Juneteenth
From Association of Independent Readers and Rootworkers
Juneteenth, also known officially as Juneteenth National Independence Day, began as a grassroots holiday to celebrate the end of slavery in the United States. The name Juneteenth combines the words June and Nineteenth, because that is the day, in 1865, in Galveston, Texas, that Major General Gordon Granger finally read General Order No. 3, which commanded the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas, two years after its signing on January 1, 1863 and more than two months after the Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to the Union General Ulysses S. Grant in Appomattox, Virginia, to end of the American Civil War. With the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution on December 6, 1865, slavery officially came to an end in every American state. By 1866, Protestant church groups in Texas were holding celebrations on Juneteenth, which they called Jubilee Day, in reference to the ancient Jewish Biblical Year of Jubilee, a celebration held every 50 years on which all slaves were granted their freedom.
The June 19th Jubilee Day celebrations soon spread throughout the South. In some Texas towns, freed people, forbidden from holding picnics in municipal parks, purchased land on which to hold the annual celebrations of Juneteenth. One such place, in Houston, Texas, is now known as Emancipation Park. The day's events at these large gatherings included public readings of the Emancipation Proclamation, singing, group picnics, baseball games, and rodeos. The festive foods of Juneteenth were traditional soul food dishes like barbecued or grilled meats, potato salad, cornbread, collard greens, corn, fresh summer fruits, and ice cream. Red foods, including tomatoes, strawberries, and watermelon, are all in season in June, and their colour became prominent in the savoury dishes, fruit salads, sweet deserts, and fruit punches served at Juneteenth celebrations.
The White backlash against Black freedom that took place after World War One was known as the Jim Crow era. Segregation laws were passed during the 1920s and 1930s in many formerly Confederate states, and White supremicist vigilante organzations like the Ku Klux Klan wreaked havoc in African American communities. The observance of Juneteenth became a more low-key holiday, as racial violence could be sparked at any time or place where Black people met in large numbers. Despite this, Texas formally recognized the importance of Juneteenth with a proclamation in 1938.
During World War Two, thousands of Black shipyard workers and mechanics from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas moved to the West Coast to aid the war effort, and Juneteenth celebrations saw a remarkable resurgence in West Coast cities like Oakland and Los Angeles. Less formal and commemorative than the earlier forms of the holiday, these Juneteenth festivities often centered on church and family cookouts and recreation in public parks.
The civil rights movement era of the 1960s saw the focus of Black activism shift to ad hoc demonstrations and marches, which reduced attendance at Junetweenth observances, but after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Juneteenth celebrations of the 1970s hit a new level of popularity, with added events such as street parades, music, dancing, soul food buffets, family reunions, water slides, activities for children, and displays of African-American art added to the mix. By this time, Juneteenth festivities also often featured tables or booths set up to promote voter registration drives and to vend clothing, art, and books as fund-raisers for local churches and non-profit political organizations.
In 1976, Opal Lee, a retired Texas school teacher, counselor, and activist, born in 1926, became involved in Fort Worth community causes. She helped found the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society, helped organize Fort Worth's annual Juneteenth celebrations, and soon undertook it as her personal mission to see that Juneteenth became a federally-recognized holiday. She first campaigned locally for state recognition of Juneteenth, and in 1979, the Texas legislature established it as a holiday. She spent the next several decades travelling around the country, campaigning to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. She organized marches for the cause in Arkansas, Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and South Carolina. By the 21st century, her petition at change.org for federal recognition of Juneteenth received more than a million and a half signatures. Momentum for the movement grew, until eventually every state and the District of Columbia recognized Juneteenth as a holiday. As Lee entered her 90s, still campaigning, she told news reporters, "It's going to be a national holiday, I have no doubt about it. My point is, let's make it a holiday in my lifetime."
In 1997 Hassie Benjamin Haith Jr., also known as Ben Haith or Boston Ben, decided that Juneteenth could best be promoted as a federal holiday if it had a flag of its own. Haith, born in 1942, was a civil rights activist and organizer in Boston, Massachusetts. His original design for the Juneteenth flag, fine-tuned by the graphic artist Lisa Jeanne Graf, incorporated a number of symbolic elements, which Haith explained as follows: The flag is red, white, and blue, the same colours as the national flag of the United States, to indicate that the people who have descended from former slaves are fully American citizens. It has a white five-pointed star at the center to recognize that it was in the Lone Star State of Texas that emancipation was proclaimed to the freed slaves on June 19th, 1865. Haith has also related the star pattern to the North Star, Polaris, which was used as a navigational aid by escaping slaves who travelled North to enter non-slavery states before the Civil War. Around the central star a twelve-pointed white star bursts open. This is the "nova" or new star, the "bursting star of freedom" for African-Americans. The red and blue field is bisected by an arc which indicates the rising of the people from subjugation to freedom, and also calls to mind the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.'s statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
In 2021, Opal Lee's 45 years of campaigning finally came to fruition when Juneteenth was officially recognized as a national holiday, generally observed on the weekend nearest to the date of June 19th in any given year. Lee was 94 years old by then and had devoted almost half her life to the cause. In 2024, Lee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of her service to the nation.
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