Measure of Freedom

Today is the holiday "Juneteenth," marking the 1865 notification of African-Americans in Galveston, Texas, that they had been freed by the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

Abraham Lincoln had signed the Proclamation in 1862, setting it to go into effect on January 1, 1863. It initially covered slaves held only in areas that openly rebelled against the United States, and of course it was tough to enforce in any area that Union forces had not retaken. News of Robert E. Lee's April surrender didn't reach Galveston until May, and the Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi operating west of the Mississippi River did not lay down its arms until June 2. Union General Gordon Granger and 2,000 troops occupied the port city on June 18, and the next day Granger publicly read a declaration of emancipation.

Of course, we know that the former Confederate states, beginning in the 1890s, began pushing back the rights of African-Americans until in some cases their worlds were even more restricted than before. Northern cities did not always offer much better; African-Americans walking through the Chicago suburb of Cicero, IL, were at no less risk of their lives than those who lived in the South might be walking in a "white" area of one of its cities. It would take the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to enable African-Americans to regain any significant portion of what they had lost after the Reconstruction era and problems undeniably persist today in spite of that progress.

Only four states -- Hawaii, Montana and both Dakotas -- do not have some kind of official state observance of the Juneteenth holiday. Although resolutions to create a federal recognition have been introduced in Congress from time to time they have not established it yet. On the other hand, it is on the Apple iOS system's official calendar, so government recognition may be a moot point.

Obviously the population for whom Juneteenth means the most are modern African-Americans whose ancestors were owned by other people. But it has a national dimension as well. The Declaration of Independence suggested that the leaders of the American colonies held that God had created all of humanity as equals who possessed rights simply by virtue of being a human being. Since some of those signing the document owned slaves, it's sometimes said that the Declaration was hypocritical, or at least those signers were. It seems more likely that they were simply limited in their thinking, and as time moved on we came to understand that they fell short not in their ideals, but in the execution of them.

Step by step across the decades, brave and visionary men and women have reminded America that it promises its citizens some things and have sought to elevate it so that it will live up to make those promises real for all of those citizens. Martin Luther King referred to the Declaration as a promissory note that civil rights activists wanted "cashed," so to speak, for America's black citizens as well as its white ones. The suffragettes whose victory was sealed by the 19th Amendment wanted the same for America's female citizens as well as its male ones.

The nation unfortunately took almost as many steps back after Juneteenth as it took forward to get there. But the holiday and the Proclamation it represented showed that such steps were possible, and made many Americans realize that if their fellow citizens could be arbitrarily denied equal rights, some day they might be also. Those seeds may still have a way to go before fully flowering, but without that first bloom celebrated on June 19, 1865, none of the rest might have ever followed at all.