Mark Anthony Neal

Critical Noir

What the Hell is Juneteenth?

Posted 06/19/2007 at 4:53 PM | Comment?

So let me get this straight: some two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation (freeing enslaved Africans in states loyal to the Confederacy, (but not those several “border” states who Lincoln didn’t want to piss off), word is finally delivered to a bunch of black folk in Galveston, Texas that they were free? Sounds like a skit from the lost season of Chappelle Show, but alas this is the stuff of American history. That day in 1865—June 19th—is now regularly referred to as Juneteenth and is currently a holiday in 14 States, including Alaska and California. I remember first hearing about Juneteenth 20 years ago when I was living near Buffalo, NY - northern outpost for black migrants from Alabama and Mississippi, hence the city’s well known affinity for Jheri curls well past their popularity - and wondering that someone surely must be joking. What the hell is there to celebrate about black folk being forced to live in slavery for two years longer than they needed to? And yet Juneteenth celebrations in cities like Buffalo, Galveston, and Durham, NC are a chance for blacks in those cities to affirm notions of community and survival with a steady flow of African dance and smoked pork butt (pulled-pork for the uninitiated).

Comedian Paul Mooney makes the point that there were likely whites who knew about the Emancipation Proclamation, but simply chose not to tell blacks they knew—some of whom that might have been kin. In that same spirit I imagine that there had to be blacks who were still unaware of emancipation even after June, 19, 1865. And then there’s the twisted irony of the many of those newly freed subjects who ended up back on the very plantations they often prayed to leave, working as share-croppers, in part, because of the comfort-zone that those plantations represented in a society that was not all that excited about the prospect of negroes flowing freely in the streets. But I can’t imagine what it must have been to be part of that generation of blacks, for which had been nothing more than a word and an idea, and who now could literally touch freedom and I guess it is for that memory them, that Juneteenth remains important.

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