An urgency to complete emancipation of Juneteenth

Juneteenth has always been the celebration of an incomplete emancipation, of justice denied and a dream deferred.

It was, literally, freedom delayed: Two years, six months and 18 days after President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Union Gen. Gordon Granger sailed into Galveston Bay to read General Order No. 3, which freed Texas’ 200,000 slaves.

Technically, the proclamation only liberated slaves in Confederate states occupied by Union troops. But slaves took Lincoln’s words as the keys to unlock their shackles and emancipated themselves.

For them, whether it was Jan. 1, 1863, or June 19, 1865, emancipation was Thanksgiving because they had at long last been delivered from bondage.

For newly freed black Texans, General Order

No. 3 was their Declaration of Independence and Juneteenth was their Fourth of July. From the beginning, Juneteenth was synonymous with family reunions. Slaves searched for those loved ones from whom they had been separated. Many of those families, their members sold to different white families and plantations throughout the South, were never reunited.

As ex-slaves and their descendants left Texas and the South, they carried the traditions and celebration of Juneteenth across the nation. But Juneteenth is Texan; it’s a time when families unite in big cities such as San Antonio, Houston and Dallas, as well as small towns such as Schulenburg, Luling and Gonzales.

Juneteenth 2020, like every American tradition in 2020, will be tentative and different, its participants searching how best to continue given the unique challenges of the day.

Juneteenth 2020 is pulled between the social distancing and isolation demanded by COVID-19 — and we are seeing more and more infections — and the social justice and togetherness inspired by the brutal killing of George Floyd.

The pandemic may be responsible for fewer reunions this year, but the protests arising from Floyd’s death have created unprecedented opportunities for families to discuss and plan how they can respond to this historic moment.

The overflowing joy delivered to slaves by news of their emancipation spilled over into more than 150 years of Juneteenths, celebrations of good times with eating and drinking, music and dancing, baseball and dominoes, and the repeating and bequeathing of family lore.

But the news of emancipation delivered to the slaves wasn’t accompanied by any materials that would help them on their way.

There was no compensation for the nearly 250 years of suffering, toil, dehumanizing and barbaric treatment, rape, broken families and death that came with building so much of the economic foundation of the United States of America.

Generations of working someone else’s land from can’t-see-in-the-morning till can’t-see-atnight didn’t earn the newly freed slaves a penny they could use toward buying land. Their former masters would be compensated for losing the commodity — the bodies and labor of black men, women and children — but the former slaves didn’t even get 40 acres and a mule to help them make the transition to freedom.

Little thought was given to how to begin to repair the damage that slavery had inflicted on generations of black people. But significant thought and action was given to how to replicate slavery’s brutality and oppression and inflict it on future generations of black people through Black Codes, Jim Crow, the convict lease system, lynching, “white primaries,” separate but unequal everything, redlining and voter suppression.

Every Juneteenth has been a celebration earned for freedom denied and delayed. Earned by former slaves whose existence as property made a mockery of the promise and aspirations of the Constitution. Earned by the slave’s descendants, given nothing in constitutional rights that they didn’t have to demand, struggle and die for.

Juneteenth 2020 finds us in a historic moment when there appears to be the will, energy and moral urgency to complete an unfinished emancipation by reckoning with our nation’s past to correct the injustices still infecting us.

This Juneteenth should be celebrated in joy, but also with the fierce urgency of purpose. How can we best use this moment, this movement and the spirit of George Floyd to finally prove Sam Cooke right that “A Change Is Gonna Come”?