Juneteenth is everyone's holiday

This one’s by Andy. When I was a kid in the 1950s, I spent four years in Japan (my father was a USAF officer). The American schools I attended (grades 1-4) were fully integrated, just like the armed forces — thanks to a President Harry Truman’s order to desegregate the ranks in the late 1940s.

Black and White kids learned and played together. It was, in my childhood view as well as now, the natural order.

Then we returned to The States;, spent the summer of 1959 in my mom’s hometown in South Texas. I saw “whites only” and “coloreds excluded” signs in nearly every public establishment. We went to see Disney’s hit movie Pollyanna and I learned that blacks were relegated to the balcony of the town’s only movie house.

I heard the N word on an frequent basis. The area where blacks lived was nonchalantly called N-Town.

My adolescent and college years were in Austin starting in 1960s. The civil rights movement and Vietnam War protests started to make a big impact.

One evening in 1968, when I was out with some friends buying a six-pack of Lone Star Beer with a fake ID, I ran into a favorite uncle, who grew up in that small town with my mother, purchasing a sixer as well.

What are you celebrating, I asked.

“Juneteenth,” he said. “See you around.”

I had never heard of Juneteenth. Days later I asked my mother what her brother was talking about. I was about 19 or 20. She explained. This is the story in a nutshell:

More than two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, and months after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, Union troops finally arrived in Galveston, Texas, announcing the end of slavery to the local populace. It was June 19, 1865.

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free,” Major General Gordon Granger read. That order effectively freed 250,000 enslaved Black people in Texas.

Celebrations started soon after with an organized Jubilee Day in Texas the following year. For a few years, life improved for emancipated slaves. That didn’t last long as Reconstruction that Abraham Lincoln envisioned evaporated into segregation, Jim Crow laws, the KKK, lynchings, “separate but equal.”

But Juneteenth was still celebrated in the black communities of Texas.

As families migrated across the country to escape the oppression in the Jim Crow states, celebrations spread with prayer services, and public readings of the Emancipation Proclamation. Celebrants ate red-colored foods (think: red beans and rice, okra with tomatoes, red velvet cake, watermelon) that traditionally symbolize resilience and joy. There was a lot of music and dancing.

In 1980, Texas became the first state to make Juneteenth an official state holiday. Imagine that!

Juneteenth is a National Holiday now, thanks to an act of Congress and President Joe Biden’s signature in 2021. Many still haven’t heard of it. And too many resent it.

Juneteenth today is celebrated across the country with parades, music festivals, traditional foods, and street parties that draw thousands. Many are listed here.

The newly finished Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, a museum, library and education project, is officially opening June 19.

It includes a grand opening weekend complete with free live performances, family-friendly activities, food, art, and storytelling across the expansive campus on Chicago’s South Side.

Presidential libraries are great ways to help your kids learn American history. We plan on visiting the Obama Center in the fall, adding to our list of presidential libraries that include Washington, Jefferson, T. Roosevelt, FD Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and LBJ. It’s going to be a road trip and I already have sights on the Eisenhower Library in Abilene KS.

PS: If you’ve never seen the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures” - we highly recommend it. Or watch it again. It’s a great mashup of civil rights, discrimination, Jim Crow, the space race, intellectualism vs ignorance, male chauvinism, truth, and power.

Also : The Help (2011). Based on a novel about racism in a small Southern town, it topped the Netflix rankings during and following the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.

Other recommendations welcome in comments.

Happy Juneteenth!