June 21, 2024
Dear Interested Readers,
Reflecting On The Real Significance of Juneteenth
Our newest national holiday, Juneteenth, was celebrated this past Wednesday, June 19th. It was well publicized, but my assumption is that for many Americans the day passed without much interest. For many of us the day might have been more of an inconvenience than a celebration.
A lack of awareness about the holiday, its history, or a consensus that it represents our “second Independence Day” may be another example of how difficult it is for many Americans to think about slavery, the greatest stain on the history of our nation. Perhaps the ambiguity and misinformation about the day arose from the fact that there was not one specific day when slavery ended across the land, and when attempts at reconstruction were abandoned with the Compromise of 1877, new forms of oppression and inequality quickly emerged.
Perhaps it should not be a surprise that we have incontrovertible evidence of racial inequality and implicit bias in healthcare when we can’t get our history straight about slavery, the true cause of the Civil War, or the continuing oppression of Black Americans that followed for more than one hundred years after Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation on January 1, 1863. If you were from another planet and read the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that was ratified on December 6, 1865, you might conclude that its passage assured equality, and every citizen forever after had the same rights and expectations. We all know that neither the Thirteenth, the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, or the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 established equality. Sadly, staggering inequality still exists even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the election of an African American president in 2008. Legislation and Constitutional amendments haven’t had the power to make equality for everyone a priority for many Americans who more than ever seem to be focused on themselves rather than the community To this day, there are still barriers to voting for many African Americans.
In my mind, our new holiday should be more a reminder of what we still need to accomplish than a celebration of some permanent achievement. Our resistance to diversity, equity, and inclusion has grown steadily as legislatures in many of our states ban the discussion of critical race theory, try to hide much of our history from students, and pass new laws that will make voting difficult for many minority groups.
I applaud Juneteenth for the spirit behind it, but I fear that some may use it as a celebration of a huge task that has not been completed. You may have in-depth knowledge of what has led up to June 19 becoming a national holiday, but for continuity, I will hit the high points of its interesting history.
Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation freed the slaves in the Confederate states and for practical purposes was limited to territories controlled by Union forces. Ironically,it did not free the slaves in states that were still in the Union. News of the surrender by Robert E. Lee at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, took a while to travel west. Texas was the most western state of the Confederacy. In the west, as late as mid-June 1865, there were still Confederate soldiers who did not know the war was over and there was territory that was not under the secure control of Union forces. As the story goes, the enslaved people of Texas first learned that they were free when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston on June 19, 1865.
An article from The National Museum of African American History and Culture, a part of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, gives a good overview:
Even though the Emancipation Proclamation was made effective in 1863, it could not be implemented in places still under Confederate control. As a result, in the westernmost Confederate state of Texas, enslaved people would not be free until much later. Freedom finally came on June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. The army announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved black people in the state, were free by executive decree. This day came to be known as “Juneteenth,” by the newly freed people in Texas.
I think their report is “sugarcoated.” Further along, they write:
Juneteenth marks our country’s second independence day. Although it has long [been] celebrated in the African American community, this monumental event remains largely unknown to most Americans.
The historical legacy of Juneteenth shows the value of never giving up hope in uncertain times.
Charles Blow of The New York Times published an opinion piece on Wednesday that has less sugar and refutes the idea that people in Texas had not known of the Emancipation Proclamation. I have bolded an important point that he makes:
Last week at a Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn of the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris said that on June 19, 1865, after Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, “The enslaved people of Texas learned they were free.” On that day, she said, “they claimed their freedom.”
With those words, Harris, who stood alongside President Biden when he admirably signed the legislation that made Juneteenth a federal holiday, expressed a common oversimplification, one born of our tendency to conjugate history’s complexities: Although it’s a mark of progress to commemorate the end of American slavery, it’s imperative that we continue to underscore the myriad ways in which Black freedom was restricted long after that first Juneteenth.
To start, there is some debate over whether most of the estimated 250,000 enslaved people in Texas at the time didn’t know about the Emancipation Proclamation. As the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. told me recently, “I have never met a scholar who believes that’s true.”
