Originally posted by: Brent Kline
I may have missed it because I was out of town, but I do not remember anyone on this forum celebarating Juneteenth this year. It seemed like a big deal the first couple of years , but seems like it is losing steam. If anyone did , could you please share.
Several reasons why it might have seemed kind of muted:
1) That day this year, there was a lot of bad shit going on, with Vance and Trump both trying to restart the Iran war. Trumpflation soared over 4%. There were definitely celebration across the country, but it seemed to me that those events got a bit lost in all the other noise--as things do when your country's at war.
2) Juneteenth is a kind of artificial holiday in that it doesn't commemorate any overall liberation of African Americans, but rather, the arrival of a Union general in Galveston, two months after Lee had surrendered, with a copy of the Emancipation Declaration.
3) The Declaration came into effect in Texas when the Confederacy surrendered, which had happened a week or so after Lee was defeated, so the Texas slaves were already free, by law, and what happened on June 19th was more of a ceremony than a liberation.
4) It only commemorates the freeing of slaves in Texas; they had been technically free already, and in most other Southern states, they had been free for some time. The date and the event didn't mean much to a former slave in, say, Virginia or Alabama.
5) Everyone in the Confederacy, most slaves included, was well aware of the Proclamation immediately after it was issued. That was illustrated when Sherman took Atlanta and 50,000 freed slaves followed him on his march to the coast. They knew that they were free per the language of the Proclamation. So the announcement in Galveston didn't tell anyone anything they didn't already know.
So it's not a "when the slaves were freed" day. It's a bit contrived as an historical event.
