Historian Kate Masur has an essay in today’s New York Times on the unfinished work of the civil rights struggle that led to Juneteenth. According to Masur:
For two and a half centuries, starting long before the establishment of the United States, people of African descent fought against slavery every way they could. Americans legally bought and sold Black people as property, and enslaved status passed through generations, from mothers to their children.
It took a deadly civil war, at a cost of more than 650,000 lives, to rid the United States of that institution. To commemorate Juneteenth — now established as a national holiday on June 19 — is to recognize the importance of slavery in United States history, to remember the horrors of bondage and the jubilation of freedom.
Yet abolishing slavery was only one piece of a complex puzzle. It marked an ending, confirmed on Dec. 6, 1865, with ratification of the 13th Amendment. But it was also part of a much longer struggle to secure for Black Americans the rights and privileges promised to white Americans, a struggle that began long before Juneteenth and endures today.
For decades before the Civil War, Black Northerners and their white allies fought to rid their communities, and the nation, not only of slavery but of racist laws and institutions.
Masur’s essay gives an overview of the struggle and accomplishments of this movement, particularly in the Reconstruction period, writing:
The Congress that met in 1865-66 adopted the nation’s first civil rights statute, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the 14th Amendment. These measures passed despite full-throated Democratic opposition, including charges — so familiar today — that the new policies interfered with the prerogatives of the states and gave Black Americans unfair advantages over whites.
Juneteenth, then, should serve not only to remind us of the joy and relief that accompanied the end of slavery, but also of the unfinished work of confronting slavery’s legacy. Thanks to the efforts of generations of activists, laws that explicitly discriminate based on race are a thing of the past. But today’s conservatives echo their 19th-century predecessors when they justify federal inaction on voting rights with arguments about states’ rights and spurious claims of electoral corruption. These arguments join a growing attack on the teaching of American history itself.
Americans need to understand that the original Constitution, which protected slavery while providing few federal safeguards for individual rights, did not create a path toward abolition or racial equality. To the contrary, before and after Juneteenth, it was Black people and their white allies who fought to eradicate the racist legacies of slavery and who demanded that the federal government take action to protect the rights of all.
Masur’s essay draws on her recently book Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction which I reviewed here.
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