What, to the Non-Black American, Is Juneteenth?
Juneteenth is more than a Black celebration. Its story of rights delayed and justice denied belongs to every American who values freedom.
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Frederick Douglass once famously asked, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” It is a question that jars us from our insular assumptions and forces us to realize that there are other people who might not see things as we do.
The Juneteenth national holiday turns Douglass’s famous question on its head. While so much of American life and lore centers whiteness and assumes it to be the norm, the Juneteenth holiday centers Blackness and, as the Fifteenth Amendment puts it, the “previous condition of servitude.”
In the context of this day, it seems to me the relevant question is “What, to the non-Black American, is Juneteenth?”
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Let’s take a minute to review the story of how we got here.
January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation frees all slaves in rebel states. June 19, 1865, U.S. Major General Gordon Granger issues General Order No. 3, informing Africans in Galveston what recent scholarship concludes they already knew. They were free. It is significant that scholars have corrected the conventional narrative and argued that the African Americans in Texas knew they were, legally speaking, free. First of all, it alters our assumption that these people were so out of touch with the news of the day that something so major could have been kept from them. It also reminds us of the dualism that is central to what I have to say today. These people knew themselves to be free, yet, they were not free.
So, as I choose to see it, the Juneteenth national holiday is a celebration and commemoration of freedom and justice delayed. And this freedom and this justice apply to a wider range of Americans than you might assume.
Black Americans are inclined to see this as “our” holiday, as a “Black” holiday. But to label it in that way is to miss the significance of what President Joe Biden did when he signed the Juneteenth holiday into law four years ago. He didn’t create a celebration. Black people have been celebrating Juneteenth for more than a century. What he did was create a national holiday. A national holiday, commemorated with widely varied degrees of enthusiasm by more than 300 million Americans.
If this is and is to be a national holiday, as I believe it is and must be, there has to be something in it for the nation as a whole, and not just one large minority group within its borders.
The Juneteenth national holiday is a celebration and commemoration of freedom and justice delayed. And this freedom and this justice apply to a wider range of Americans than you might assume.
It is neither surprising nor wholly inappropriate for African Americans to see this as “our” holiday. The nation has generally not taken us into consideration when choosing what to celebrate and not celebrate, hence Frederick Douglass’s question. In other aspects of American life where the color line barred Black folks from admission, we created alternative institutions. I daresay the National Medical Association, a black organization of physicians, would not exist, if the American Medical Association had not been so racist. Ditto for the National Bar Association with regard to the American Bar Association.
At our best, as we strive to form this more perfect union, I think we should seek to shed these vestiges of segregation whenever and to whatever extent possible. Thus, I think we as Americans should see Juneteenth as an American holiday.
One of the impediments to such a vision is a direct result of the success of the civil rights movement. That phrase “civil rights movement” is so associated with Black people that we forget that civil rights are not based on race.
I remember an episode of the old sitcom All in the Family, where Archie Bunker’s son-in-law said that some white man’s civil rights had been violated. Archie’s response was “he ain’t colored!” meaning, since he wasn't Black, he didn't have any civil rights to violate. As I intend to remind you, other folks have civil rights too, and many of those rights were highlighted and made law as a direct result of the Black movements for civil rights.
If we are to speak of freedom delayed, American women were among the first to suffer under the burden of inequality. In one of American history’s great ironies, Black men gained the right to vote before white women, though of course the exercise of said right by Black men could often prove fatal.
Women were long aware of American gender injustice and movements for female freedom and equality go back at least to the suffragette struggles of the early twentieth century if not before. But it is significant that the National Organization for Women wasn’t founded until 1966. Which is to say, the modern women’s movement was founded more than a decade after two milestones in the African American struggle for freedom: the 1954 Brown v. Board decision on school segregation and the 1955 lynching of Emmitt Till. These two events galvanized the nation’s attention to what I like to call “the white problem.”
Among the societal changes to emerge from the civil rights movement were the Affirmative Action mandates requiring consideration of people and companies that had previously been excluded from government contracts. Companies owned by white women have benefitted mightily from these programs, which are too often seen as gifts to Black people.
