Juneteenth

[lpetrich]

I don't know where best to post this, so I'm creating a new thread for it.
JUNETEENTH WORLD WIDE CELEBRATION

Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.

I got a tweet about it in AOC's Twitter page:
b-boy bouiebaisse on Twitter: "“Emancipation wasn’t a gift bestowed on the slaves; it was something they took for themselves, the culmination of their long struggle for freedom.” https://t.co/ayCc2SQMIs" / Twitter

Opinion | Why Juneteenth Matters - The New York Times - "It was black Americans who delivered on Lincoln’s promise of “a new birth of freedom.”"

Neither Abraham Lincoln nor the Republican Party freed the slaves. They helped set freedom in motion and eventually codified it into law with the 13th Amendment, but they were not themselves responsible for the end of slavery. They were not the ones who brought about its final destruction.

Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves.

“Slave resistance,” as the historian Manisha Sinha points out in “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” “lay at the heart of the abolition movement.”

“Prominent slave revolts marked the turn toward immediate abolition,” Sinha writes, and “fugitive slaves united all factions of the movement and led the abolitionists to justify revolutionary resistance to slavery.”

 

[southernhybrid]

This is a good place to post this because there is currently a political movement in Congress to make this a national holiday. In fact, several large corporations have said they want or will make it a paid holiday for their employees. I don't have time right now to post any links, but thanks for bringing this up.

 

[Politesse]

I'm thrilled that so many people suddenly know about the holiday! We certainly weren't taught about it in school, I never so much as heard of Juneteenth til I started attending Pride celebrations in my late twenties.

I'm keen on the idea of nationalizing the holiday, though of course it will go the way of Labor Day if enacted, its original purpose forgotten immediately to most... Still, for those who do celebrate, they'd be able to do so with less fear of persecution, at least if they work for the government.

 

[lpetrich]

Before the Civil War, the US had accumulated a sizable population of free blacks. Some of them were freed by their masters (manumission), some of them escaped their masters, and some of them were descendants of the first sorts of free blacks.

"The Fall of the House of Dixie" is a very nice social history of the Civil War. I especially like how apologist James Henry Hammond objected to the Confederate Army requisitioning some grain as (1) it compensated him to little, and (2) it was like "branding on my forehead 'Slave'"

Abraham Lincoln disliked slavery, but he didn't want to find a war over it. When the Civil War started, he hoped for an early ending, even if it meant slavery continuing. He wanted to assure the Confederate states that if they stopped their rebellion, what they most wanted would continue. He also wanted to keep from departing the border states, pro-Union states with slaves.

Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass thought that this was morally and practically flawed, the latter because it deprived the Union of a valuable potential ally: the slave population.

In the early days, Union commanders had different policies toward slaves. Some of them welcomed escaped slaves as laborers, effectively freeing them, while some others returned escaped slaves to their former masters. Lincoln himself urged border-state legislatures to have programs of voluntary, compensated emancipation. But they didn't go along, and not many slaveowners in the Confederate states were pro-Union. By the middle of 1862, Congress and Lincoln decided that the slaves of rebellious slaveowners were now free.

Then in early 1863, Lincoln decreed his Emancipation Proclamation, stating that all slaves in anti-Union territories were now free. From rebellious masters to rebellious leaders. This gradual evolution also happened with accepting black soldiers, something that Lincoln and others had feared would antagonize a lot of the white population. But the Union army eventually did, and these soldiers fought well, impressing many of their white fellow soldiers.

As Union armies traveled, slaves that they reached often freed themselves, to the point that Confederate leaders decided on a policy of "refugeeing", moving slaves out of the reach of the Union armies. Some slaveowners went along with that, some could not afford doing so, and some refused to do so. Refugeeing had the side effect of notifying slaves in the interior of the Confederacy that lots of slaves in its lost territories were getting freed.

It must be noted that some Union commanders continued to treat ex-slaves shabbily, commanders like General Sherman.

Toward the end, some Confederates discussed recruiting some slaves to fight in their armies, but that meant having to free them, and this was very controversial.

To sum up, many slaves freed themselves, and the willingness to do so among those not already free helped end their condition.

 

[lpetrich]

The Five Greatest Slave Rebellions in the United States | African American History Blog | The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

So, did African-American slaves rebel? Of course they did. As early as 1934, our old friend Joel A. Rogers identified 33 slave revolts, including Nat Turner’s, in his 100 Amazing Facts. And nine years later, the historian Herbert Aptheker published his pioneering study, American Negro Slave Revolts, to set the record straight. Aptheker defined a slave revolt as an action involving 10 or more slaves, with “freedom as the apparent aim [and] contemporary references labeling the event as an uprising, plot, insurrection, or the equivalent of these.” In all, Aptheker says, he “has found records of approximately two hundred and fifty revolts and conspiracies in the history of American Negro slavery.” Other scholars have found as many as 313.

