On Juneteenth

Tomorrow (Wednesday) we in the United States will mark our newest holiday, Juneteenth. Many Americans know little about the events that Juneteenth marks nor how it relates to the holiday we will celebrate in less than three weeks on July 4, Independence Day. (Canadian friends, I don’t want to ignore you as Canada Day comes up on July 1. I had the pleasure of being in Ottawa on Canada Day back in 2008 and it was a great celebration.)

Briefly, what is Juneteenth? First, it’s the day we honor the Emancipation Proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln’s directive that all African American enslaved people in the Confederate states were free from slavery. Lincoln had struggled with the purpose of the war and at the beginning made preservation of the Union the reason for the conflict. But he came to see that the Union could not be preserved unless all Americans were free and possessed the liberties that Thomas Jefferson had articulated in the Declaration of Independence. “All…are created equal” in Jefferson’s words, and Lincoln acted to apply Jefferson’s maxim to all African Americans in the United States, be they free or enslaved. So, Juneteenth marks the day when American liberty and freedom began to apply to all of our citizens, not just those who were of European descent.

But the Emancipation Proclamation was January 1, 1863. Why do we mark Juneteenth on June 19? In the mid-19th century, communication was slow, and it would take weeks or months for news of important events to travel long distances. In this case, it took over two years before enslaved people in Galveston, Texas received news of their emancipation on June 19, 1865. As far as we know, the enslaved people in Galveston were the last group of African Americans to hear of their emancipation.

Like Independence Day, Juneteenth is a day to celebrate liberty and independence. For many of our fellow citizens, it marks the day when the promise of the American founding became a possibility for them. That is not to say that hardship and struggle did not follow especially with Jim Crow and other forms of legal segregation that would persist into my lifetime. We still feel the effects of a brutal Civil War even now.

But if America is to remain a land of freedom, liberty, and possibility for all of its citizens, it’s because of men like Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and events like the Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth that help make it so. Juneteenth is a great time for individuals, churches, and communities to serve. Join me in marking this good holiday.

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has a lengthy entry that describes Juneteenth and offers good context for the day and how it became first a state holiday in many states, and finally a federal holiday in 2021.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth