Yes, my fellow white Americans, Juneteenth is absolutely worthy of celebration!
In his book American Slavery as It Is, published in 1839, abolitionist Thomas Dwight Weld recounted a story told by a former Virginia slaveholder named William Poe.
Poe, a merchant who had emancipated his slaves and moved from Virginia to Cincinnati, spilled the beans on some of the atrocities he had witnessed from his fellow slaveowners.
“I am pained exceedingly, and nothing but my duty to God, to the oppressors, and to the poor down-trodden slaves, who go mourning all their days, could move me to say a word,” he said.
Among the slaveowners outed by Poe was Benjamin James Harris, a wealthy tobacco plantation owner from Virginia. Harris was a cruel “master” to his slaves, and one of the atrocities he committed was beating a 15-year-old girl to death while his wife severely burned the young girl’s body.
Whippings were not unusual for slaves who disobeyed orders, and many slaves carried scars on their backs for the remainder of their lives to show it. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for slaves that were being sold to be forced to strip by their prospective buyers so their scars could be seen. A smooth back meant a submissive slave. A scarred back meant a disobedient slave.
This particular young girl, whose name isn’t known, didn’t get just any ordinary whipping. As excruciatingly painful as being whipped was — especially for an adolescent girl — the Harrises went even further.
“While (Benjamin Harris) was whipping her, his wife heated a smoothing iron, put it on her body in various places, and burned her severely,” Poe said.
The combination of the whipping and the torture was too much. The girl died. A coroner’s inquest recorded that the slave girl “died of excessive whipping.”
Harris was indicted and stood trial in Richmond. Not surprisingly, he was acquitted.
Having to go to court failed to teach Harris a lesson. Nor did it lessen his brutality. A few years later, he whipped another slave to death. He was again indicted, again stood trial, and was again acquitted.
Still later, when one of his slaves didn’t do work to suit him, Harris whipped the slave repeatedly. He then ordered the slave to cut off his own hand. The slave complied in order to stop the beatings.
Poe also told a story of a slaveowner in Goochland County, Va. who severely whipped a slave, then tied him to a tree, piled brush around him, and set fire to it — burning the man alive.
An anonymous former slave told the story of a slaveowner who paid a white man $20 for every female slave he could impregnate, so as to improve his stock. When one woman refused to be bred, she was whipped. Then she was offered to have sex with the man again. When she refused again, she was whipped a second time. Rather than continue to be beaten, she gave in.
Slavery in the American colonies is generally dated to 1619, when 20 enslaved Africans were brought ashore in Jamestown, Va. For the next 246 years, slavery was a scourge in this land — until June 19, 1865, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Tex. and proclaimed freedom for slaves in the Lonestar State. (Officially, slavery ended after the ratification of the 13th amendment to the Constitution the following December.)
During that 250-year time frame, black people in America were subjected to cruelties unimaginable. Being held in bondage and forced to hard labor from sun-up to sun-down in the extreme summer temperatures on sweltering plantations in Georgia, Louisiana and elsewhere in the Deep South was bad enough. But as the testimonies of Poe and countless others reveal, slaves were routinely beaten, mutilated, raped and murdered. Families were ripped apart — husbands from their wives and children from their mothers. Some slaveowners — like Harris — subjected their slaves to more cruelties than others, but the fact is that millions of black people spent their lives in captivity for no reason other than that they were considered inferior because of the color of their skin.
Sadly, the mistreatment of black people didn’t end with emancipation. A people who knew nothing but bondage were released without jobs or skills to obtain jobs. Throughout the South, many black men were arrested and forced back into involuntary hard labor on prison chain gangs for the offense of not having a job, especially as Reconstruction ended and Democrats regained control of state legislatures, and as insurgent paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan gained strength. Wanton abuse of black Americans continued well into the 20th century as they were denied their basic rights in many parts of the Deep South.
Today, black Americans celebrate the abolishment of slavery with Juneteenth observances, which commemorate June 19, 1865, when slaves in Galveston learned that Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation and they were free. Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021, but celebrations in some Southern communities actually date all the way back to the 1860s.
Many, perhaps most, Americans had never heard of Juneteenth until it became a federal holiday. Celebrations date back generations, but they weren’t mainstream. Today, it isn’t uncommon to see a news article on Facebook about government offices being closed for Juneteenth, or a Juneteenth celebration being planned, and see it met with “haha” emojis that are being used derisively and mockingly.
I’m convinced that many of those who dismiss Juneteenth as unimportant or even laughable aren’t racist people. They merely see Juneteenth as a politically-motivated holiday, implemented by a party they detest as a response to the George Floyd race riots.
But that makes the response no less unfortunate. Because if ever an occasion deserved to be commemorated — in black communities and white communities alike — it was the freedom of American slaves.
Count me among the Americans who despise race-baiting, as well as the politicians and pundits who attempt to frame every issue in America on the basis of race as a way to score political points. But June 19, 1865 truly was America’s second independence day.
The first independence day, you see, the one we celebrate on July 4, promised the premise that “all men are created equal,” and that they “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” such as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
But Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, and the other American founding fathers weren’t true to their word. The Declaration of Independence did not uphold its promise of equality. There were fewer than one million slaves in the colonies when the Revolutionary War was fought. By 1860, at the dawn of the Civil War, that number had grown to nearly four million. Even then, as an increasing number of Americans became enlightened to the moral stain of slavery, there were vigorous discussions about expanding slavery to new territories. That discussion was, after all, what ultimately led to war.
Racism was rampant in the American North and the American South alike at the onset of secession. Even Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, wasn’t absolutely opposed to slavery. And he was more interested in preserving the union than he was in ending slavery. He famously wrote in 1862, as war raged, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”
America would have always come to its senses on slavery. Even if the Confederate states had won the Civil War, slavery’s days were numbered. The institution was simply too immoral not to awaken the conscience of decent people. That it took as long as it did, and that it took a long and brutal war costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans to bring about the abolishment of slavery is a great stain on our nation’s past — as is the treatment of newly-freed slaves and their descendants through generations of Jim Crow laws in much of the South.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” the philosopher George Santayana is often paraphrased as saying. History shouldn’t be whitewashed, nor should it be used in an attempt to shame or to condemn. It should be hoisted to the height of public awareness and used for teaching and learning. For these reasons, the atrocities of slavery should never be forgotten, and celebrating its end — including with Juneteenth celebrations — is one of the best ways to remember.
It makes me grit my teeth to see race-baiting take place in a public forum, or to see a grifter engaging in racial politics for personal gain. But it also makes me grit my teeth to see white people deriding the creation of the Juneteenth holiday. On July 4, we will celebrate our independence from a nation that over-taxed us and kept us in a sort of economic bondage — as well we should. So how are we to deny an entire race of people the celebration of their independence from a much crueler and torturous form of bondage, the likes of which most of us could never imagine?
Not only shouldn’t we deny them this day of freedom’s celebration, we should be joining alongside them to celebrate the day that America — however slowly — began to right the wrongness of the most horrible atrocity our nation has ever known.