What he said

Two-and-a-half years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the enslaved people of Texas learned — via the Union Army — that they were liberated. It was June 19, 1865, when U.S. Maj. General Gordon Granger issued an order, reading: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages.”

That “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property,” of course, while easy to assert on paper, has been devilishly difficult in the 157 intervening years to make real.

In Reconstruction, Southern whites brutally kept Black people down. During Jim Crow, segregation and voting suppression and racism made the promise of fairness little more than a taunt. Even since the civil rights movement, which culminated in sweeping federal legislation prohibiting discrimination, the pernicious virus of bias infects too many institutions. Even if every last American were enlightened — which is most certainly not the case — the accumulated weight of generations of bigotry, much of it written into our laws, still weighs on the nation.

Wealth and power are tightly intertwined, and the median white household has a net worth 10 times the median Black household, a disparity that adds up to more than $10 trillion. There are many reasons for this, some of which flow from individuals’ decisions — we don’t for a moment suggest that to be Black in America is to be invariably destined to a life of poverty and oppression — but the lasting burden of decade after decade after decade of injustice still makes shoulders ache. On Juneteenth, we celebrate those who carry that weight and dedicate ourselves to building a fairer future.