TOn June 19th, many Americans will come together to celebrate Juneteenth, now the United States’ newest federal holiday. Although it was celebrated by Black Americans as early as the mid-to-late 1800s, Juneteenth is a date that has long been omitted from the history books — and wasn’t designated as a federal holiday until 2021, following the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other black people in the US have renewed momentum for conversations about racial justice and the enshrinement of the holiday on a national level.
“Recognize liberation, recognize freedom. Some people will refer to it as Black Independence Day. It is a day to celebrate the end of a 246-year era of slavery that African Americans experienced in this country,” says Daina Ramey Berry, professor of History and dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Many Americans may not know why the date is significant or even celebrated, as many may not have learned about the event in school. “Many people assume that freedom began with the Emancipation Proclamation and think of Lincoln as the great liberator,” says Berry.
But the real story is more complicated than that. On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that “all persons held as slaves” in the Confederacy or in the states that seceded from the Union, “are, and hereafter shall be free.” But this freedom did not come immediately, as the Civil War continued and Union soldiers went from state to state to enforce the measure. “Essentially, very few enslaved people were freed in 1863,” says Berry.
On June 19, 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued and two months after the official end of the Civil War, Union Army General Gordon Granger and 2,000 of his soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved people about their freedom. .
“When the Union army arrived in Galveston and notified black people of their freedom, it generally meant that the last segment of the approximately four million slaves in the South now knew that they were officially free,” Nafeesa Muhammad, Associate Professor of History at Spelman College, told TIME in an email. “And this is the meaning of the eleventh month.”
Galveston was an important port city at the time, making the city an important business and information center. “A lot of merchants had businesses in Galveston, so word would get around,” says Tommie Boudreaux, President of African American Heritage at the Galveston Historical Foundation. “It was the most important city in the state of Texas.”
See more information: When did slavery really end in the USA? The complicated story of the eleventh month
The arrival of the Union Army in Texas did not bring freedom to all enslaved people – many in the “border states” of Delaware and Kentucky did not see the end of slavery until the passage of the 13th Amendment abolished it throughout the United States.
While June 19th does not mark the official end of slavery, it is a day that provides an opportunity to examine and reflect on the entire history of slavery and the struggle for freedom – a struggle that continued through the passage of Jim Crow, which passed soon after the civil war.
“There are different ways of looking at freedom,” says Berry. “There were black people who were free before June 19, 1865, free before December 1865 [when the 13th Amendment passed]free before April 15, 1865, when the Civil War ended, and free before January 1, 1863 with the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation.”
One way many black Americans commemorate the day is by reading aloud General Order No. 3 — the relatively progressive order that promised formerly enslaved people “absolute equality of personal rights and property rights between former masters and slaves,” and clarified the relationship between slave owners. and enslaved as someone “between employer and hired labor.” In Galveston, celebrations include a large parade, picnic and lectures.
Juneteenth celebrations began in Texas and other Southern states as early as 1866, Berry says. Many Texans pushed for the holiday to be recognized by the state — a designation that finally came into being in 1980.
But where exactly did the term “eleventh month” come from? Boudreaux says it was a Houston newspaper that first shortened “June 19th” to “June eleventh” around 1890. “I assume it was a mouthful to say the whole thing and apparently it stuck,” she says.
Berry adds: “It went from a small regional understanding of freedom to a federal holiday [where] now we learn about the institution of slavery in this rich history of liberation and freedom.”
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This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
