Zebulon Miletsky, PhD
Zebulon Miletsky is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Stony Brook University in New York. He is a historian specializing in recent African American history, Civil Rights and Black Power, Urban History, and Mixed Race and Biracial Identity and Hip-Hop Studies. His first book, “Before Busing: A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle” was published by the University of North Carolina Press in December.
“Thus spoke ‘the noblest slave that ever God set free,’ Frederick Douglass in 1852, in his 4th of July oration at Rochester, voicing the frank and fearless criticism of the black worker.”
— W.E.B. DU BOIS “BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA: AN ESSAY TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE PART WHICH BLACK FOLK PLAYED IN THE ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 1860-1880”
Someone asked me recently, “Do African Americans still celebrate July 4th?” My thoughts drift back to Juneteenth. This is a time, separate and apart from July 4th to focus and meditate on the problematic aspects of the American experience, which cannot be forgotten about—namely slavery. It doesn’t mean that they are mutually exclusive or that one negates the other, but they both must be recognized and observed. The answer is of course “yes.” It must be “yes” I told them, no one has loved this country more than African Americans. They not only love this country, and they were willing to die for it. The conundrum of sacrificing for a country that repeatedly negated Black worth and citizenship informs Black freedom rhetoric.
It was this conundrum that Frederick Douglass–whom W.E.B. Du Bois called “the noblest slave that ever God set free,” worked to address. In 1852, Frederick Douglass in his 4th of July oration at Rochester, voiced the frank and fearless criticism of the black worker, (in a speech intentionally given on July 5th) “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” He answered his own rhetorical question by plaintively stating, “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
Unlike July 4th, Juneteenth represents a different representation of freedom. With the arrival of Union troops in Galveston, Texas under the command of Major General Gordon Grainger on June 19th, 1865, slavery ended in America. This event occurred well after the Emancipation Proclamation and the passage of the 13th Amendment. Enslaved persons still being held in bondage in Texas—some 250,000 souls—were liberated at bayonet point by General Granger and his troops. Granger issued General Order #3. The order asserted the Union Army’s authority over the state of Texas based on the military order of the Emancipation Proclamation, promulgated in 1863.
The full weight of the Emancipation Proclamation—a document some have criticized for not freeing that many enslaved persons when it was first enacted—was finally being brought to bear. Because of it’s nature as a military document, and not an emancipatory one per se, it was the only thing that could free the enslaved in Texas and elsewhere in the former Confederacy with its bold words declaring “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” Texas was in violation of this statute, and the last of the remaining Confederate states to still in rebellion against the Union. This was so because in Texas slavery continued to exist in the state as late as June 19th 1865. Juneteenth is also the key to understanding “the New Jim Crow”–forcing us to rethink the periodization of the end of slavery. It also highlights the fact that there has never been a clear date for the ending of slavery. This suggests something about the ongoing nature of Abolition, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, which continues to this day.
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Previously Published on Historian Speaks
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