A New Beginning & The Work Ahead

This day in history celebrates a monumental end, as well as a significant beginning.

Word of a Union victory, backed by uniformed troops to deliver and enforce the news, at last arrived to the furthest reaches of enslaved people in the U.S. in Galveston, Texas.

Freedom from state-sanctioned slavery had officially arrived.

The Civil War ended in April of 1865, but it took two extra months to finally enforce what the end of the war meant.

For years after, beginning on the first anniversary of that momentous June day, Black Americans celebrated this day of liberation with picnics, parades, and parties. But slowly, under the pressure and expansion of new forms of racism and increasing violence, and especially as families spread across different states in the growing nation, the tradition began to ebb.

Juneteenth celebrations were rekindled during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, however, when 100 years of state-sanctioned racism were finally put to an end by federal law.

The first state to make Juneteenth official was Texas in 1980, the place of that final arrival of Union soldiers on June 19, 1865 to inform the people of their new legal freedom. The nation followed suit in 2021.

It’s easy to quaintly believe that the 250,000 enslaved people of Texas did not know about their hard-won freedom in the far-flung reaches of the western frontier, simply because it took time for someone to carry the message on horseback in the 19th century.

But telegraph had connected the country in a web of wires years beforehand, enabling instant communication that would have been widely published. And news about the war effort had plenty of back channels to travel as well, especially among enslaved people.

The delay wasn’t due to distance or technology—it was due to resistance.

News of victory, of freedom (not to mention the formal Emancipation Proclamation made during the war in 1863), was almost certainly known by all in Galveston in April, but was deliberately rebuffed by the people who relied on slavery for economic prosperity and fought the deadliest war in American history to protect it.

The arrival of Union soldiers following the surrender of the Confederacy in Virginia two months earlier was about enforcement far more than information.

Because our laws and values are only as good as their implementation.

Just as the end of slavery was the end of an abhorrent evil in our country, it was also the beginning of a whole new nation, one that struggled for another century to enforce what well over half a million soldiers died fighting over: equality for all people and a government of, by, and for those people.

Our democracy had a long way to go in the summer of 1865, and is struggling still 160 years later, but remembering and better understanding our great turning points of the past can help us to come together and continue the work into the future.