Juneteenth celebrates independence for all Americans

Brut America

"We're celebrating the 4th of July today."   Juneteenth marks the end of slavery in the U.S. Many are pushing for it to become a federal holiday...

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00:00Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration honoring the end of slavery.

00:04So you have to remember in 1776, when the Patriots were celebrating the Declaration of Independence,

00:11most Black Americans were still slaves.

00:13So we're celebrating the Fourth of July today.

00:16We've got to revisit the past.

00:35We've been putting band-aids on systemic racism for centuries.

00:39And it's finally time to look back to our past and make sure that we are celebrating

00:43the history of everyone that makes this country great, and not just a select group of people.

00:53Texas at the time was part of the frontier, you know, it was part of the far western regions

00:59of the country at that time.

01:03And so it took news a while to get there.

01:06But it's also really important to note that one of the biggest reasons that it took so

01:11long to learn about the end of the war and about the Emancipation Proclamation is that

01:18the enslavers, the people whose, you know, the emblems and the substance of their wealth

01:24lay in their enslaved property, you know, they did not want to lose that.

01:29They didn't want to lose their power and their wealth.

01:33And so they refused to comply or to act in accord with the Emancipation Proclamation as well.

01:43I would say that the very first celebrations happened right there underneath that balcony.

01:49When General Granger actually read the order announcing that, you know, enslaved people

01:56were free and that the war was over.

01:59I mean, there are people I know who probably hooped and hollered, you know, and cried and

02:04celebrated right there in the streets of Galveston.

02:09But at the same time, you can imagine that they were also really fearful.

02:15The order itself really had a kind of a slap in the face.

02:22And in one breath, it promised the formerly enslaved people that they, you know, now shared

02:28equality with their former masters.

02:30And then in the next breath, it told them to go quietly back, you know, to their plantations

02:36and continue to work, but for wages, for those same former masters.

02:43So even then it was a mixed celebration.

02:46It was in June 19th, 1866, when you had thousands of African-Americans in their freedmen's colonies

02:55and their free people communities who continued to mark that day as their day of jubilee.

03:46What I think makes Juneteenth really significant actually is that tension.

03:52It is that, you know, that gap between the promise of freedom, but also the pain of freedom denied.

04:01There were new forms of bondage, you know, that came, sharecropping, convict leasing,

04:06mass incarceration, and this kind of economic marginalization, violence.

04:11So it didn't, it may have officially marked the end of slavery, but it certainly wasn't

04:17the beginning of freedom.

04:28It's really inspiring to see different companies like Nike and Twitter giving their employees

04:33paid days off for Juneteenth, because it really is showing that today you have to make a stance.

04:39You can't just stand on the bylines and hope that tomorrow no one will notice.

04:43And I really believe that consumers are going to have more trust into companies that have

04:47ideals and shared values that they believe in.

04:50Juneteenth is just a perfect holiday that encapsulates that hopefulness, the hopefulness,

04:57but also the hard work that people have been putting in now for centuries, you know,

05:03to get us to this moment.

05:09you

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