Slavery has been called America’s “original sin.”
Folks do not generally like to dwell on their sins. That is why we all think forgiveness is so swell.
But the first and most important step in redemption? To stop committing the wickedness, in this case to immediately emancipate those held in bondage. That “struggle,” as the escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass would so eloquently refer to it, was anything but quick.
Emancipation came only after Union forces won the Civil War, America’s bloodiest conflict by far.
But it did come. Slavery was abolished.
And this wonderful news reached Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865 — a date that has lived on as the holiday “Juneteenth.” (Some call it “Emancipation Day” or “Freedom Day.”) And enslaved people were freed.
“This year, Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the arrival of the news of emancipation from slavery,” Veronica Chambers writes in the New York Times, “seems to be a bigger deal across the nation.”
By executive order, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has declared today a paid holiday for state employees. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, of blackface infamy, gave all state executive branch employees the day off and promised to push through legislation next year naming Juneteenth a state holiday to be “acknowledged and celebrated by all of us.”
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee says she will introduce a bill to make Juneteenth a national holiday.
I like it. Is there anything more worthy of commemoration than freeing people from slavery? It cannot hurt to remind people there was once slavery in America, or that we fought and died to bring that awful institution to an end.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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5 replies on “Happy Juneteenth!”
I forget the reporters name, but he said that Veteran’s Day was a basically a reverse holiday. The Vets went to work and the government took a day off. Juneteenth as a federal holiday will give government workers and a few others a day off, but the great majority of the black population will be working that day.
You indeed have a point. I think much more important than whether it is a day off work, is whether it is a day that Americans across any and all divides take a moment to think about slavery and also about its eradication. This should be something we all feel sad and then glad about and we can feel that and learn something all together.
“Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior.” – past president of the American History Association, Lynn Hunt of UCLA
Someone on TV recently referred to the fact that the founders were unable to create an America where the kind of true equality honored in the language of our founding documents prevailed, as “America was born with a birth defect”. I really like that language. We have done one huge surgery (Civil War) to correct this birth defect and I believe the American people today, by a great majority, want true equality of opportunity for all.
Recent protests for equality within the criminal justice system devolved into looting and rioting and many on the left justified the looting and rioting as only being against property. NO! Our founders understood that true liberty required that the right to property was fundamental to a free society.
Today on Fox News I saw a young man from Ga. (a self-proclaimed conservative) who had raised $160,000 to help black business owners whose property had been damaged or destroyed during these riots. He received much praise. The story was very inspiring but it did cause me to wonder what kind of reception a white young man would get if he was raising money to rebuild white businesses that had been damaged or destroyed.
The physics law which states that ‘every action begets a corresponding reaction’ suggests that it may take as long to ‘extinguish’ the effects of slavery as the period of time that slavery existed in the U.S. I believe that was 246 years was the duration of slavery. That means that we have had 155 years since the end of the civil war – – – I hope we don’t have another 91 years before we have peace and harmony along racial lines in the U.S. I don’t think our nation can survive that long with the incredible damage that is being done today along racial lines.
Well said. Let’s keep working and hoping.