Juneteenth isn't just a Black holiday. It's for all Americans

[sl8]

Last edited Wed Jun 19, 2024, 04:19 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/19/g-s1-5022/up-first-newsletter-juneteenth
(more Juneteenth stories at link)

Juneteenth isn’t just a Black holiday. It’s for all Americans

JUNE 19, 2024 7:00 AM ET
By Michel Martin, Suzanne Nuyen

Why Juneteenth is for all Americans



Opal Lee, shown earlier this month, is celebrating this week's passage of legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday. President Biden signed the bill Thursday.
Amanda McCoy/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service via Getty Images [from 2021]

This essay was written by Michel Martin, Morning Edition and Up First host

Confession: I had never heard of Juneteenth until I came to D.C., after college. A colleague and friend who was dating a guy from Texas told me about it. Even then, I thought it was a regional thing, like Mardi Gras — which is to say: not to be tampered with, watered down or interpreted by people not in the know, if you get my drift.

You can see it. It commemorates the day federal troops arrived to enforce The Emancipation Proclamation in Texas some two years after it was issued. More broadly, though, it celebrates the end of chattel slavery. To my mind, it celebrates the beginning of true freedom because — as moral philosophers have long known — no one is free until everyone is because oppression ensnares the oppressor as well as the oppressed. Anyone who has ever been in a toxic relationship knows that.

That is one reason the magnificent Opal Lee, the Fort Worth native known as the grandmother of Juneteenth, worked so hard and so long to see Juneteenth become a federal holiday. A white mob burned down her family home in 1939. She became an educator and an activist and saw the day become a federal holiday last year. She told her local station KTVT “It's not a Texas thing or a Black thing. It's an American thing."

Go celebrate.

[Think. Again.]

1. 🇺🇸

[Harker]

2. I was thinking about that this morning over a cup of tea.

It's an American thing, and a damn good thing to celebrate!

[Thunderbeast]

3. My flag is flying today!

While the motives of the Emancipation Proclamation were not pure, and the underlying racism enabling slavery still haunts our country, freeing the slaves was a watershed moment in our nation's history.

The work toward justice MUST continue. All Americans must stand up to bigotry in all of it's machinations.

JUNETEENTH is a day to recognize what is possible if we shed the curse of racial hatred. Justice is an American value! Fly the flag to celebrate those values.

[slightlv]

4. I agree its bold to celebrate it

But I can't help feeling sadness, too... :we emancipated black slaves and have now replaced them with women as chattel slavery. Will this country ever grow up enough to not need slaves and other scapegoats.

[70sEraVet]

5. Slavery certainly kept the white, non-slaveholding class in poverty.

Wages are held down to starvation levels in a society that allows slavery. One iron foundry in my part of Tennessee owned over 400 slaves, who performed all manner of labor, skilled and unskilled. If that foundry DID hire any white workers, what kind of wages would that company pay?
Yes, ending slavery in this country IS worth celebrating! It IS a holiday for ALL Americans!