Oh, Freedom! Oh, Freedom over me!
Before I'd be a slave,
I'll be buried in my grave . . .
THERE IS a vogue in American holidays. Some stay in fashion, others fade. Some have their roots deep in the past, others are largely artificial constructs:
In recent years, Halloween has become a big deal rather than the kids' night to play trick-or-treat till nine o'clock. Now it's a North American version of Mexico's Day of the Dead.
Then there's Thanksgiving, perhaps the most American of holidays. It has met a felt need--to express our just plain gratefulness for the blessings of this land. And so a semi-history, semi-mythology grew up around it. Its Southern roots were largely supplanted by all those cutouts of Indians and Pilgrims that adorn elementary school classrooms every fall.
At Christmas, Santa Claus now vies with Baby Jesus in our pop culture, or they may be combined in civic displays that inevitably make the holiday a time of litigation as well as celebration.
As for July 4th, officially Independence Day, John Adams foresaw with uncanny accuracy what it would become in the years ahead--even as he understood the bloody price freedom would extract. As he wrote Abigail, this day "will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival . . . solemnized with pomp and parade . . . bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forevermore."
Mr. Adams got only one detail wrong: the actual date. He thought it would be July 2nd--the day when the Continental Congress resolved that these colonies would henceforth be free and independent states, rather than July 4th, when the Declaration of Independence was adopted. So does history surprise even prophets.
John Adams had forgotten that a true holiday needs more than the event; it needs the words.
Note how Martin Luther King's birthday began as an officially proclaimed national holiday but has yet to fulfill its potential or Dr. King's dream of uniting the nation. Every year, Martin Luther King Day seems to grow more parochial when it should be universal.
Here in Arkansas, Dr. King shares his official birthday with Robert E. Lee, which should make for a great coming-together. Instead it has devolved, sadly, into the all-too-familiar separate-but-equal arrangement, this time with the general assigned to the back of the bus.
The moral of this story: More than historical commemorations tell us what happened, they tell us where we're headed, especially if we're not careful. Toward united we stand or divided we fall. Back to slavery or on to freedom. Back to the security of Egypt with its fleshpots or on into the wilderness of freedom with all its unpredictable dangers. And opportunities.
The choice is ours. No matter how appealing it is to pretend that our destiny is determined by others, whether the master we have in mind runs a plantation or issues decrees from Washington in the name of an all-benevolent state.
Our choice depends on what we worship: William James' bitch goddess Success? The whole modern pantheon of gods displayed 24/7 on our television screens with Pan leading the unending parade? (It's called entertainment, the current euphemism for mental enslavement.) We might even choose to follow the God of freedom. Wherever that choice leads. Every year Juneteenth rolls around, observed or neglected, to remind us of the choice that is still there, just as it was for the new freedmen of 1863.
Much as freedom came to the slaves, Juneteenth has spread only slowly, uncertainly, unevenly moving in fits and starts. Just as jazz, another great American invention with its roots in the African American heritage, came up The River from New Orleans, so Juneteenth moved like a ripple out of Galveston, Texas. That's where the Union commander landed on June 19, 1865, with the news that The War was over and, by the way, the slaves had been freed--two and a half years ago.
No wonder Juneteenth has been slow to catch on; the end of slavery on this continent did not come on one definite date amid lightning and thunder. No waters parted, no great Exodus was scripturally enshrined. Instead, the wheels of emancipation ground slow and exceedingly fine. Some slaves were freed at once, others were not. Some heard about it, others did not. Some believed it, others did not.
Emancipation was more a mundane legal process than a great Voice from the Heavens proclaiming liberty throughout the land. Mr. Lincoln's proclamation was an exercise of a commander-in-chief's wartime powers rather than some great declaration that all men are created equal.
How strange: The same Abraham Lincoln who contributed two messages that still ring with biblical power to American history and the American heritage--the Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural--also wrote an Emancipation Proclamation that had all the romance of a real estate deed, and not a single stirring line.
The Great Emancipator had become, as in a way he always was, the cautious lawyer. He was careful to proclaim liberty only in that part of the land where he was sure he legally could, but practically couldn't--in the "rebellious" states.
He was using Emancipation as a weapon of war, well aware that it could backfire but also hopeful that it would spell the end of slavery everywhere in the country soon enough. Mr. Lincoln knew, and had said time and again, that a house divided against itself could not stand, and that this Union must become all slave or all free. And he was determined it should be free. And united. But when? And how?
It was all so indefinite. For a legal proclamation alone cannot fill an emotional vacuum. Juneteenth has certainly not filled that vacuum. Not yet. Its observance, like freedom itself, remains spotty. It is still largely confined to black communities in the United States. Just as it was in all those Jim Crow years, when it was an almost underground holiday, a product of folklore rather than official proclamation.
Here in Arkansas, it is officially observed the third Saturday in June. But proclamations alone do not a holiday make. This one needs to spread to all Americans.
The transformation of Juneteenth from a parochial, informal celebration into a nationally accepted one could be a slave narrative, with fact and fancy, history and myth, all mixed up. Its identity with one distinctive group of Americans, rather than restricting the holiday, should be no barrier to its general acceptance.
After all, on St. Patrick's Day all Americans are Irish. On Juneteenth, we are all freedmen. We just need to realize it. Knowing one is free is the beginning of freedom itself.
Nobody knows the trouble Juneteenth's seen. Its observance has waxed and waned over the years. It may have an obscure past, its origins cloaked in the mists of memory, but it's got a great future. Like freedom itself, it all depends on what we make of it.
We shall not be moved
We shall not be moved
Like a tree that's planted by the water
We shall not be moved
Black and white together
We shall not be moved
We shall not be moved.
Editorial on 06/19/2015