June 18, 2021
Dear Interested Readers,
Juneteenth and a Reconfirmed ACA on One Day Speak Loudly to a Legacy of Poverty and Healthcare Disparities.
Early this week, my plan for this letter was built around a review of the history of Juneteenth that would show how the consistency between the general ignorance of the term and experience witch. h the day held by the majority of Americans is emblematic of the general disinterest and apathy that manyhh comfortable Americans have had with the very slow progress toward the resolution of healthcare disparities, income inequality, and the health of minority and impoverished populations. It has seemed to me that for years “Not my problem” has been the attitude of the many people who have had no compelling reason to consider the impact experienced by the minorities and poor who as part of the “other” populations have traditionally had little option other than to accept their plight and try to find some way to survive in a game of life where they were dealt a losing hand. Juneteenth has been part of a long old old story of two worlds uncomfortably coexisting within some powerful fables that are more than stories.
I was going to focus on an issue that I thought would be painful for some, the debate over structural racism or if you prefer “critical race theory” that has demonstrated that It is hard to admit that one has personally benefited from racism and to recognize that many of us continue to benefit from the poor wages, crumbling neighborhoods, and lack of adequate programs of healthcare, education, and housing that burden so many who are not a part of the controlling and protected and favored group.
I was delighted and honestly surprised by the apparent suddenness of the event when I realized that it was likely that President Biden would sign the legislation passed in the last few days making Juneteenth the eleventh national holiday, and the first since Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was created in the early eighties. Just as I was processing what it felt like to get the surprise of unexpected good news, it happened again! I heard in a news flash from NPR and Nina Totenburg who is one of my favorite commentators that the Supreme Court had ruled 7-2 in favor of the ACA! It was too much. Simultaneously learning that Juneteenth was a new national holiday and that the ACA had survived another, and perhaps the last, attempt to use the courts to deny its benefits to millions of Americans who were either poor or unfortunate enough to have a preexisting condition was just too much. How great is that duo of events!?
I will sleep more easily now that the ACA decision is behind us. Enough said at the moment, but you can be sure that now that there is much less uncertainty about the future of this beneficial law I will be writing more about extending its benefits it in the near future. With this new clarity about the acceptance of the ACA, it was a surprise to learn that such conservative voices as Clarence Thomas, Bret Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett had voted for its preservation.
The ACA has been under attack from conservatives since the moment in March 2010 when President Obama had signed it into law. This decision opens the way to provide many more Americans with access to affordable care even though at the moment there are twelve states, states where majorities have also refused the COVID vaccine that are still refusing to accept the Medicaid expansion that would provide both better health for millions and economic benefits to the hospitals and businesses in the state. You have got to admire someone who will deny a benefit to both their health and pocketbook on the basis of a principle. I have wondered if these same principled individuals would have had the same response if the bill had been passed during the presidency of John McClain or Mitt Romney. In the same vain I wonder about the refusal of the same people to trust a vaccine created with the support of the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” even as President Trump was doing his best to create controversy around the science and the public health issues that were so critical.
Today I will continue with my original idea of connecting the importance of Juneteenth to healthcare disparities. Some of this story will be from personal experience since one of my good friends and an interested reader has told me that I am a better memoirist than an essayist. What follows is a blend.
I first heard of Juneteenth in the mid-fifties after my family moved to Texas from Oklahoma. I did not realize it at the time, but in Oklahoma, Texas, and the Carolinas where my grandparents lived and where I spent much of my childhood and then moved lived for the last two years of high school and the four years of college, there was a vigorous state of apartheid which coupled with the Jim Crow laws restricted the free movement of the Black portion of the community and denied them from full participation in the benefits of citizenship. Their limited role in my world was a given, and a result of the cruelties of over three centuries of slavery and then their incomplete emancipation followed by a brutal backlash from my ancestor’s era that had continued into the present. It is a measure of the power of culture that now more than fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 much of that culture and many of the restrictions persist to this day. This suppression made it almost impossible for me as a child to have had contact or any positive experiences with my black peers. The accomplishments and good character of older black people were never revealed to me. It was almost as if they did not exist. The same can be said for the lack of recognition for members of the LGBTQ+ community. If you ever read the book, The Help by Kathryn Stockett you have an excellent picture of what life was like for a white child in the South in the forties, fifties, and early sixties. The awakening of the author and the white heroine is somewhat similar to what happened in my life.
The separation of the races in Oklahoma was the worst. In one town not far from Tulsa, where we lived when I was a small child there was an ordinance or custom that prevented African Americans from being in town after dark. That reality forced my parents to hire a Native American woman as our housekeeper. Tulsa was not far away and the Tulsa “Black Wall Street Massacre” had occurred less than thirty years in the past, but nobody talked about it. I heard plenty about “The Depression” and World War II, but nothing about Tulsa.
