Last week at the Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn of the White House, Vice President Harris speak that on June 19, 1865, after Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, “Slaves in Texas knew they were free.” That day, she said, “they demanded their freedom.”
With those words, Harris, who stood by President Biden as he performed admirably. signed the law made Juneteenth a federal holiday, represents an oversimplification, stemming from our tendency to conflate the complexity of history: Although it is a sign of progress intended to commemorate the end of slavery in America, but it is imperative that we continue to highlight the countless ways in which black freedom was curtailed long after that first Juneteenth.
To begin with, there is some debate as to whether most of the approximately 250,000 slaves in Texas at the time were unaware of the Emancipation Proclamation. As famous Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. told me when we spoke recently, “I have never met a scholar who believes that to be true.”
But more importantly, emancipation was not true freedom – not in Texas and not in most of the American South, where the vast majority of blacks lived. It’s almost freedom. It is an apparent freedom. It’s freedom with more constraints than being a puppet.
Most black people could not claim freedom on June 19, 1865, because their bodies (and their free will) were still governed to roughly the same extent and with the same regime the deep-seated racism that Southern whites directed at them during slavery.
Daina Ramey Berry, dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University, said the laws governing former slaves “are very restrictive in terms of where they can go, the type of work they can do, where they can live in certain communities”. of California, Santa Barbara, and author of “The Price for Their Pound: The Value of Slaves, From Womb to Grave, in Building a Nation.”
Is the blog Rediscovering Black History at the National Archives note, “Most white Texans wished to keep the blacks as close as possible to their former state of slavery; therefore, they vigorously oppose any action likely to elevate blacks to a competitive economic, political, and social position.” This was true throughout much of the former Confederacy.
And it was clear. Upon arriving at Galveston, Union General Gordon Granger delivered General Order No. 3which said that “the relation heretofore existing” between “the former master and the slave” would become “the relation between master and employee” and that “those who are free should remain quiet in their current home and work to earn money.”
The order also contained a curious stipulation: that freedmen would “not be supported in idleness.”
Of course it would be completely understandable if, after being forced to work entirely for the benefit of others throughout your life, the exercise of freedom that you might choose would first be a period of respite, and what’s more, you can decide who in your family should work. outside the house and who is inside. But that agency has largely been denied to Black people.
Notice from Granger published a few days later in The Galveston Daily News informed the public that “no former slave shall be permitted to travel on public roads without a pass or permit from their employer”. In other words, white people would still dictate where black people could live.
The notice went on to say that “laziness inevitably leads to evils, and humanity dictates that employment should be provided for these people, while the interests of the commonwealth necessarily require it, to secure the current crop.”
In 1866, a Texas constitutional convention passed the state’s Black Code, codifying stifling limits on black autonomy. As the Texas State Library and Archives Commission describe these laws:
Unemployed African Americans were often assigned to white guardians to work without pay. Penalties for quitting a job often include imprisonment for breach of contract. Other laws prevent freedmen from freely accessing public facilities. Stiff fines were imposed on African Americans for violating curfew, possessing guns, or displaying objectionable behavior in public (harsh speech or offensive gestures). They were not allowed to testify against whites, serve on juries or state militias, or vote.
In this way, the rules “outlined a status for African Americans that was not too far removed from their previous status of slavery.”
Additionally, for blacks in the 1870s, being convicted in Texas essentially meant being consigned to slavery, because that was when the state’s convict leasing program began.
The 13th Amendmentratified in 1865, outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as punishment for a crime for which the party shall be lawfully convicted,” an exception that states and Southern businesses were exploited, making the practice of renting out convicts – often black convicts – a practice of unpaid labor, generating enormous profits in the process.
As Douglas Blackmon wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Slavery by Another Name,” his brilliant and devastating book about the convict leasing system: “The concept of reintroducing forced labor to black people Black people as a means of funding government services were viewed by whites as an inherently practical method of eliminating the costs of prison construction and returning black people to their proper place. in social.”
And this labor is often brutal. While slave owners had perverse financial incentives to keep slaves alive and relatively healthy—to them, slaves were property to be sold, passed down, and loaned out—the who exploits convicts for their labor has no such motives.
The question of labor is at the core of how we must understand emancipation and Reconstruction because American slavery, the entire capitalist system represented billions of dollars in wealth, has been built upon the free labor of the Negro, has been subjugated and will have to be supported upward; The newly freed blacks were returned to the machine so it could continue to operate.
Some vestiges of the convict leasing system still exist today, as convicts continue to be forced to labor for free or at extremely low wages to produce a variety of products, one Some of which you probably have in your home now.
As an investigative agency report of the Associated Press published in January found: “Goods produced by prisoners appear in countless supply chains of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and sausage Ball Park sausage to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice.”
Yes, some of the restrictions placed on black Americans during emancipation and Reconstruction were addressed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, known as the Reconstruction Amendments. But not all of them.
Perhaps the best way to look at Juneteenth is not that the the time when black people won their freedom but as One moment in the long struggle for freedom. When slavery was replaced by a succession of systems – the Black Code, Jim Crow, mass incarceration – that while less brutal but remained oppressive on the same principles, there was still no to have true, comprehensive freedom.
As Corey Walker, director of the African American studies program at Wake Forest University, emphasizes, the idea of freedom, especially for black people in this country, is constantly negotiated and contested, so “Juneteenth marks a moment in history like no other.” the growing and expanding project of American democracy.”
“It is,” he said, “a project that will never be completed. It was never fulfilled, even on June 17. And it’s something that’s still growing today.”
