Juneteenth or Disappearing from History by Warren Bull

Juneteenth or Disappearing from History by Warren Bull

Image from Wikimediacommons 

President Trump planned to hold a political rally and speak on June 19, 2020. When he learned the date coincided with a holiday named Juneteenth, he rescheduled the rally. It is not surprising that he did not know about Juneteenth. It was a pretty obscure holiday in the past. The 2020 observance, however, was compounded by recent events that have reignited the significant racial trauma and unrest experienced by black people and communities.  The killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, and Rayshard Brooks by police forced attention on that date as never before.

In The New Yorker 6/16/2020 article by Jelani Cobb titled: Juneteenth and the Meaning of Freedom, the writer quoted Kelly Navies, museum specialist in oral history at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Navies said, "Juneteenth is an important holiday for all Americans to recognize.”

Navies shared Juneteenth's history: Union General Gordon Granger came to Galveston in 1865 with a force of 1,800 to 2,000 troops, some of them members of the United States Colored Troops. The order he announced read, in part: "The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free."

The announcement met with delays and resistance from whites, but the event marked a hopeful turning point. In the years afterward, Juneteenth celebrations spread from Texas to other communities during the Great Migration when 6 million Black Americans moved from the South into other areas of the U.S. between 1916 and 1970. In the 1970s, Juneteenth picked up popularity as an expression of freedom and arts in the Black community, and Texas made it a state holiday beginning in 1980.

As Navies put it, "June 19 is a day to reflect on the meaning of freedom, the challenges that we've had to overcome, and the challenges that we still face. It's  time to come together with our families and our communities and talk about steps we can take to move forward in the future. It is celebrating that we're alive and we made it to this point, even if we still have obstacles to face before us.”

Navies noted that George Floyd graduated from Jack Yates High School in Houston, Texas. Reverend Jack Yates, a formerly enslaved person, led the effort to buy property for Juneteenth celebrations. Raising $1,000, Yates and his congregation purchased 10 acres of land in Houston and named it Emancipation Park. It was the only municipal park for Black Americans during the era of segregation.

Popular American history has a way of ignoring minority people and events. You are more likely to know about Lewis and Clark than about Sacagawea, a Native American woman, and York, a black man even though without each of them the Lewis and Clark expedition would have failed. Other relatively unacknowledged blacks include Mathew Henson, who, as part of William Perry’s trek to the North Pole might have seen the pole before the leader of the exploration did; and two formerly enslaved people Bass Reeves, who was appointed Deputy US Marshal in 1875 and worked in that role for thirty five years, arresting an estimated 3,000 outlaws ; and Mary Fields, known as “Stagecoach Mary who carried the mail for the US Postal Service for twenty years starting in 1855.

Although I am white, male, married, monogamous, financially stable, and thus an unlikely target of discrimination, I once had the experience of being excised from history on purpose. Somewhere in Crime, an anthology compiled by Central Coast Mystery Writers was reviewed by a Sisters in Crime member.  She reviewed all of the stories except three. Apparently, the reviewer, member of Sisters in Crime - an organization founded to combat sexual discrimination in mystery writing - simply decided that three authors were beneath her attention and not worthy of mention since they were men. She overruled the editors’ selection of stories. Without mention or apology, she simply made no mention of the stories by those authors.  In my opinion, she consciously discriminated against people on the basis of gender. I believe her behavior undercut the very reason Sisters in Crime was founded. I believe she exacerbated the prejudiced action by feeling no need to point out what she had done in print, as if dismissing someone’s work because of their gender was so common that there was no reason to even comment about it.

With the reviewer’s permission, I wrote about my anger and objections. I included her response to my views. The great majority of people who commented agreed with my point of view, but a few expressed the idea that women, having been discriminated against, should be able to “discriminate back” at men, any men, even those who, like me, have supported both women and men as writers.

It is, I readily admit, a tiny, tiny sliver of what many people experience much more often and in much more serious ways. But I can tell you it was a profoundly eye-opening and disturbing experience.

Personally, I have celebrated Juneteenth for many years.