It’s Time for All of America To Celebrate Juneteenth

For far too long Juneteenth, marking the official end of slavery in America, has remained a niche holiday within the Black community. Now it must turn into a national holiday that all Americans should embrace.

Following George Floyd’s murder, Americans have stood up and declared that they can no longer tolerate the American status quo that devalues Black lives. Americans of all walks of life have supported defunding the police, and forcefully removed statues and monuments celebrating Confederates, slave owners and colonizers who terrorized indigenous people. Americans have occupied the streets chanting Black Lives Matter and shouting down white supremacy.

I did some more study....

The Emancipation Proclamation was signed on September 22, 1862. That’s a Historic Event!!

From Wikipedia:

Although Juneteenth is commonly thought of as celebrating the end of slavery in the United States, it was still legal and practiced in Union border states until December 6, 1865, when ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished non-penal slavery nationwide.

Let THAT be the National Holiday.

I considered your point before writing, but in fact the "Juneteent" thing builds and enhances a festering disunity, If the people with brownized skin--whose ancestors may well be "white" (less melanin" even within one or two generations backward--don't get over this, but keep on imagining that they are still being subjugated, our society will be so fractured as to make July 4 and the Declaration signers irrelevant.

Which effect is in progress now, due to the exacerbation of Soros's BLM credulous constituents, tools of the Antifa disruptors, and misplaced compassion of naive Caucasian admirers.

Lincoln's insistence on the Unity of the States of America, the conquering of separationist rebels, and over 100 years of attempts to minimize resentments are being undone by our current crop of "peaceful" (?) protesters whose rebelliousness will institute yet another all-out civil war if they can.

If at the end they win, you can kiss any hope of your own freedom and law-abiding peacefulness goodbye, my FRiend.

In supporting efforts like "Juneteenth," and "peaceful protesting" against way overstated "police brutality," and toleration of BLM, you are only magnifying the effort to tear down our Constitution which defines the independence our Founders have bequeathed their progeny, whether literal or spiritual.

It's time to get off your high horse and focus on the Constitutional independence that has played out to finally release, long ago, the segments of African impotees who have developed an irreconcilable attitude and are now demonstrating it through events like "Juneteenth" and "Kwanzaa" etc

"In supporting efforts like "Juneteenth," and "peaceful protesting" against way overstated "police brutality," and toleration of BLM, you are only magnifying the effort to tear down our Constitution which defines the independence our Founders have bequeathed their progeny, whether literal or spiritual."

You have misstated my position by adding in things I did not say. I never said anything about the protests, about the demonization of the police or of tolerating BLM. My supporting a Juneteenth holiday has nothing to do whatsoever with those ideas. I'm sure there are those who are rioting, who demonize the police, who are pro-BLM who are in favor of the holiday. My support for it goes no further than what I stated in my previous post. Period.

As for tearing down the Constitution, I don't think acknowledging the past injustice of slavery and its subsequent termination does anything of the sort. Another poster suggested instead of a Juneteenth holiday, perhaps a celebration of the 13th Amendment is more in order. Until that amendment was passed, enslaved Blacks had no such enjoyment of the Constitutional rights that you rightly laud. And it is because of the "irreconcilable attitude" of which you speak that my heart was burdened to consider how an acknowledgement of this momentous (and, it would seem, deeply hurtful) past event might well lead to the kind of reconciliation that would lead to freeing us all from the present slavery we, both Black and White, currently endure.

I'm not for shining shoes, like Mr. Cathy over at Chik-Fil-A. I'm not for reparations or giveaways of any kind. I'm not for approving of destructive behavior/rioting. I'm not for anything other than for a genuine reconciliation. If that's what it means to be on a high horse, then, "Hi-yo, Silver!" True reconciliation is the path that leads to peace.

Sept. 22, 1862, was the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation--the Confederate States were given 100 days warning that if they did not submit to the Union their slaves would be declared free (which Lincoln proceeded to do on Jan. 1, 1863).

In practical terms liberation was very spread out. Some slaves had fled to Union lines and were effectively free even if not legally so before this, and then after Jan. 1, 1863, as the Union gradually gained control of more and more of the Confederacy, the slaves there were told that they were free.

How much practical difference it made may have varied--probably some continued to work for their former masters because that was the only way they would have food to eat. A lot of the house servants seem to have remained with their former owner's household even later (reflected in Gone with the Wind.) Former President Andrew Johnson's best friend in his post-Presidential days was one of his former slaves who continued to live with the family.

I was told by a great-aunt (born on the day that Jefferson Davis died in 1889) that at end of the war former slaves begged to be allowed to stay. I wouldn't be surprised if that sometimes happened--they had no money to buy land for themselves and they needed some way to make a living. The difference was that they were free to leave. (My great-aunt's father was a 14-year-old boy in Virginia at the end of the war--I don't think his family owned any slaves.)

Thank you for further expressing your view.. Like yourself, I have never supported any kind of behavior that neglects the basic rights with which the God of the Bible (not Allah) has bestowed on each of His created eternal human souls.

As to personal relationships with the humans around me, I have not seen the hue of one's epidermal layern to be a source of distinction of value of the person's body, soul, or spirit, or that it should be a bar to warm and close fellowship.<

On the other hand, it has been obvious to me that the ghettoization of our inner cities has led to a multitude of problems, giving rise to a certain level of the need for a special awareness of the behaviors of people living in and governed by the type of culture prevalent there. The statistics seem to show that the policing of the cultures in these areas to be effective requires a suspicious alertness and firmness of enforcement that those on the receiving end are likely to chafe at or reject. It also makes those needing discipline overreact and call it a return to slavery.

In that vein, Does the attitude of inventing new holidays like Juneteenth bring reconciliation? Or do they bring back undercurrents of the old adversarial relationships? Or is it a moment of thanking the overwhelming sector of non-black citizens that put down the practice of enslavement with deadly force and irreversible modification to the Constitution?

When I hear the Black community thank the other freemen vocally and with commensurate behavior consistent with their long-established liberty, then I will rejoice with them. It is the broadly inclusive reenactment of July 4 that made it slowly but inexorably possible, given the situation existing in the Americas at the time of its appearance in history when the governed were first classed as citizens, not subjects. It was at a time when free black citizens did own other black souls as chattels, and not a few of them as major slaveholders.

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