The actual day was June 19, 1865, and black dock workers in Galveston, Texas, were the first to hear word that freedom for slaves had come. There were speeches, sermons, and shared meals, most of which were held in black churches, the safest places to hold such celebrations.
The dangers of unfair laws and racist social customs were still great in Texas for the 250,000 enslaved blacks there, but celebrations known as Juneteenth reportedly continued for seven straight days.
The spontaneous jubilation was partly due to General Order No. 3 issued by General Gordon Granger. It read in part: “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation of the Executive of the United States all slaves are free.”
But the emancipation that occurred in Texas on that day in 1865 was just the latest in a series of emancipations that had been unfolding since the 1770s, most notably the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln two years earlier on January 1, 1863.
As I explore in my book The Black Ghost of Empire, between the 1980s and 1930s, during the era of liberal empire and the rise of modern humanism, more than 80 emancipations from slavery occurred, from Pennsylvania in 1780 to Sierra Leone in 1936.
In fact, there were 20 separate emancipations in
The United States alone, from 1780 to 1865, across the northern and southern United States.
In my view as a scholar of race and colonialism, the days of emancipation – June in Texas – are not what many people imagine them to be, because emancipation did not do what most of us imagine it did.
As historians have long documented, emancipation processes did not remove all the shackles that prevented blacks from obtaining full citizenship rights. Emancipation also did not prevent states from enacting their own laws prohibiting blacks from voting or living in white neighborhoods.
In fact, based on my research, emancipation processes were actually designed to force blacks and the federal government to pay reparations to slaveholders—not the enslaved—and thus ensure that whites retained advantages in accumulating and transmitting wealth across generations.
Reparations to slave owners
Emancipation processes share three common features that, when taken together, liberate the enslaved in one sense, but re-enslave them in another.
The first, and perhaps most important, was the ideology of gradualism, which said that atrocities against blacks would end slowly, over a long, open period.
The second feature was state legislators' adherence to the racist principle that freed people were units of a slave owner's property—not captives subjected to crimes against humanity.
The third was to insist that blacks must incur various forms of debt in order to emerge from slavery. This included economic debt, imposed by the constant forced labor and low wages that freed people had to pay slave owners.
In essence, freed people had to pay for their freedom, while enslaved people had to be paid to allow them to be free.
The myths and realities of liberation
On March 1, 1780, for example, the Pennsylvania legislature set a global precedent for how emancipations could pay reparations to slaveholders and uphold white property rule.
The Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition of Slavery Act provided that “all persons, as well as negroes, mulattoes, and others, who shall be born within this State, from and after the passage of this Act, shall not be deemed servants.” For life or slaves.
At the same time, the legislation provided that “every negro child and man born in this State” could remain in slavery “till the age of twenty-eight years” and “shall be liable to punishment and punishment” as slaves.
After the first Emancipation Day in Pennsylvania, slaves remained in slavery for the rest of their lives, unless voluntarily freed by slave owners.
Only newborn children of enslaved women were nominally free after Emancipation Day. Until then, these children were forced to work as forced laborers from childhood until their twenty-eighth birthday.
All future emancipations share Pennsylvania's DNA.
Emancipation Day came to Connecticut and Rhode Island on March 1, 1784. On July 4, 1799, it dawned in New York, and on July 4, 1804, in New Jersey. After 1838, West Indian people in the United States began celebrating British Empire Emancipation Day on August 1.
The District of Columbia Day came on April 16, 1862.
Eight months later, on January 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation which freed slaves only in the Confederate states—not in states loyal to the Union, such as New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri.
Emancipation Day dawned in Maryland on November 1, 1864. The following year, emancipation was granted on April 3 in Virginia, on May 8 in Mississippi, on May 20 in Florida, on May 29 in Georgia, and on June 19 in Texas. On May 20 in Florida, on May 29 in Georgia, and on June 19 in Texas. On August 8 in Tennessee and Kentucky.
Slavery by another name
After the Civil War, the three Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution contained loopholes that aided in the continued oppression of black communities.
The Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 allowed the enslavement of imprisoned people through convict leasing.
The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 allowed prisoners to be denied the right to vote.
The Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 failed to explicitly prohibit forms of voter suppression that targeted black voters and would intensify during the coming Jim Crow era.
In fact, Granger's Order No. 3, issued on June 19, 1865, made that clear.
The order stated that the liberation of slaves “implies absolute equality in personal and property rights between masters and former slaves, and the relationship that has existed between them until now becomes the relationship between the employer and the wage-workers.”
However, the order also states: “Parolees are advised to remain in their current homes and work for pay. They were informed that they would not be allowed to gather at military sites; And they will not be victorious over laziness, neither there nor elsewhere.”
Meaning of Juneteenth
From the moment emancipation celebrations began on March 1, 1780, until June 19, 1865, crowds of blacks gathered to demand redress for slavery.
On that first June in Texas, and increasingly during the days that followed, freedmen celebrated their resilience amid emancipation's failure to achieve complete freedom.
They advocated for the end of debt slavery, racist policing, and discriminatory laws that unfairly harmed Black communities. They elevated their collective imagination from outside the spiritual stream of white monarchy.
Over the decades, Juneteenth traditions have matured into larger gatherings in public parks, with barbecue picnics, fireworks and street parades with brass bands.
At the end of his posthumous 1999 novel, “Juneteenth,” he called on the famous black author Ralph Ellison to ask a poignant question on Emancipation Day: “How the hell do we bring love into politics or mercy into history?”
The question calls us to pause today more than ever.
Chris Mangapra is a professor of history at Tufts University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