1. Stono Rebellion, 1739 (in South Carolina)
2. The New York City Conspiracy of 1741
3. Gabriel’s Conspiracy, 1800 (in Virginia)
4. German Coast Uprising, 1811 (in Louisiana)
5. Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831 (in Virginia)

The heroism and sacrifices of these slave insurrectionists would be a prelude to the noble performance of some 200,000 black men who served so very courageously in the Civil War, the war that finally put an end to the evil institution that in 1860 chained some 3.9 million human beings to perpetual bondage.

There were plenty of slave revolts elsewhere in the New World, like in Haiti, Cuba, Suriname, and Brazil. The Haiti one succeeded in making that territory an independent nation, though that nation ended up having to pay a heavy indemnity to France about lost property.

 

[lpetrich]

H.R.7232 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): To amend title 5, United States Code, to establish Juneteenth Independence Day as a Federal holiday, and for other purposes. | Congress.gov | Library of Congress -- Introduced by Rep. Jackson Lee, Sheila [D-TX-18], it now has 102 cosponsors with 74 original, all Democrats except for 4 Republicans.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I'm thrilled that so many people suddenly know about the holiday! We certainly weren't taught about it in school, I never so much as heard of Juneteenth til I started attending Pride celebrations in my late twenties.

I'm keen on the idea of nationalizing the holiday, though of course it will go the way of Labor Day if enacted, its original purpose forgotten immediately to most... Still, for those who do celebrate, they'd be able to do so with less fear of persecution, at least if they work for the government.

It's funny how the American labour day isn't on the actual (International) labour day, 1'st of May. The International one was created to commemorate an American worker's event, which then the Americans promptly forgot.

 

[Toni]

I'm thrilled that so many people suddenly know about the holiday! We certainly weren't taught about it in school, I never so much as heard of Juneteenth til I started attending Pride celebrations in my late twenties.

I'm keen on the idea of nationalizing the holiday, though of course it will go the way of Labor Day if enacted, its original purpose forgotten immediately to most... Still, for those who do celebrate, they'd be able to do so with less fear of persecution, at least if they work for the government.

It's funny how the American labour day isn't on the actual (International) labour day, 1'st of May. The International one was created to commemorate an American worker's event, which then the Americans promptly forgot.

Labor Day in the US was first commemorated in 1882. The first parade in NYC was in 1887.

International Labor day was first celebrated in 1889

 

[DrZoidberg]

I'm thrilled that so many people suddenly know about the holiday! We certainly weren't taught about it in school, I never so much as heard of Juneteenth til I started attending Pride celebrations in my late twenties.

I'm keen on the idea of nationalizing the holiday, though of course it will go the way of Labor Day if enacted, its original purpose forgotten immediately to most... Still, for those who do celebrate, they'd be able to do so with less fear of persecution, at least if they work for the government.

It's funny how the American labour day isn't on the actual (International) labour day, 1'st of May. The International one was created to commemorate an American worker's event, which then the Americans promptly forgot.

Labor Day in the US was first commemorated in 1882. The first parade in NYC was in 1887.

International Labor day was first celebrated in 1889

Yes. The world communist international decided that all socialists should celebrate together on the same day. The Americans did not give a fuck

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Down here in Texas, Juneteenth has long been celebrated. For decades now.

 

[Testy Calibrate]

I'm thrilled that so many people suddenly know about the holiday! We certainly weren't taught about it in school, I never so much as heard of Juneteenth til I started attending Pride celebrations in my late twenties.

I'm keen on the idea of nationalizing the holiday, though of course it will go the way of Labor Day if enacted, its original purpose forgotten immediately to most... Still, for those who do celebrate, they'd be able to do so with less fear of persecution, at least if they work for the government.

I hadn't heard about it till Trump scheduled a rally on it. There's a good indication of the power of marginalization.

 

[Axulus]

Labor Day in the US was first commemorated in 1882. The first parade in NYC was in 1887.

International Labor day was first celebrated in 1889

Yes. The world communist international decided that all socialists should celebrate together on the same day. The Americans did not give a fuck

And its a good thing the US doesn't give a fuck. Labor day is always on a Monday in the US, which makes it much more convenient to take a vacation over the extended weekend without having to take additional time off work and/or to take a family trip without the kids having to miss school. It is far more rational to have national holidays scheduled on a Friday or a Monday for this reason.

However, this in no way prevents any socialists in the US from celebrating whatever they want whenever they want.