Friday, April 26#blacklivesmatter

Juneteenth: An Uncelebrated Holiday

The Bougie Aunt | Published 12:00 a.m. E.T. June 19, 2020

The year is 1863, you are an African-American slave, and President Abraham Lincoln just issued the Emancipation Proclamation. You are ecstatic because that automatically means you and your other slave companions are all released from the bonds of slavery, right? No, you are completely wrong. But I can reason why, as the Emancipation Proclamation is often misunderstood, and consequently, taught wrong in schools. 

Since the Eurocentric narrative shapes the United States’s history of slavery to seem like a linear path where the starting point is the Transatlantic Slave Trade and cuts off immediately after Martin Luther King Jr. had his Kumbaya moment (that has increasingly become more whitewashed as the years pass), the conditions that pushed for such a document to be released and the intentions behind it are not analyzed. It is better for comprehension purposes to acknowledge the Emancipation Proclamation as a stepping stone in an exhausting fight for freedom that is still not over today. 

The inhumanity of slavery that is falsely recognized as the prime motivator for the Emancipation Proclamation to occur was not President Lincoln’s main concern. His main concern was how the Confederacy was attempting to recruit European nations like England and France as allies; if they formed an alliance with the Confederacy, President Lincoln would have had a much harder time preserving the Union. Additionally, the emergence of Freedman’s villages, the transformed area of General Robert E. Lee’s former plantation estate where freed slaves were able to reside, led to freed slaves rallying together and advocating for the right to participate in the Union’s army. Lincoln recognized the additional manpower from African Americans could progress the Union in the war, so that was another conflict that would aid the Union economically, rather than morally. Lincoln’s concepts of how the implications of slavery should be dealt with are so off-base from what is generally taught in school. Lincoln is played out to be this man who wanted to integrate blacks and whites together when that could not be further from the truth. In fact, when Lincoln was writing the early drafts of the document, he organized a delegation of freed slaves to win them over for his plan of African Americans colonizing Central America. Because, as Lincoln believed, it is “better for us both, therefore, to be separated”.

Now that the context for why the Emancipation Proclamation really happened has been covered, we can move on into the limited effects it had. Firstly, it formally stated that slaves were only free in the Confederate states that had seceded, leaving slavery the ability to run rampant in the loyal border states. Moreover, the effects it could do boiled down to whether the Union was victorious, which is why the issuing of the proclamation was so strategic. It was issued after the Union was victorious in the Battle of Antietam, so people would believe the Union still had control over the unruly nation. This belief was especially important for Europeans to believe, as President Lincoln wanted to prevent European countries that economically gained from the outputs of slave labor from allying with the Confederacy; it ended up working because England and France, for instance, did not want to be seen as trespassing what was seen as moral authority in the public light.

However, the slave population were not able to acquire all the fervor the document extracted from the elite. Since word did not travel nearly as fast as it does now, many slaves remained in slavery. Furthermore, even if slave owners did know about the Emancipation Proclamation they refused to acknowledge it. And, most slaves were kept from that knowledge because they were illiterate due to slave states making it illegal for slaves to be literate (exceptions were Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee). 

So, when General Gordon Granger read the Emancipation Proclamation to enslaved African-Americans on June 19, 1865 (Juneteenth) in Galveston, Texas, after two years had passed from when the proclamation was released, it symbolized freedom coming to tarnish areas where racism had run deep. Of course racism was not just resolved right there and then, but it provided African-Americans with hope to hold them steady until the Thirteenth Amendment, it abolished slavery/involuntary servitude unless it is the ruling of a crime, was ratified later that year in December. 

With an act that significant, it does not make sense why Juneteenth has not been celebrated more. Well, that is until you recall how the Eurocentric agenda works to sanitize narratives, so white Americans will not have to confront the diabolical actions of their ancestors. Although, now would be a great time to start celebrating the holiday since the Black Lives Matter Movement is in full swing. It is celebrated like most holidays that commemorate a group receiving freedom; people have cookouts, historical reenactments, and there are even Miss Juneteenth contests. 

Miss Juneteenth is also a drama movie that premiered today (June 19, 2020), and it would be good to watch since it is a lighthearted film that touches on the historical significance of Juneteenth.

How are you planning on celebrating Juneteenth? And, have you ever celebrated it before? Let me know either in the comments or through my Instagram page, or both!

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