Juneteenth, Decoration Day, and the memory of ‘these honored dead,’ Black and white
Growing up in Natchez, Miss., in the ’50s and ’60s, I had never heard of “Juneteenth,” the celebration of the end of slavery in America that took place two states over in Texas. It will be commemorated today with programs, marches and other festivities in communities in the 47 states where June 19th is now an official holiday.
The news set off spontaneous celebration among the freedmen of Galveston, and beginning in 1866, community events, parades, cookouts, prayer gatherings and musical performances inaugurated Juneteenth. The annual event has continued and spread from a largely Texas tradition to a national celebration of African-American freedom and culture, and a way to empower young people with a sense of their own history. Juneteenth became an official state holiday in Texas on Jan. 1, 1980.
As a youngster, I was never taught about Juneteenth. But in Natchez we had our own annual unique event celebrating the end of slavery, which also commemorated and honored the participation of African-American ancestors in their own liberation. It was known simply as the “30th of May.
As I would learn later, we were honoring a remarkable and little-appreciated aspect of the Civil War, and the role that runaway slaves played in turning the war into a battle for freedom. Fifty years before the war, Natchez, the oldest European settlement on the Mississippi, had been the site of “Forks of the Road,” the second-largest domestic slave trading center in America.
Thousands of Black schoolchildren, Black women carrying baskets of flowers and wreaths, and regiments of Black and white Union soldiers joined in a march to the former slaveholder’s racecourse on the first “Decoration Day.”
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