Samantha O’Sullivan is President of Harvard’s Generational African-American Students Association.
“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass first posed the question in a speech on July 5, 1852, and since then, it has rung, largely unanswered, in the ears of our country.
As a little Black girl growing up in Chocolate City, Washington, D.C., every year I remember running with excitement down to the waterfront, sitting on my uncle’s shoulders, watching fireworks explode over the Washington Monument, and cheering in awe. I’d look around and see a crowd of Black faces patriotically applauding and celebrating our nation’s so-called Independence Day, loudly honking horns, the loud pop of firecrackers drowning out Douglass’s question, along with a question I hadn’t yet thought to ask: If the Fourth of July was “the birthday of your National Independence,” as Douglass suggested to his mostly White audience in 1852, when was ours?
On June 19, 1865, Union troops reached Galveston, Texas with news that the Civil War had ended and all of the enslaved were to be freed — 2 ½ years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. With minimal Union troops to enforce Lincoln’s Proclamation, slavery in Texas had remained the status quo for nearly 30 months beyond what was statutory.
Upon hearing the news of their overdue freedom, one cannot help but wonder about the reactions of those enslaved people. Oral accounts describe the reactions as mixed, from “pure shock to immediate jubilation.” Perhaps there were reactions of disbelief, suspicion and even anger upon hearing of the delay. Whatever the reactions may have been, June 19 quickly became celebrated as “The Great Day of Good News,” or Juneteenth.
Is Juneteenth then, the answer? Is Juneteenth our Independence Day?
Not quite. While news of Emancipation reached Texas on June 19, many of the enslaved were not freed until months after, and even this “freedom” was only in name. In the years following emancipation, chattel slavery quickly adopted the pseudonym of “sharecropping,” with Black Codes and Jim Crow laws that criminalized unemployment, terrorizing newly “freed” African Americans back onto the same plantations from which they were supposedly emancipated. The enslaved were granted a freedom to be terrorized and lynched by klansmen and the police — who sometimes were one and the same — or exploited for free prison labor in chain gangs. If this depiction seems grim, it is because the reality was grim. Juneteenth was a celebration of a delayed notice of freedom, which never truly came.
So, we must ask: If we are still not truly free, if our Independence Day has yet to come, then why celebrate Juneteenth?
Just as July 4 has different meanings to the enslaved and the rest of America, so does Juneteenth.
To Generational African Americans, people who identify as descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States, Juneteenth is a testament to our strength. It is a day to celebrate that through 246 years of legalized ownership of our bodies and labor, we resisted and persevered. A day to honor how we endured centuries of physical, sexual and psychological abuse and emerged a strong, proud people. A day to honor our ancestors’ sacrifices. Reading through slave narratives, especially those of Black women, exposes the horrors enslaved people endured in heartbreaking and enraging detail and yet also how time and time again they persevered. Not only did they survive, but they resisted, and, after 246 years of resistance, escaped bondage.
That Generational African Americans celebrate Juneteenth — a day commemorating a delay in our overdue emancipation from an immoral bondage – is a testament to our people’s spirit. That we use Juneteenth to celebrate, rather than riot (which would perhaps be a more appropriate reaction to the injustice of slavery), is a testament to our people’s optimism and resilience. To us, Juneteenth is a day to celebrate our people and how far we have come in the face of institutional opposition.
On Juneteenth, I celebrate my grandmother who picked cotton in South Carolina fields and my grandfather who attended segregated schools in Washington, D.C. so that I can study at Harvard University now. Today, we celebrate these strides and honor those who fought for them.
It is for this reason that Lex Brow ‘20, Kaya Bos ‘20, and I co-founded Harvard’s Generational African American Students Association: to foster a community to celebrate our strength and the spirit of Juneteenth year-round on Harvard’s campus while also continuing to push for change. It is for this reason we created GAASA’s “Five days of Juneteenth” challenge, honoring African American music, film, literature, and icons, which will culminate in a virtual celebration on the evening of June 19.
Now understanding the significance of Juneteenth to African Americans, we curiously pose another question: What to America is Juneteenth?
To the rest of America, Juneteenth is a public reckoning. A reminder that this country allowed slavery to persist for 2 ½ years longer than was legally just and for 246 years longer than was morally just. To America, Juneteenth is a reminder, as we march in the streets and chant the same words we chanted for 246 years, that an unforgivable number of Americans are still not free. A reminder that “America’s Freedom” in 1776 has meant the freedom to terrorize and murder African Americans. Juneteenth is a spotlight on the stain of slavery in America’s cloth; it is a stain which, if you look closely, makes up the very fibers of the cloth itself.
And from these stained fibers emerges a question for America: “What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do to fix this?” While I applaud Harvard President Bacow’s recognition of Juneteenth as an official holiday, such recognition is empty without action. One cannot cheer that slavery ended without asking why it took so long to end and why it began, and being forced to reckon with the answers.
The reality is that the cloth of Harvard, too, is woven with the stained fibers of slavery. We attend an institution which enables and profits from slavery now as much as it did in the 19th century through its current investments in the prison system. It is disingenuous for institutions like Harvard to celebrate Juneteenth without acknowledging and seeking to make reparations for their role in its origins
In his 1852 address, Frederick Douglass eventually answers his own question. “What to the slave is the fourth of July?” It is “a sham”: “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
With change and action, Juneteenth has the potential to be more. If lawmakers use this holiday to re-allocate funds away from inherently racist police systems and toward reparations, education, mental health services, programs addressing homelessness and the myriad other symptoms that the plague of slavery imparted on our country, then Juneteenth can be more. If all Americans use today to educate themselves on how they continue to perpetuate systems of slavery through overtly racist acts, microaggressions and everything in between, then Juneteenth can be more.
But if America does not address this bloody history, and supplants real action with merely a day off from work, by confusing Juneteenth as “the day we were all free,” then Douglass’s warning in 1852 will ring just as true now: “your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery. … There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”
Happy Juneteenth.
Image Credit: “Emancipation Day in Richmond, Virginia, 1905.jpg” from the VCU Libraries is in the public domain.