In Texas, my contact with Black Americans was limited to the middle-aged Black women my mother hired to help her take care of our house and an older Black man who performed chores around the church and would sometimes mow the grass at the parsonage before I was old enough for the job to become my chore. My dad was a firm believer in the character-building qualities of sweat-producing work. By age twelve I had a small “yard work” business with several neighbors as customers. The best customer gave me five dollars and plenty of ice tea and cookies. Dad didn’t pay.
My real contact with minorities was with the Mexican-American boys who did attend our schools. My elementary school was in a “better part of town,” but when I went to junior high school there were Mexican-American children that came from other schools in less affluent neighborhoods. At that time in Texas, children had to remain in school until they were sixteen. Most of the Mexican-American boys clustered in the seventh and eighth grades waiting for their sixteen birthday.
These older boys entertained themselves in the back of the classroom and would sometimes perform little tasks as requested by the teacher. The school was overcrowded until a new junior high was built in the contiguous better neighborhood near the lake where no Mexican Americans lived so the gym classes had eighty or ninety boys under one teacher who made no effort at crowd control. The large class and overwhelmed teacher created an opportunity for these boys who were usually two or three years older than the rest of us to shake down the younger and smaller boys for their lunch money or perform other little acts of harassment on the boys who were trying to participate in the activities that the lonely teacher was trying to get us to do. A favorite game of the bystander who was faking it was to pull your feet out from under you when you tried to do pushups and the teacher was not looking. Only a complete idiot would have ventured a shower after gym. One day while changing back into my clothes from my gym wear I was bullied into a fight probably because I was a larger kid who was a good student. I actually won the fight in a convincing way. My attacker had to go to the hospital with some significant injuries, and no one ever challenged me again. I was terrified that the teacher or the principal was going to punish me. All I ever heard of it was from another teacher who was an assistant coach who said, “We wondered how long you were going to take it.”
I think that I heard about Juneteenth from either our housekeepers or from the janitor from the church. My dad seemed to have a good relationship with the man. I well remember one Saturday when my dad took my brother and my sisters and me to see the man’s farm animals. His farm was a few miles outside of town. It was a different world. The house was a small “shotgun” house with a front porch and probably no more than four rooms. He lived with his wife and several children in very cramped quarters that were far different from the large brick colonial style home with a large yard and large graceful trees that were my world. I was surprised when after we had seen his pigs, chickens, cows, and a mule that he invited us to join his family for lunch. My dad immediately accepted the invitation. I remember being very apprehensive about eating their food which seemed quite primitive and foreign to me which in retrospect should not be a surprise because even though I was probably less than five miles from my home and the center of my sheltered existence, culturally I was five thousand miles or more away in a foreign land. Whether I learned of Juneteenth from him or from our housekeeper, I did learn that Juneteenth was a day celebrated by Black people in Texas because it was the day that the slaves there were set free. It was just another way that their world was not my world.
In retrospect it was interesting that I had not learned more about Juneteenth Day in seventh grade Texas History and Geography, We learned all about the heroes at the Alamo and Sam Houston at San Jacinto. Neither slavery in Texas nor its end were ever presented as something worth our attention. Having learned about Juneteenth and its origin in 1865, I was surprised and confused when I learned in eighth grade American history that President Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. How did that fit with Juneteenth? It was not until I read David W. Blight’s marvelous biography of Fredrick Douglass a couple of years ago that I had any real appreciation of the extent of the abolitionist movement or heard of the “Watchnight Services” held in churches in the North on New Year’s Eve 1862 where prayers were offered that Lincoln would sign the proclamation after the stroke of midnight on January 1, 1863, as he had promised. Not only was slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the brutal return to near-slavery never much examined in my American History Class in the eighth grade they were slanted or not mentioned in my American History course at the University of South Carolina where the professor stressed again and again that the Civil War was fought as the South’s attempt to leave the Union because their “states rights” were consistently denied by the North. I was listening hard in both classes and produced the desired answers at test time because I won the DAR medal for being the best student in American History in my school and got an A in my college history course. I do not think I am alone. “Black studies ” are a recent invention and there is a huge effort now to take the discussion of race and the history of race in our country back to the level I experienced as an eighth-grader in 1958. Juneteenth is a noble pushback on that process. Now the question is how will this new opportunity be used.
As you think about what to do with Juneteenth let me recommend that you read an article that appeared yesterday in Vox. The article was written by is entitled “Juneteenth, explained: The holiday’s 156-year history holds a lot of meaning in the fight for Black liberation today.” If you click on Fabiola’s name you will find other informative articles that she has written on the critical issues in the ongoing discussion of race, inequality, and healthcare disparities. Here is a little of the background that Ms. Cineas offers on Juneteenth Day:
Setting the foundation for Juneteenth
Often referred to as the Second American Revolution, the Civil War began in 1861 between northern and southern states over slavery and economic power. A year into the war, the US Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1862, which authorized Union troops to seize Confederate property, including enslaved people. (The act also allowed the Union army to recruit Black soldiers.) Months later, on January 1, 1863, President Lincoln affirmed the aims of the act by issuing the final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. The document declared that “all persons held as slaves … are, and henceforth, shall be free.”
