If we are to acknowledge our nation's historic failings as well as its triumphs, we must embrace the full complexity of our past.
On June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill establishing Juneteenth as a Federal Holiday. Signed into law a year after the brutal murder of George Floyd and the chorus of calls for a racial reckoning that followed, the Juneteenth holiday not only acknowledges the delayed fulfillment of equality for African Americans, but, according to President Biden, the nation's burgeoning commitment to restorative justice.
More to the point, if you had not heard of Juneteenth prior to the last few years, it's not because of a conspiracy to conceal its importance. Ignorance of Juneteenth is owed to two matters: In 1865, Juneteenth had no significance for African Americans outside of Texas, because it doesChattel slavery was abolished several monthsJuneteenth by the 13th Amendment—the curious recent, and ahistorical controversies surrounding it notwithstanding.
So, one year later—June 19, 1866—the freedmen in Galveston celebrated the first"Jubilee Day"—what Juneteenth was called prior to its renaming in the 1890s. Likewise, during the Great Migration black Texans would bring their Juneteenth celebrations to communities outside of Texas. As a result, the 1980s would witness formal Juneteenth celebrations in several states—including California, Wisconsin, Illinois, Georgia, and DC.
To understand this point, readers should recall two points I made previously—the first pertains to Juneteenth's relevance to black Texans while the second concerns the Emancipation Proclamation's purview. So, Louisiana provides yet another, albeit complicated, example of the reality that the equivalent of Juneteenth occurred at different times throughout the South.Emancipation ProclamationThough exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation, Maryland , Missouri , Tennessee , and West Virginia abolished slavery prior to the Civil War's conclusion.
If one views the 13th Amendment through this lens, then the felony exception clause is a poison pill that both undercuts the 13th Amendment's significance and disqualifies it from commemoration. The problem, however, is that efforts to trace contemporary mass incarceration to the 13th Amendment's felony exception clause rest on sandy ground.
The implications of Lincoln's proposed containment policy were clear to the leaders of the slaveholding states. Between December of 1860 and the summer of 1861, 11 of the nation's 15 slaveholding states would secede in explicit defense of slavery. Indeed, the secessionist states cited as chief among their concerns the growing antagonism of the northern states toward"the slaveholding states.
Many Republicans saw slavery as what we might think of as the most brutal expression of the asymmetrical relationship between the owners of the means of production and their workers. Consequently, the 13th Amendment's abolition of slavery and"involuntary servitude" reflected so-called Radical Republicans' desire to establish fairer terms of work for the laboring classes.
Involuntary servitude for debtors and criminals was a long-accepted form of punishment in Europe, England, the American colonies, and even Africa.
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