Tuesday, June 19th is the 153rd
Juneteenth Independence Day
The date celebrates the June 19, 1865, announcement of the loss
of the Civil War and the abolition of all slaves in the state of Texas.
This was two and a half years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went
into effect on January 1st.
In Chicago, many events will be held on the following weekend,
and a number of concerts will be held by
the Old Town School of Music. Customary celebrations, like those held in
Texas in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s provided an opportunity for simple
freedoms like singing, dancing, and readings from worshipped artists.
In
Aurora, Events With Elegance, a member of the National Association of
Juneteenth Lineage, will sponsor it's 2nd Juneteenth Dinner Dance at six
o'clock in the evening on Saturday, June 21, 2003, at the Hyatt Hotel located
in Lisle, IL. The Event will also consist of a Speaker and Live Entertainment.
African American entrepreneurs will have a chance to display and sell their
products to promote their business to other African American consumers. For
more information or updates, please send an e-mail to: eventswithelegance@msn.com
Why June 19th? It was on that date in 1865 that
Union soldiers under the command of General Granger finally washed ashore in
Galveston to inform the Texans of what had transpired. By and large,
Texas and its citizens were not impressed. The limited size of the Union
force and the increased numbers of slave-holders fleeing southern states to
Texas as the war ravaged their plantations made for little response or
acceptance of the news.
Other stories and conspiracy theories, most likely apocryphal,
surfaced as reasons for the delay in the announcement for over two years after
the President’s Proclamation. The soldier sent to carry the news to Texas
was murdered by those who wanted to prevent such information from reaching the
fields. Plantation owners kept the information from their work force to maintain
order and production. The Union soldiers were complicit in keeping the
information from slaves to assure cotton crops were picked before freedom.
In fact, slaves worked and tilled the fields for over two years
after they had been acknowledged free men and women in the Capitol.
Despite the Lone Star pushback, after Lee surrendered in April
of 1865, it was only a matter of time before the tide of change would sweep
across the nation. Texas Supreme Court decisions in the next decade
reaffirmed the status of freedom for those brave African Americans who had
cautiously celebrated their liberty in June in the streets of Galveston upon
first hearing the news.
Other racial justice organizations will mark the day remembering
the horrific history of the slave trade and its everlasting impact on a people
and two continents separated by over 5000 nautical miles.
Over 2 million died while crossing the Middle Passage into
America.
At least as many others perished during the forced
transportation across West Africa to the waiting ports.
Estimates of total captives brought to America for slavery run
as high as 12 million.
Several hundred captives were chained together below decks in
deplorable conditions, suffering cramped contagion and death on the journey.
Insurance brokers provided for coverage in cases of drowning,
but not simply deaths. As a result, some historians visualize the
Atlantic sea bottom marking the exact paths of ships with the mountains of
bones left from throwing strings of sick or unwanted slaves
overboard. Deplorable.
It’s small wonder that Juneteenth will likewise mark the strong,
resentful argument for reparations by racial justice organizers like the Black
Land and Liberation Initiative. They and others symbolically revisit the issue
by highlighting General William Sherman’s original order in 1865 by recognizing
a national day of action. According to writer Aviana Willis, “In 40 acres
across 40 cities black people will take nonviolent direct action to occupy and
reclaim spaces such as abandoned schools and empty lots, with the goal of
putting these spaces into service of the community.”
Black Land and Liberation Initiative states it clearly:
“We are people who have been enslaved and dispossessed as a result of the
oppressive, exploitative, extractive system of colonialism and white
supremacy. In this system, our labor and its products have been taken
from us for generations for the accumulation of wealth by others.”(http://blacklandandliberation.org/)
“We have been taught in school that the source of the policy of
“40 acres and a mule” was Union General William T.
Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, issued on Jan. 16, 1865. (That
account is half-right: Sherman prescribed the 40 acres in that Order, but not
the mule. The mule would come later.) But what many accounts leave out is that
this idea for massive land redistribution actually was the result of a
discussion that Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton held four
days before Sherman issued the Order, with 20 leaders of the
black community in Savannah, Ga., where Sherman was headquartered following his
famous March to the Sea. The meeting was unprecedented in American history.
“Today, we commonly use the phrase “40 acres and a mule,” but
few of us have read the Order itself. Three of its parts are relevant here.
Section one bears repeating in full: “The islands from Charleston, south, the
abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and
the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida, are reserved and set apart
for the settlement of the negroes [sic] now made free by the acts of war and
the proclamation of the President of the United States.”
“Section two specifies that these new communities, moreover,
would be governed entirely by black people themselves: ” … on the islands, and
in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever,
unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to
reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the
freed people themselves … By the laws of war, and orders of the President of
the United States, the negro [sic] is free and must be dealt with as such.”
“Finally, section three specifies the allocation of land: ” …
each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) acres of tillable ground,
and when it borders on some water channel, with not more than 800 feet water
front, in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford
them protection, until such time as they can protect themselves, or until
Congress shall regulate their title.”
“With this Order, 400,000 acres of land — “a
strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St.
John’s River in Florida, including Georgia’s Sea Islands and the mainland
thirty miles in from the coast,” as Barton Myers
reports — would be redistributed to the newly freed slaves. The
extent of this Order and its larger implications are mind-boggling, actually.”
(http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/)
Stanton had gone to a group of African American preachers and
ministers at the conclusion of the war, asking what would be an appropriate
payment for the debasing of a race and people. The answer was the
assurance of future economic freedom by receiving land on which to farm, land
that had been taken in Sherman’s march along the southeastern coast of the
United States. Sherman later threw in the single mule with the 40 acres –
as many of the pack animals were now available after the war.
“And what happened to this astonishingly visionary program,
which would have fundamentally altered the course of American race relations?
Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor and a sympathizer with the South,
overturned the Order in the fall of 1865, and, as Barton Myers sadly concludes,
“returned the land along the South Carolina, Georgia and Florida coasts to the
planters who had originally owned it” — to the very people who had declared war
on the United States of America.”
Only a small handful of states – Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire,
North Dakota and South Dakota – do not recognize the date as a day for
observance, a ceremonial holiday or state sanctioned holiday. 45 other
states, including Illinois, recognize the date’s importance and its observance
of the participation and achievements of African-Americans in the progress of
our country.
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