America today celebrates Juneteenth, a commemoration both of the horrors of the nation’s original sin, slavery, and of its end. The holiday traces to victorious Union Gen. Gordon Granger’s June 19, 1865 order putting the Emancipation Proclamation (issued in January 1863) into full legal effect across Texas and freeing all the state’s remaining slaves.
The celebration has since spread, especially in the South, culminating in federal recognition in 2021 by President Biden. So what, as a holiday for all Americans — a fully national occasion as Independence Day and Thanksgiving are — should we make of it? One all-too-fashionable idea is to treat black history and black life as somehow unapproachably apart from the larger history and larger life of this country. Yet that plainly stands as an obstacle to grasping the full meaning of this day.
As the great American sociologist and civil-rights warrior W.E.B.
Du Bois said in 1905: We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America. The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone but for all true Americans.
Precisely. The struggle for freedom and dignity undertaken by black Americans is inextricably linked to the larger ideas that breathed life into this nation. The oppression and struggle they e.
