Two-and-a-half years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the enslaved people of Texas learned — via the victorious Union Army — that they were liberated. Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered his defeated Army of Northern Virginia to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865 and then a few days later, Lincoln was assassinated.
But it wasn’t until June 19 of that year, when U.S. Maj. General Gordon Granger, commanding the military District of Texas from Galveston, issued an order, reading:
“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.”
The last of the rebellious slaveholding states was finally under federal control. The Civil War was over, the South vanquished and conquered and Lincoln was dead, but that “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property,” of course, while easy to assert on paper, has been devilishly difficult in the 161 intervening years to make real.
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution would be ratified that December, ending slavery everywhere (including in the border states that didn’t secede from the Union). The 14th Amendment, granting citizenship to those who were held in bondage, was ratified in December 1868 and the 15th Amendment, extending voting rights to Black men was ratified in February 1870. But those changes in the supreme law of the land, as well as civil rights legislation passed by Congress, didn’t mean much for millions of Black citizens of the United States.
Reconstruction, where the federal government imposed equality using the strength of an occupying army, ended after a dozen years and then Southern whites returned to power and kept freed Black people down. Slavery ended, but segregation thrived.
During Jim Crow, voting suppression and racism made the promise of fairness little more than a taunt. It wouldn’t be until a century after Gen. Granger’s Juneteenth proclamation, during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, where unfairness in the law was finally swept away.
But even with federal legislation prohibiting discrimination, the pernicious virus of bias infects too many institutions. Even if every last American were enlightened — which is most certainly not the case — the accumulated weight of generations of bigotry, much of it written into our laws, still weighs on the nation.
Wealth and power are tightly intertwined, and the median white household has a net worth 10 times the median Black household, a disparity that adds up to more than $10 trillion. There are also differences that are too great in levels of education and health. One people we are not. There are many reasons for all of this, but the lasting burden of decade after decade after decade of injustice still makes shoulders ache.
On Juneteenth, we celebrate those who carry that weight and dedicate ourselves to building a fairer future.