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If Juneteenth is most properly seen as a commemoration of freedoms delayed, then most certainly American women of all colors should take their share of ownership of it.
I would argue that another share of the Juneteenth celebration should be enjoyed by immigrants in general and Asian immigrants in particular. I am referring, of course, to the case of Wong Kim Ark, a San Francisco-born son of Chinese immigrants. Upon returning to his country after visiting relatives in China, he was told that he was not a citizen. In the ensuing Supreme Court decision, Ark’s argument and his citizenship depended on the language of the 14th Amendment, which held that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
In the arguments over affirmative action in recent years, some Asian Americans have concluded that minority set-aside programs at universities should be disbanded because they favor black students over more qualified Asian ones. It is richly ironic that, were it not for the ancestors of these black students, many of the Asian students would not be able to rightly append the adjective American to their self-descriptions.
If we are to celebrate Juneteenth as a commemoration of rights delayed, we must commemorate the citizenship of Wong Kim Ark, which began with his birth in 1873 and not with his Supreme Court victory twenty-five years later.
Much is made of the contributions of Jews to the civil rights movement, contributions measured in both blood and treasure. Jews of the ’60s, still all too aware of the horrors of the white-on-white holocaust in Europe, saw in the civil rights movement a kindred blow against injustice. But, to appropriate a term from biology, Jews had what we might call “protective coloration.” Despite antisemitic discrimination, Jews were allowed to own businesses and go to all-white schools and vote in all-white elections.
As we strive to form this more perfect union, I think we should seek to shed these vestiges of segregation whenever and to whatever extent possible. Thus, I think we as Americans should see Juneteenth as an American holiday.
What is sometimes forgotten in all this whiteness is that discrimination against Jews in this country was in some circumstances indistinguishable from anti-Black discrimination. Jeremiah Guttman, an ACLU lawyer, who later shipped guns to the Zionist movement in Palestine, recalls that, when his New York family vacationed in Florida in the 1930s, he would routinely see signs in hotel windows proclaiming “no niggers, dogs, gypsies or Jews.”
My father was a lawyer for the Congress of Racial Equality and my mother was one of the first generation of Black public school administrators allowed to run schools attended by white children. Which is to say, I grew up hearing tales of Black folks being discriminated against. But at no time did I hear of them or any of their Black friends being discriminated against on the basis of creed.
When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, it included language barring discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Thus, a law ostensibly intended to legislate fair treatment for African Americans did the same for Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, and even the Pastafarians, whose worship of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is miraculous in its own way.
We could go on for hours or days looking at all the court cases decided based on some law or amendment enacted ostensibly for the benefit of African Americans, but I hope these few examples suffice to illuminate the greater whole.
Which returns us to our question.
I have seen the Frederick Douglass quote written as “What to the American slave is the Fourth of July?” and “What to the American the slave is your Fourth of July?”
Appropriated to the Juneteenth context, those questions might read “What to the non Black American is Juneteenth?” or “What to the non-Black American is your Juneteenth?” The latter is a question directed at Black Americans beseeching us to share Juneteenth. The former is a challenge to non-Black Americans to understand and embrace the Juneteenth holiday as their own. In accepting that challenge, I daresay non-Black Americans would come to understand something about themselves and their darker countrymen that Ralph Ellison’s character noted in the celebrated novel Invisible Man. That Black character said, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
Indeed, who knows but that, on some lower frequencies, Juneteenth is as much about you as it is about anyone else.
MORE ESSENTIAL JUNETEENTH READING
“Words From a Recovering Ally” by Chuck Reece
Reclaiming Black History in Appalachia by Neema Avashia
And a listen: the Salvation South Deluxe podcast on the U.S. Colored Troops, with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edda Fields-Black and Affrilachian poet Frank X Walker
Lolis Eric Elie is a New Orleans-born, Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker. His television credits include work on Bosch, The Man in the High Castle, and the HBO series Treme. He co-produced and wrote the PBS documentary, Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans. A former columnist for The Times-Picayune, he is the author of Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country. He is editor of Cornbread Nation 2: The Best of Southern Food Writing.