Today marks the federal holiday of Juneteenth, which commemorates the date in 1865 that General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. Although Lincoln issued the Proclamation with an effective date of January 1, 1863, the Southern whites who took up arms to defend their “right” to own and exploit other human beings certainly did not honor the Proclamation during the Civil War. Even after Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 19, 1865, white planters thought that they could simply continue slavery if they were beyond the reach of federal troops.
The conventional wisdom is that enslaved Black Texans first learned of their freedom with General Granger’s arrival, but the truth is that Black people knew that they had been freed, but needed the power of the Union Army to compel white Texans to respect it. Throughout the Civil War, Southern plantation owners moved westward to Texas in order to continue profiting from violently extracted free labor. “Within weeks,” Granger’s proclamation was followed by “fifty thousand troops who flooded the state in a late arriving occupation,” (Source: “The Hidden History of Juneteenth,” by Gregory P. Downs, TalkingPointsMemo.com, 6/18/15).
Even after Juneteenth, white enslavers continued their violent recalcitrance. As late as October 1865, there were reports of white planters who continued to “claim and control slaves as property…and systematically murdered rebellious African-Americans to try to frighten the rest into submission,” (ibid). Enslaved Black Texans were not passively waiting to be told they were free, but were actively engaged in the fight for their own emancipation. The truth is that they needed not only the letter of the law, but the power of the Union army to enforce that law.
The same pattern has recurred throughout the last 158 years — violent white resistance to Black freedom which can only be overcome by a combination of Black organizing and federal legislation that is actually enforced, with federal troops if necessary. After all, the continued recalcitrance of white Southerners gave birth to the 14th and 15th Amendments, which became hollow guarantees after the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877.
Although it was Reconstruction era integrated state legislatures that established universal free public education and enshrined the right to a basic education in Southern state constitutions, Jim Crow legislatures segregated public schools and starved Black schools of resources. They then used the lack of education that they had engineered to disenfranchise Black people by imposing literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting rights (Source: “The Constitutional Moment: Reconstruction and Black Education in the South,” by David Tyack and Robert Lowe, American Journal of Education, Vol. 94, No.2, pp. 236-256, (February 1986).
It took, not only one hundred years of Black people’s unceasing activism and strategic litigation, but our steely resolve to remain undeterred despite the ceaseless campaign of terror and murder waged by white supremacists, in order to regain the freedom supposedly guaranteed to us by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. Just as in the 1960s and the 1860s, there are an alarming number of people in this country today who would stop at nothing to keep Black people from being free. The lesson of the true history of Juneteenth is that freedom is never given, it is fought for and won.