While the proclamation legally liberated millions of enslaved people in the Confederacy, it exempted those in the Union-loyal border states of Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky. These states held Confederate sympathies and could have seceded; Lincoln exempted them from the proclamation to prevent this. A year later, in April 1864, the Senate attempted to close this loophole by passing the 13th Amendment, prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude in all states, Union and Confederate. But the amendment wouldn’t be enacted by ratification until December 1865. In other words, it took two years for the emancipation of enslaved people to materialize legally.
It is disturbing to think of how many floggings, how many sales that disrupted families, and how much general misery was endured by the 250,000 slaves in Texas between the time Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclimation on January 1, 1863, and the day General Granger rode into Galveston to give Texans the story. Here is how Cineas tells the story:
On June 19, 1865, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger of the Union army arrived in Galveston and issued General Order No. 3 that secured the Union army’s authority over Texas. The order stated the following:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, ‘all slaves are free.’ This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts, and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
Still, even under Order No. 3, as historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. noted, freedom wasn’t automatic for Texas’s 250,000 enslaved people. “On plantations, masters had to decide when and how to announce the news — or wait for a government agent to arrive — and it was not uncommon for them to delay until after the harvest,” he wrote.
Finally being “free” was seen as a blessing to those jubilant people in 1865, but it’s 158 years later and the full manifestation of that concept of their freedom and equality is yet to be realized. Most of us who have no family history of bondage would not feel “free” if we had to endure the systemic racial disadvantages that even our most prosperous and contributing Black Americans endure routinely. Barack Obama’s presidency is testimony to the fact that millions of Americans felt that despite his immense talents and humanity he was not a legitimate leader for the entire nation. There is one universal reality about suffering. It is hard for most of us to fully empathize and to stay constantly engaged in the resolution of inequities that are not a perceived personal burden.
Does it take a Mother Teresa who is willing to give up all and live in the slums of a distant land to help “outcasts”, or an Oskar Schindler to do what must be done to improve the lives of people who many would consider being “other?” Schindler was converted by compassion from his life as a Nazi and as an industrialist to a higher calling. I would like to think that he is an example of a man who recognized that we are all members of one overarching group, the human family, and as our founding fathers said, but failed to ensure, we are all entitled to the same inalienable rights. Schindler is perhaps an imperfect example of someone who discarded dualist, exclusionary thinking and was willing to die or lose his fortune to do time and again what was necessary to preserve the lives of members of an “out” community whose experience he did not naturally share other than the most essential connection of our shared humanity.
I would hope that on some Juneteenth Day in the future we will all feel compelled to celebrate the realization of Dr.King’s dream:
“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.”
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
It occurs to me that our new Juneteenth Holiday will be unique. All of our other holidays with the possible exceptions of MLK Day and Labor Day are days that remind us of either of our blessings or of the sacrifices of others for our well-being. Juneteenth has been a celebration of a partial transition that is still in progress. Using Juneteenth Day as a way of thinking about was has not yet happened and could yet be achieved for everyone should be the goal. It is my understanding that for the past 156 years that is the way Black Americans have honored this day. Cineas quotes Professor Loius Gates:
According to Gates, newly freed Black women and men rallied around Juneteenth in the first year it was recognized, transforming it from a “day of unheeded military orders into their own annual rite.”
The first Juneteenth celebration took place in 1866 in Texas with community gatherings, including sporting events, cookouts, prayers, dances, parades, and the singing of spirituals like “Many Thousands Gone” and “Go Down Moses.” Some events even featured fireworks, which involved filling trees with gunpowder and setting them on fire.
At the core of the celebrations was a desire to record group gains since emancipation, “an occasion for gathering lost family members, measuring progress against freedom and inculcating rising generations with the values of self-improvement and racial uplift,” Gates wrote.
I think the last sentence contains what will be my approach to Juneteenth:
“At the core of the celebrations was a desire to record group gains… measuring progress against freedom and inculcating rising generations with the values of self-improvement and racial uplift,”
That process has room for all of us. There is much work to be done and some alive today will never see the mutual benefit in moving ahead as quickly as possible, but time has been an asset if you discount the pain and loss of all that is endured during the wait. When all is considered Black Americans are among the most patient and enduring people in history. Their accomplishments are often disregarded or even stolen. Their gifts to us all have been immense. The old sixties song that contains the phrase “when will they ever learn” is an apt description of many of us who are members of the dominant “other.”
