory whose benefits were reaped right away. It was a beginning and we haven't made it to the end yet.