Write Team: Looking at the meaning of Juneteenth

Show of hands, who had never heard of Juneteenth until the last couple of years? Don’t worry! My hand is up too, so don’t feel bad. Let’s explore together and get to learn our history and how Juneteenth came about.

On June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed a bill making Juneteenth the 11th American federal holiday. This is the first holiday to obtain legal observance as a federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was designated in 1983.

Juneteenth came to the national forefront in 2020 amid violent nationwide protests after a Minneapolis man, George Floyd and a Louisville woman, Breonna Taylor, were killed during encounters with law enforcement. Both Floyd and Taylor were African American. Their deaths spotlighted ongoing racial inequities in the justice system as well as the legacy of slavery in encounters between African Americans and the police.

The newest federal holiday celebrates the end of slavery in the United States. Being from Illinois, and a huge Abraham Lincoln fan, I was always under the belief that once President Lincoln signed all the paperwork, the Emancipation Proclamation act on Jan. 1, 1863, that slavery was over. But I was sadly quite wrong.

Fearing the loss of Americans who remained loyal to the Union, Lincoln’s Proclamation did not emancipate enslaved people in certain parishes in Louisiana as well as the states of Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia, though each of those states abolished slavery before the war’s end.

The effort was slow and painful, and it was not until Union troops under the command of Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, the final place yet to be notified.

Granger and his men went street-to-street proclaiming “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

This year, at least 28 states and the District of Columbia will legally recognize Juneteenth as a public holiday – meaning state government offices are closed and state workers have a paid day off according to a Pew Research Center analysis of state human resources websites, state legislation and news articles. Connecticut, Minnesota, Nevada and Tennessee have made Juneteenth a public holiday at the state level starting this year.

In the overall scheme of things, looking through the lens of history, 159 years seems like just yesterday but as an old white guy, I have zero context for what that means. In researching this column, I reached out to several of my African American friends to broaden my perspective. All I can say is that I am profoundly ashamed of my country, a country that I love, for this embarrassing blemish.

My prayer is that as we continue to evolve as a society, lines continue to blur. In my own family, they already have. I am proud to say that I have African American cousins, nephews and nieces. And I have to say, the combination of a blond, blue eyed Swede and African American has produced some of the best-looking people in the world.

So next Wednesday, while we’re all sleeping in and think about planting tomatoes, let’s take at least a moment to reflect on something good but stands to remind us that we have a ton of work still to do. But national recognition of the final nail in slavery’s coffin is a great way to start.

Jonathan Freeburg is an Ottawa transplant for the past two decades-plus and a regular contributor to 1430 WCMY Radio. He can be reached at newsroom@shawmedia.com.