Celebrate Juneteenth
What is Juneteenth?
Juneteenth, a portmanteau of June and 19th, is the most popular annual celebration of emancipation from slavery in the United States. On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger traveled to Galveston, Texas, announcing that all slaves were free. Texas was the last state in the Confederacy to learn that the Civil War had ended and that slavery had been abolished following the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation - more than 250,000 Black people were enslaved in Texas at the time of Granger’s arrival.
Immediately following Granger’s announcement and in the days shortly after, freed people left the state to find family members and to travel North. This mass exodus became known as the “Scatter.” In an attempt to maintain possession of freed people, many slaveholders deliberately suppressed information until after the harvest or cited provisions in the order encouraging freed women and men to stay with their former owners as “hired labor,” to “remain quietly,” and to avoid collecting at military posts. Those that exercised their freedom were beaten, lynched, or murdered as they crossed the Sabine River bordering Louisiana. Survivors began celebrating Juneteenth with parades, rodeos, fishing, barbecues, pageants, baseball games and prayer services in 1866.
Due to Jim Crow laws in the early 20th century, Juneteenth celebrations became less common. They were revived in 1968 when the Poor People’s Campaign held a Juneteenth Solidarity Day, soon after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1980, Texas became the first state to make Juneteenth an official holiday. The holiday has been legally recognized in Georgia since 2011 and Hawaii and South Dakota are the only remaining states that do not recognize Juneteenth.
For more than a decade, resolutions were introduced in the U.S. House and Senate to recognize Juneteenth as a national holiday. In 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and protests across the nation, Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, John Cornyn, Tina Smith and Ed Markey introduced a new Senate resolution. U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee championed the legislation in the U.S. House. In 2021, resolutions passed in the U.S. House and Senate and President Biden signed the measure into law. June 19 will now be recognized as Juneteenth National Independence Day.
CLA recognizes that this symbolic recognition is an important first step, however, the fight for racial equity must include investments in closing the racial gaps in housing, healthcare, wealth, and education.
The Women of The Movement
Sojourner Truth
Born Isabella Baumfree in Ulster County, New York, Sojourner Truth was an outspoken advocate for abolition and women’s rights, author, and one of the most revered figures of the 19th century. She was bought and sold four times before her emancipation by the New York State Legislature in 1827. The Dumonts, her former slaveholders, would not comply and Sojourner left early one morning with her baby in tow. She stayed with an abolitionist family until she moved to New York City. On June 1, 1843, she adopted the name “Sojourner Truth” and began preaching at camp meetings for the Northampton Association for Education and Industry, a community of abolitionist leaders, including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Truth established herself as a leading voice in the movement.
Her most famous address, given in 1851 at the Women’s Rights Conference in Akron, Ohio, challenged prevailing ideas about racial and gender inferiority. During the Civil War, Truth solicited food and clothing for Black Union soldiers and met with President Abraham Lincoln to discuss the plight of freed people living in camps in Washington, D.C. She became involved with the Freedmen’s Bureau, assisting freedmen and women with employment. Notably, she was one of the first Black women to successfully sue white people in the United States - her first victory affirmed the emancipation of her son Peter. She also filed and won a slander lawsuit against a white couple, becoming one of the first Black women to win a civil suit on the basis of defamation. Truth died in 1883 in Battle Creek, Michigan.
“If it is not a fit place for women, it is unfit for men to be there.”
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin was born into an affluent family in Boston, the daughter of an English mother and a father from Martinique. She attended integrated schools in New York City and the communities surrounding Boston and became a staunch supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. Ruffin founded the Women’s Era, the first newspaper published by and for Black women in the United States, and served as editor and publisher from 1890 to 1897. In 1894, she organized the Women’s Era Club, a national organization for Black women. The following year, she convened the organization’s first convention, garnering support from more than 100 Black women across 20 clubs.
Ruffin was a member of the Board of the Massachusetts Moral Education Association and the Massachusetts School Suffrage Association and a founding member of the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
“[W]e need to talk over not only those things which are of vital importance to us as women, but also the things that are of especial interest to us as colored women.
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Lula Briggs Galloway
Lula Briggs Galloway had a passion for preserving Black history. In the 1990s, Briggs Galloway, a paralegal, began hosting Juneteenth festivals in Saginaw, Michigan. In 1997, as president of the National Association of Juneteenth Lineage, she convinced members of Congress to recognize Juneteenth with a joint resolution. The bill’s Senate sponsor, Trent Lott of Mississippi, had formerly opposed a civil rights amendment ending mandatory racial exclusion within his fraternity and was a frequent speaker at the white supremacist group Council of Conservative Citizens.
Nearly a decade later, Briggs Galloway erected a monument honoring Stevie Wonder in Saginaw, his hometown. She established the Juneteenth Creative Cultural Center and Museum and was the author of Juneteenth: Ring the Bell of Freedom. In 2013, the U.S. Senate passed Resolution 175, acknowledging Briggs Galloway’s tireless efforts to bring national recognition to Juneteenth Independence Day. The African American Heritage House in San Jose, California is a memorial to Galloway, who passed away just before the community center was dedicated in late 2008.
“Education is important. There are people who still do not know what [Juneteenth] is. We’re working to get it into the school curriculum. We need to educate children and their parents about Juneteenth.”
Opal Lee
In 2016, community activist Opal Lee embarked on a 1,400-mile journey to Washington, D.C. to highlight the significance of Juneteenth. She traveled two and a half miles each day, a nod to the two and a half years that enslaved Black people in Texas waited for freedom following the Emancipation Proclamation. At 93, Lee is a zealous and unrelenting community leader in Fort Worth and a national advocate for the creation of a federal holiday. For more than 40 years, Lee has organized Juneteenth celebrations in her local community.
As a young girl, her family’s home was vandalized and torched by a mob of white supremacists. Local police officers in Fort Worth did not intervene and the event ignited a passion for activism and education in Lee. She has led and founded several nonprofits, including United Unlimited, an organization that provides fresh food to low-income families in Texas food deserts. She is the author of a children’s book, Juneteenth, A Children’s Story, a narrative that simplifies the history of slavery for young readers.
Today, she will walk an additional 2.5 miles, from the Fort Worth Convention Center to the Will Rogers Coliseum, with a caravan of Juneteenth supporters trailing her.
“We think Juneteenth is the catalyst. We think it’s a unifier. When we get a million signatures and Congress realizes it’s not just a little old lady in tennis shoes that they are going to take notice and do something.”