Juneteenth - Today Is Independence Day
posted in Cultural | | | View blog reactions | Print This PostBe sure to check your local Black paper, Black radio station online community listings, or posters on the wall at the African incense store to see what Juneteenth events are happening in your community this weekend.
Be an active part of a celebration to keep our culture and history alive. That means going to a freakneek type gathering disguised as a Juneteenth celebration, doesn’t count.
Juneteenth Round Up
- First Purple Zoe has the history:
“Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. From its Galveston, Texas origin in 1865, the observance of June 19th as the African American Emancipation Day has spread across the United States and beyond.
Today Juneteenth commemorates African American freedom and emphasizes education and achievement. It is a day, a week, and in some areas a month marked with celebrations, guest speakers, picnics and family gatherings. It is a time for reflection and rejoicing. It is a time for assessment, self-improvement and for planning the future. Its growing popularity signifies a level of maturity and dignity in America long over due.
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Carmen D. writes:
On June 19, 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas with news that the Civil War had ended and those who had been slaves were now free. There are a number of accounts as to why freedom took so long to arrive in Texas:
“Later attempts to explain this two and a half year delay in the receipt of this important news have yielded several versions that have been handed down through the years. Often told is the story of a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas with the news of freedom. Another is that the news was deliberately withheld by the enslavers to maintain the labor force on the plantations. And still another is that federal troops actually waited for the slave owners to reap the benefits of one last cotton harvest before going to Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. All or none of them could be true.” History of Juneteenth– Juneteenth.com
Whatever the reason, the result was that free people were still enslaved past the moment when slavery was abolished. In honor of the jubilation the ancestors must have felt on this day, I have released my imagination from the bonds of reality for a moment and I will share a fantasy with you. My fantasy is that I have arms long enough and strong enough to wrap around all the poor, disenfranchised and hopeless young people in our country. I draw them close and whisper in each anxious ear “You are free.” I tell them “There is no limit to your power, if you claim it.”…
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Elder Eddie Griffin muses:
I learned of Juneteenth in my childhood during the 1940s, when the holiday celebration was still at its height. I remember Juneteenth as a day of gentle defiance, when all black people took the day off from work. No permission was asked and no advance notice was given. It was just something everybody knew and accepted.
Domestic maids and servants like my mother simply stopped work and took time to celebrate the day similar to the way whites celebrated the Fourth of July. But there were one thing black maids and cooks did for their employers. They would fix their white employers and their families a special Juneteenth barbecue dinner and leave it in the oven for the next day. Otherwise, the whites were left to fend for themselves on that one day.
He’s from Texas by the way, for context.
Please pass on knowledge and understanding of Juneteenth to someone you know.
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