I was presented with evidence this week of just how complicated and confusing distant history can be. I was flabbergasted as I was listening to a public health podcast (on June 17) from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health where its dean responsible for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the school repeatedly referred to the date of the event in Galveston as June 19, 1863. Despite the error that was not noted by the interviewer nor apparently in the production process, I would enthusiastically recommend the podcast to you because it nicely positions the importance of Juneteenth in the struggle for equity in healthcare as the dean outlines the atrocities of slavery between 1619 and 1865 and the continuing crimes against African Americans and the lack of equity between 1865 and today. If we have become bored with the complaints related to slavery and the continuing injustices since 1865, perhaps we should enact policies that resolve the inequities and make retribution for the harm done to millions of people over the years. If those things happened, they would deserve a week of holidays for celebration.
If you are a regular reader of these notes you know that I lived in Texas from age eight to sixteen when my family returned to South Carolina, my father’s home state. I was a good student. As evidence of that fact, I am proud to report that I won the D.A.R. medal for the best student in American History in the eighth grade. At that time, Texas history was a required seventh-grade course, and I was also an enthusiastic consumer of Texas history. Somewhere, either in school or in the community, I learned that the Black population of Texas celebrated Juneteenth. At the time it was a curiosity to me because I was living in a society that was strictly segregated. There were Spanish-speaking students in my school, but even after the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, our schools and our community were strictly segregated.
Before moving to Texas when I was eight, we had lived in Oklahoma which had very strict segregation. In Oklahoma, there were over fifty “all Black” towns. One of the oldest of those towns, Liberty, was near our home in Okmulgee, the capital of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Whether it was true or not, in my child’s mind, I thought my mother’s housekeeper and my nanny were Native American because African Americans were not allowed to be in town after dark. This strange history of all Black towns in Oklahoma is well documented by the Oklahoma Historical Society. In an article entitled All Black Towns, we read:
In those towns African Americans lived free from the prejudices and brutality found in other racially mixed communities of the Midwest and the South. African Americans in Oklahoma and Indian Territories would create their own communities for many reasons. Escape from discrimination and abuse would be a driving factor. All-Black settlements offered the advantage of being able to depend on neighbors for financial assistance and of having open markets for crops. Arthur Tolson, a pioneering historian of blacks in Oklahoma, asserts that many African Americans turned to “ideologies of economic advancement, self-help, and racial solidarity.”
On June 19, 1865, no one knew that “Reconstruction” would be a failure, and a new form of slavery and abuse would evolve in the South as the soldiers of the Confederacy were pardoned, and lynchings, denial of rights, and the loss of the privilege to vote were negated by poll taxes, literacy requirements, and outright intimidation. One particularly offensive practice was the mass incarceration of Black men who were then “rented” to white landowners to do the work that had previously been done by slaves.
I fear that without allowing the history of slavery, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and other more recent oppressive actions like redlining to be taught in our schools, it will be increasingly difficult over the years to come to make progress toward equity in all of society as well as in healthcare. Juneteenth is important as another reminder of human suffering from times past and the immediate joy and relief of thinking that it is over. Perhaps its greatest benefit is as a warning of how fragile past accomplishments might be in the future.
In his column, Charles Blow points out that immediately after the Union officer, General Gordon Granger informed the Black population of Galveston that they were free he continued by describing a restriction on their freedom. Blow writes:
…the Union general Gordon Granger delivered General Order No. 3, which said “the connection heretofore existing” between “former masters and slaves” would become “that between employer and hired labor” and that “freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages.”
…A notice from Granger published days later in The Galveston Daily News informed the public that “no persons formerly slaves will be permitted to travel on the public thoroughfares without passes or permits from their employers.” In other words, white people would still dictate where Black people could be…
It was a strange introduction to freedom. I wish that Juneteenth was truly a “second Independence Day.” A more realistic appreciation of the day would be that it was another milestone on a very long and difficult journey toward the America we have always wanted to be but have not yet become. Blow says it better than I.
Perhaps the best way to consider Juneteenth is not as the moment Black people attained freedom but as a moment in the long-running struggle to realize freedom. When slavery is replaced by a succession of systems — Black codes, Jim Crow, mass incarceration — that, though diminished in their brutality, oppress on the same principles, a true, comprehensive freedom still eludes.