Down At The Shore
A few weeks ago my wife announced that she had been invited to a small reunion of nursing school friends. She is well past her 50th reunion from the diploma nursing program at Roger Williams General Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. The program, like most three-year diploma programs, has ceased to exist, but every graduate of a hospital-based diploma nursing program will tell you that today’s nurses don’t get the bedside training that was once core to a diploma program. Times have moved on but the memories of the adventures my wife had as a student nurse grow dearer. Since she planned a lifelong career in nursing she complied with the times and earned her BSN from Boston College when she was in her mid-thirties. She was mostly a stay-at-home mom when our boys were young, but after they reached their high school years she went back to school again in her fifties and earned her Master’s degree in the family NP program at Regis College. She enjoyed the last decade of her nursing career working primarily as a clinical specialist in the CHF program at the West Roxbury VA Hospital. Through it all, she has asserted that something good was lost when the old diploma schools became obsolete.
I was delighted to hear that he wanted to see her old chums, but it was a three-hour drive down and a three-hour drive back. I suggested that she bring me along for the ride and we could turn the trip into a little mini-vacation on the Rhode Island shore which I knew she loves. Mid-week reservations post the COVID lockdown are easy to get so we spent Monday and Tuesday nights at a lovely bed and breakfast in the East Bay Harbor section of Jamestown. The B&B was purchased a couple of years ago by an older husband and wife who got tired of both of their lives as corporate lawyers and have found joy in cleaning rooms, making spectacular breakfasts, and generally making their visitors comfortable in a charming old Victorian just a few steps from the harbor and next door to a vacation home for Catholic nuns.
Jamestown is a very quiet version of some of the better parts of a much more crowded Cape Cod. It is also the site of some of my wife’s most cherished childhood memories. As a child, she had many day trips to the Rhode Island shore, and many of those trips were to Jamestown. While her father fished off a pier or would be “quahogging” –see the YouTube for a short introduction to quahogging– in the shallow water around the many little beaches, my wife and her four sibs would play in the ruins of the old fort at the end of the island or wade out to serve him a fresh beer on request while he terrified my wife who was the youngest of five about the presence of a “dangerous horseshoe crab” that was not there.
Monday afternoon was rainy until we arrived, but the weather cleared just in time to ride our bikes down to Fort Wetherill State Park and West Cove. If you click on the link, you will discover that the old fort has become a canvas for graffiti artists. The site was beautiful but even minus the graffiti, it was not quite what she remembered. Standing on the high rocks you can peer into the colorful walls of the old fort or turn around and see spectacular views of the cliffs, with coves below, Newport, and Narragansett Bay as it merges with the Atlantic. It is an “off the road” scene Thant was well worth the short bike ride from our B&B. On Tuesday, after the gathering of her chums, we rode to the other state park at the end of the island, Beavertail State Park, which my wife had also frequented as a child, but it too was not quite what she remembered. There was no pier and no fort. Today’s header shows the lighthouse which looks directly out at Europe. There is nothing but 3,000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean between the lighthouse, the British Isles, and Europe. There has been a lighthouse at the end of Beavertail since the mid seventeen hundreds. Click on the link to see a spectacular ariel view of the lighthouse and shoreline.
On the bike ride out to the Beavertail Light, we noted a sign to another fort, Fort Getty. It was late in the day so we resolved to check it out Wednesday morning on our way back home. Eureka! Fort Getty was the place of my wife’s childhood memories. The fort, the fishing pier, and the little bay for quahogging are all there and all within a circle of a hundred yards or so.
Things have changed a little bit at old Fort Getty. There is now a permanent summer RV community on the hill overlooking the fort and the pier. The pier that is present now may be an upgrade from what was there in the early fifties. The old fort and the spectacular views of the bay are just like they always were. Some things never change.
I think this summer will be about short mid-week trips to other places in New England. The weekends are almost completely booked with visitors to the lake. Perhaps, we will finally take in Block Island. Neither my wife nor I have ever been there which is hard to explain since she has been in New England for almost seventy-five years and I have been here for over fifty years. I think there are probably many discoveries ahead.
My guess is that there are probably places near you that you have never seen or given the interest that they deserve. It’s a wonderful country and some of it is probably nearby just off an Interstate. Most of what I enjoy seems to be far from the cities and frequently down a dirt road or as is more poetically presented by the Red Clay Ramblers in a beautiful song “Where the Twisted Laurel Grows,” somewhere past “where the hard road ends and turns to clay.”
Just across the blue ridge, where the high meadows lay
And the galax spreads through the new mown hay
There”s a rusty iron bridge, cross a shady ravine
Where the hard road ends and turns to clay…
I hope that you are vaccinated so that your summer and its explorations will be free of COVID worries.
Be well, and give some thought to the glorious story of our new holiday
Gene
P.S.: The baby loon hatched on the 16th I hope to have pictures for next week!
