Juneteenth: a day to celebrate freedom
Today we celebrate freedom not only for people, but for the spirit of a nation.
Updated 8:01 pm, Tuesday, June 18, 2013
When folks talk about holidays that celebrate freedom, conversations are likely to tend toward the fireworks and pomp of July 4. Our national holiday, however, isn't technically a celebration of freedom. It is a day to celebrate our declaration of independence from Great Britain and the formation of a new nation. In fact, the word "freedom" appears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence.
It would be more than a decade after that 1776 announcement until the United States ratified our Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and many decades more of legal and political evolution that created the freedom we know now.
If there is an American holiday that celebrates freedom in its purest form, that is today: Juneteenth.
Today we commemorate more than securing representation for taxation or dissolving political bands that no longer made common sense, but a very literal breaking of chains for millions of Americans suffering under the torture and oppression of slavery. It is a day that marks the elevation of property to person, and recognizes the moment when our nation herself could honestly aspire to be a land of the free.
After all, while President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the revolting states on Jan. 1, 1863, this news did not reach Texas until after the Civil War had already ended.
Only on June 19, 1865, did the bells of freedom finally ring when Union Gen. Gordon Granger announced from the balcony of Galveston's Ashton Villa that slaves were freed.
In the following years, former slaves left their plantation prisons to found their own communities. In 1872, this new birth of freedom was expressed in Houston with the purchase of an $800 plot of land where freedmen could hold annual Juneteenth celebrations. Labor once stolen was now rewarded with wages, and used to buy Emancipation Park. That greenspace is in the midst of a multi-million-dollar fundraising and renovation campaign, one that we hope will bring that historic location up to par with its national importance.
While Juneteenth was originally a Texas holiday, it is now celebrated in 42 states, and it deserves a nationwide presence. The United States cannot be the land of the free until everyone is free - that is why we celebrate Juneteenth.