Why Juneteenth Matters
It was black Americans who delivered on Lincoln’s promise of “a new birth of freedom.”
Neither
Abraham Lincoln nor the Republican Party freed the slaves. They helped
set freedom in motion and eventually codified it into law with the 13th
Amendment, but they were not themselves responsible for the end of
slavery. They were not the ones who brought about its final destruction.
Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves.
“Slave resistance,” as the historian Manisha Sinha points out in “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” “lay at the heart of the abolition movement.”
“Prominent
slave revolts marked the turn toward immediate abolition,” Sinha
writes, and “fugitive slaves united all factions of the movement and led
the abolitionists to justify revolutionary resistance to slavery.”
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When
secession turned to war, it was enslaved people who turned a narrow
conflict over union into a revolutionary war for freedom. “From the
first guns at Sumter, the strongest advocates of emancipation were the
slaves themselves,” the historian Ira Berlin wrote
in 1992. “Lacking political standing or public voice, forbidden access
to the weapons of war, slaves tossed aside the grand pronouncements of
Lincoln and other Union leaders that the sectional conflict was only a
war for national unity and moved directly to put their own freedom — and
that of their posterity — atop the national agenda.”
All of this is apropos of Juneteenth,
which commemorates June 19, 1865, when Gen. Gordon Granger entered
Galveston, Texas, to lead the Union occupation force and delivered the
news of the Emancipation Proclamation to enslaved people in the region.
This holiday, which only became a nationwide celebration (among black
Americans) in the 20th century, has grown in stature over the last
decade as a result of key anniversaries (2011 to 2015 was the
sesquicentennial of the Civil War), trends in public opinion (the growing racial liberalism of left-leaning whites), and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
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Over
the last week, as Americans continued to protest police brutality,
institutional racism and structural disadvantage in cities and towns
across the country, elected officials in New York and Virginia have
announced plans to make Juneteenth a paid holiday, as have a number of
prominent businesses like Nike, Twitter and the NFL.
There’s
obviously a certain opportunism here, an attempt to respond to the
moment and win favorable coverage, with as little sacrifice as possible.
(Paid holidays, while nice, are a grossly inadequate response to calls
for justice and equality.) But if Americans are going to mark and
celebrate Juneteenth, then they should do so with the knowledge and
awareness of the agency of enslaved people.
Emancipation
wasn’t a gift bestowed on the slaves; it was something they took for
themselves, the culmination of their long struggle for freedom, which
began as soon as chattel slavery was established in the 17th century,
and gained even greater steam with the Revolution and the birth of a
country committed, at least rhetorically, to freedom and equality. In
fighting that struggle, black Americans would open up new vistas of democratic possibility for the entire country.
To return to Ira Berlin — who tackled this subject in “The Long Emancipation:
The Demise of Slavery in the United States” — it is useful to look at
the end of slavery as “a near-century-long process” rather than “the
work of a moment, even if that moment was a great civil war.” Those in
bondage were part of this process at every step of the way, from
resistance and rebellion to escape, which gave them the chance, as free
blacks, to weigh directly on the politics of slavery. “They gave the
slaves’ oppositional activities a political form,” Berlin writes,
“denying the masters’ claim that malingering and tool breaking were
reflections of African idiocy and indolence, that sabotage represented
the mindless thrashings of a primitive people, and that outsiders were
the ones who always inspired conspiracies and insurrections.”
By
pushing the question of emancipation into public view, black Americans
raised the issue of their “status in freedom” and therefore “the
question of citizenship and its attributes.” And as the historian Martha
Jones details in “Birthright Citizens:
A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” it is black
advocacy that ultimately shapes the nation’s understanding of what it
means to be an American citizen. “Never just objects of judicial,
legislative, or antislavery thought,” black Americans “drove lawmakers
to refine their thinking about citizenship. On the necessity of debating
birthright citizenship, black Americans forced the issue.”
After
the Civil War, black Americans — free and freed — would work to realize
the promise of emancipation, and to make the South a true democracy.
They abolished property qualifications for voting and officeholding,
instituted universal manhood suffrage, opened the region’s first public
schools and made them available to all children. They stood against
racial distinctions and discrimination in public life and sought
assistance for the poor and disadvantaged. Just a few years removed from
degradation and social death, these millions, wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in “Black Reconstruction in America, “took decisive and encouraging steps toward the widening and strengthening of human democracy.”
Juneteenth
may mark just one moment in the struggle for emancipation, but the
holiday gives us an occasion to reflect on the profound contributions of
enslaved black Americans to the cause of human freedom. It gives us
another way to recognize the central place of slavery and its demise in
our national story. And it gives us an opportunity to remember that
American democracy has more authors than the shrewd lawyers and erudite
farmer-philosophers of the Revolution, that our experiment in liberty
owes as much to the men and women who toiled in bondage as it does to
anyone else in this nation’s history.
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