Around June 19, I posted several articles on Juneteenth. One looked at the spread of the holiday in Texas after the initial announcement of the freeing of the slaves in June of 1865 in Galveston, Texas to other areas of Texas. Another article looked at the large Juneteenth memorial in Austin, Texas. There were other articles on events being held on June 19 as well as a book review of a volume by Pulitzer Prize winning author Annette Gordon-Reed. When I posted these fairly innocuous articles, I got subject to a fair amount of hatred of the holiday from a large number of people on social media. I looked at other accounts and I saw similar outrage directed against people celebrating Juneteenth.
I will try to set out the cry against Juneteenth.
Let us look at what Juneteenth commemorates. On June 19th, 1865, the Union army, which had recently occupied Galveston, issued a General Order informing enslaved African Americans that they were free. Of course, these folks had been freed on January 1, 1863 by Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, but the deception of the people who enslaved hundreds of thousands of Black Texans kept people from finding out about the end of slavery. By 1866, Galveston’s Blacks celebrated June 19th as the day they were free. By 1868, the celebrations had spread to many other cities and towns across Texas. While the festivities were suppressed beginning in the 1890s under Jim Crow, they continued underground in many different places in Texas.
Other states had their own traditions of celebrating the end of slavery. Many celebrated January 1, the date of the Emancipation Proclamation. Others had their holiday on the date that the Union Army took their city of state away from the Confederates. Most of these divergent African American holidays faded away with the repression Jim Crow.
The wrong date
The holiday was put in to keep Black people from burning their “own cities.”
If the people who wanted a different date could point to what they were doing, let’s say ten years ago, to advocate for a different date I would consider that a legitimate difference, however almost none of them can show any evidence of having advocated for a different date to celebrate the ending of slavery at all.
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