How Juneteenth became a national holiday

Brut America

“It may have marked the end of slavery, but it certainly wasn’t the start of freedom.” Juneteenth has become a national holiday. Here’s what it commemorates ...

Transcript

00:00On that summer day 156 years ago, the enslaved people of Texas learned the news.

00:09They learned that they were free and they claimed their freedom.

00:23So you have to remember in 1776 when the patriots were celebrating the Declaration of Independence,

00:29most Black Americans were still slaves. So we're celebrating the 4th of July today.

00:51We've got to revisit the past. We've been putting band-aids on systemic racism for centuries and

00:57it's finally time to look back to our past and make sure that we are celebrating the history

01:02of everyone that makes this country great and not just a select group of people.

01:11Texas at the time was part of the frontier. It was part of the far western regions of

01:19the country at that time. And so it took news a while to get there. But it's also really

01:25important to note that one of the biggest reasons that it took so long to learn about the end of the

01:31war and about the Emancipation Proclamation is that the enslavers, the people whose emblems

01:40and the substance of their wealth lay in their enslaved property, they did not want to lose that.

01:48They didn't want to lose their power and their wealth. And so they refused to comply or to

01:56act in accord with the Emancipation Proclamation as well. I would say that the very first

02:03celebrations happened right there underneath that balcony when General Granger actually read

02:10the order announcing that enslaved people were free and that the war was over.

02:17I mean, there are people I know who probably hooped and hollered and cried and celebrated

02:23right there in the streets of Galveston. But at the same time, you can imagine that they

02:31were also really fearful. The order itself really had a kind of a slap in the face. In one breath,

02:41it promised the formerly enslaved people that they now shared equality with their former

02:48masters. And then in the next breath, it told them to go quietly back to their plantations

02:54and continue to work, but for wages, for those same former masters. So even then it was a mixed

03:03celebration. It was in June 19th, 1866, when you had thousands of African-Americans

03:12in their freedmen's colonies and their free people communities

03:15who continued to mark that day as their day of jubilee.

03:45What I think makes Juneteenth really significant actually is that tension. It is that gap between

04:14the promise of freedom, but also the pain of freedom denied. There were new forms of bondage

04:22that came, sharecropping, convict leasing, mass incarceration, and this kind of economic

04:27marginalization, violence. So it may have officially marked the end of slavery,

04:34but it certainly wasn't the beginning of freedom.

04:45Today, you have to make a stance. You can't just stand on the bylines and hope that tomorrow

04:50no one will notice. Juneteenth is just a perfect holiday that encapsulates that hopefulness,

04:58and the hopefulness, but also the hard work that people have been putting in now

05:03for centuries to get us to this moment.

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