Both the Senate and the House passed legislation this week to make Juneteenth a national holiday. It will take only President Biden’s signature to make it official.
I suppose we should be gratified that our elected representatives finally managed to pass a piece of legislation. The reports of gridlock in Washington have clearly been overdrawn.
I beg your forgiveness for not taking this action as seriously as, apparently, we are all supposed to.
Please don’t get me wrong. The ending of chattel slavery in this country was a major event and the story of how that was achieved should be “required reading” for us all. I want a more accurate picture of President Lincoln painted, including the reality that his support for abolition did not emerge until the Union Army needed the formerly enslaved Blacks to win the Civil War.
And I want monuments and memorials to the cruelty of slavery and the unjust theft of this land from indigenous nations and the on-going tragedy of what we call the culture of white supremacy.
I want apologies to be offered and reparations paid…even if they finally are only symbolic. I want this nation to acknowledge who “we the people” are and always have been…
I want the bad check in the language of the Declaration of independence (“that all [men] are created equal”) to be made good.
I’m not against Juneteenth being made a national holiday. But it already is a holiday in 49 states and the District of Columbia. South Dakota was the lone hold-out…one more example of minority rule in the American republic.
I am not against Juneteenth. What I am against is Congress making this token gesture while refusing to guarantee voting rights and while refusing to pass meaningful legislation to end “open season” by police on Black and Brown bodies.
I don’t want to hear about another law to deny trans kids the opportunity to play sports. I don’t want another law that will close clinics that provide abortion services. I don’t want another statement that the insurrectionists who fought their way into our Capital were just tourists. I’ve been a tourist in DC and those were no tourists.
At the very least, let’s make Juneteenth count. On Saturday, the lynching of Alonzo Tucker, the one known Black person lynched in Oregon, will be recognized and a public plaque dedicated. Money is still being raised to cover the costs, btw.
Soil from the area where Mr. Tucker was shot and his body then lynched has been collected for the Equal Justice Initiative’s memorial to the 4400+ Black Americans known to have been lynched between the end of Reconstruction and WWII.
Taylor Stewart, of the Oregon Remembrance Project, writes: “When you go to places like Germany, they tell you about the Holocaust. When you go to Rwanda, they tell you about the genocide. When you go to South Africa, they tell you about apartheid. But when you come to the United States, we don’t tell you about the difficult parts of our history.”
Given that Oregon had the largest KKK organization west of the Mississippi, it is hard to imagine that Tucker’s was the only lynching in our state.
The ceremony in Coos Bay will take place on Saturday, June 19th, Juneteenth, at 1PM. You can take part on-line. (https://cooshistory.org/juneteenth-celebration/ )
As we emerge from the pandemic, I find myself even more aware of the need to move toward some version of justice, at least toward a fuller truth than our culture has been willing to tell. Instead we get laws banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory. In Texas among other states.
Will the movement toward truth and reconciliation prevail or will the predictable reaction formation win out?
It is time. It has long since been time. We are overdue to open our minds and our hearts…all of us…to the truth of our past and of our present, if there is to be any chance of living into a more hopeful future.
It is time. It has long since been time. We are overdue.
Blessings,
Bill