As Corey Walker, the director of the program in African American studies at Wake Forest University, emphasizes, the idea of freedom, particularly for Black people in this country, is continuously being negotiated and contested, so “Juneteenth marks a moment in the ever-evolving and expanding project of American democracy.”
“It is,” he said, “a project that is never complete. It is never fulfilled, even at the moment of Juneteenth. And it’s one that is ever evolving to this day.”
I must believe that we are closer to equity in healthcare than in other aspects of our society. We have reams of data describing our current inequities. Solving problems is a stepwise process. Data helps describe the concern and can be a measure of progress toward a goal. Accepting that a problem exists is also a critical step toward solving the problem. Disasters and failures follow denial. I believe that most healthcare professionals recognize that inequities do exist. I want to believe that they want to treat all patients equitably. I also believe that many of the factors that contribute to the inequities in our healthcare statistics arise outside of the medical office and hospital as what we call the social determinants of health. I would like to think most healthcare professionals are willing to participate in efforts to diminish implicit bias and will embrace policies that support equity.
Juneteenth is a new experience for most of us. Many believe that Martin Luther King Jr.’s Day has been sanitized and that Juneteenth presents an educational opportunity. In an essay in Time magazine this week, we read the idea that Juneteenth, since it was established as a holiday in 2021, may be useful as a pushback on the current desire in some states to prevent the accurate description of our fraught history of racial tensions, slavery, Jim Crow, and institutional biases against African Americans. It should also remind us that equality has not been achieved and that we continue to deny full participation and opportunity to so many Black Americans.
…tensions around Juneteenth celebrations have increased in the wake of the initial bi-partisan consensus. Since January 2021, 44 states have introduced bills placing limits on the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT), often with chilling effect on all public discussions of race-specific history. As of 2023, 28 states have enacted restrictions and bans on CRT and related topics through legislative mandate, executive order, or other means. These legislative developments have, in turn, politicized Juneteenth as public celebrations of the day become a rare occasion for instruction in Black history.
Positioned as an opportunity for education and hope rather than the celebration of a sanitized story that is not completely true, Juneteenth is an annual opportunity for recommitment to a difficult continuing journey.
A World We Rarely See
I have a very talented neighbor, Peter Bloch. Peter’s family has had land on Little Lake Sunapee for a very long time. He spent summers here with his family as a boy and then moved here full-time back in the 70s after graduating from Hampshire College. For many years he made beautiful translucent sconces and lampshades from poplar trees using “wood turning” techniques. He is also an accomplished photographer and for the past few years has done commercial drone photography. Peter enjoys producing short videos of the beauty of our area and publishes them on the Internet. Recently, Peter has gone “underwater” capturing amazing videos of the scenery under our lake and on many other bodies of water in our region. His underwater photography is done with an iPhone that is in a special waterproof housing.
I lifted the header for this letter from a video that Peter published about a month ago. What you see in the header is an underwater view of carnivorous pitcher plants. The video is only a few minutes long and you may enjoy seeing the entire show. Just click here. Peter’s video includes a short description:
Adder Pond (aka Hopkin Pond) in Andover, NH is a little round pond that is one of our favorite places to paddle. It has a good boat ramp, lots of little nooks and crannies with natural vignettes. And most of all for me, Adder Pond is about the Pitcher Plants. I have photographed them for several years in the same way they appear to the human eye. But this little adventure was focused on capturing the strange plants under the surface. Backlit by a brilliant sun, the colors and textures become iridescent. Notice the reflections on the UNDERSIDE of the water’s surface.
We, and perhaps you, have been under a “heat dome” this week. The only positive aspect of the unusually warm weather we are experiencing for mid-June has been that the water in my lake is now warm enough for me to do my daily swim without my wetsuit. I wonder what July and August will be like. If the weather changes induced by global warming continue, New Hampshire will soon have the weather of Florida. My son and his family in Miami, Florida will be commuting to their jobs by boat as the water rises and South Florida becomes a North American Venice.
The weekend is looking good. Predictions are that by the time you read this letter, the heat dome will have departed. I hope you will be comfortable wherever you are and for whatever you do this weekend. Relax while you can. I am expecting that this next week will require our close attention. Trump and Biden will have their first debate next Thursday. I am hoping that the moderator will ask them some healthcare-related questions.
Be well,
Gene
