Juneteenth as about how we got free. Now we need to STAY free!
Issue #645 The Choice, Thursday, June 20, 2024
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Juneteenth was about how we got free. Now we need to STAY free
“Freedom ain’t free.”
I’m not sure who was the originator of that quote, but it is a quote we should all keep in mind today, the day after many of us celebrated Juneteenth, and every day from now until Election Day in November. Because just as hard as we, as Black people, fought to gain our freedom in this country, there have been those on the other side of things working just as hard ever since that day to invalidate that treasured status.
Because slavery and white supremacy weren’t such a bad deal for a lot of white folks back in the day, and a certain number of them wanted those “good ole days” back.
On June 17, 2021, both the House and the Senate voted overwhelmingly to establish June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a federal holiday. This was not a small deal, especially when you consider that this took place just a relative few months after the January 6, 2021 insurrection when thousands of angry white people stormed the Capitol because their guy didn’t win. No small percentage of this insurrection mob was openly affiliated with white supremacist groups, as evidenced by the fact that a Confederate flag had not been within six miles of the nation’s capitol since the Civil War – until the insurrection.
Yesterday many of us commemorated the day of June 19, 1865, when 250,000 enslaved people in Texas were formally – and finally - notified that they had been freed two and one-half years prior. So in a way, Juneteenth is a celebration that one quarter of a million slaves were kept in bondage for far longer than was legal because white folks in Texas didn’t want to accept that things had changed. Kind of like those insurrectionists. But hey, better late than never. Right?
But that was yesterday. Today, we need to continually remind ourselves – and others – of the cost of freedom, which is vigilance. As I’ve said before, there is no Promised Land where we can lay our burdens down and just rejoice about how good it is to be free. Because that’s when we lose it.
I realize it’s not popular to say it, but maintaining freedom is exhausting and it is never-ending. Just as badly as we want to maintain our freedoms, others want to take them away. But fighting for freedom damned sure beats the alternative.
Some of you may be familiar with Heather Cox Richardson, a widely-respected historian who hosts the popular Substack site, Letters from an American. I’d like to quote from her June 20 post here:
“But those determined to preserve a world that discriminated between Americans according to race, gender, ability, and so on, continued to find workarounds. Key to those workarounds has always been resurrecting the idea that true democracy means reducing the power of the federal government and centering the power of the state governments, where voters—registered according to state laws—can choose the policies they prefer…even if they are discriminatory.
In our era, those discriminatory policies are not just racial. They often center religion and include attacks on women’s healthcare and right to abortion, LGBTQ+ Americans, immigrants, and non-Christians. Just today, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed into law a measure requiring that every classroom in Louisiana public schools display the Ten Commandments. Those embracing the law hope to push the question of public displays of their faith to the Supreme Court, where they expect a warmer reception from this court than such discriminatory positions have gotten since the 1950s.
If states get to determine who votes and can pass discriminatory legislation without interference from the federal government, they can construct the kind of world Americans lived in before the Fourteenth Amendment. As several Republican-dominated states have already demonstrated, they can also rewrite history.”
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Absolutely! And something a lot of people seem to forget.