Two thoughts on this Juneteenth National Independence Day.
Juneteenth is an important national holiday for all Americans who love liberty and are committed to democracy for all American citizens.
Slavery wasn’t an asterisk appended to American democracy. It was a state-sanctioned system of totalitarian terror. It negated the idea of America as a true and full democracy. Juneteenth was a key milestone in our history on par with the Fourth of July. It might even be more important as a step towards becoming a fully functioning robust democracy.
When Juneteenth was made a federal holiday by Joe Biden we all saw the conservative backlash claiming that the Juneteenth holiday is somehow divisive.
Here is Republican Arizona Representative Paul Gosar:
“Our country is divided, and the cultural and political Marxists are continuing their relentless efforts to divide this country further.
Juneteenth is more debunked Critical Race Theory in action. I reject racism. I reject the racial division people are promoting. I voted no because this proposed holiday does not bring us together, it tears us apart. I cannot support efforts that furthers racial divisions in this country. We have one Independence Day, and it applies equally to all people of all races.”
Or Republican Representative Matt Rosendale of Montana:
“Let’s call an ace an ace. This is an effort by the Left to create a day out of whole cloth to celebrate identity politics as part of its larger efforts to make Critical Race Theory the reigning ideology of our country. Since I believe in treating everyone equally, regardless of race, and that we should be focused on what unites us rather than our differences, I will vote no.”
Both of these gentlemen identify Juneteenth as a holiday of import only or mainly to African-Americans rather than a major milestone in America’s journey to fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence and our still incomplete path towards becoming a fully democratic nation of equal citizens. Juneteenth should be celebrated equally by all Americans who love liberty and democracy.
What especially stands out is Gosar’s capstone statement, “We have one Independence Day, and it applies equally to all people of all races.” I hope that we achieve a society of such freedom and equity that some day it is celebrated equally by all races but it certainly did not apply to all races at the time.
In July of 1776, White British colonists were British citizens with the rights of British citizens guaranteed by the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights of 1689. They had political, civil, and property rights protected by the courts and presided over by a constitutional monarchy. The half a million African-Americans in July of 1776 we re largely enslaved in a totalitarian system of forced labor camps that employed physical and psychological terror to control them. That totalitarian system of terror was backed by state power. In July of 1776, White colonists participated in substantial amounts of self-government through town meetings and boards of selectmen in New England towns and the legislatures of the thirteen colonies, soon to be state assemblies. From the 1750s well into the 1770s, their objection was not to monarchy but to Parliament denying them representation and their full rights as Englishmen. They kept petitioning the King to act as their champion in the Parliament.
Nor did women have voting rights before or after the revolution. White women only gained the right to vote on August 26, 1920. They didn’t fully win the right to have their own bank accounts until 1974. Still, they had some basic civil rights and minimal property rights as British subjects and their husbands represented some, though certainly not all, of their political interests.
Enslaved African-American women were routinely raped by their owners* or forced to have sex with an enslaved man in order to produce enslaved children.
Certainly, White colonists declaring their Independence from the British Crown was not felt equally by Native Americans. Among the complaints against King George elucidated in The Declaration of Independence was that,
“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
While different native groups allied with either the colonists or the Crown depending on where they saw their interests, they couldn’t help but tilt towards the Crown, as British policies before the war had tried to limit the encroachment of white settlers onto Native lands, while American colonists were eager to expand westward.
Native Americans did not gain full US citizenship in America until the passage of The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
Meanwhile, the British government ended the slave trade in 1807 and in 1833 outlawed the practice of slavery throughout the Empire. The South was violently battling to extend slavery into Kansas two decades later and then fought a treasonous civil war another decade after that to maintain the institution of terrorist forced labor camps.
Independence Day cannot apply equally to American citizens whose family members were subject to genocide, living on reservations carved out by one broken treaty after another.
So no. The Fourth of July Independence Day did not apply to all races equally, though we hope that all those who love this country and the promise of its best values can celebrate the Fourth of July equally as a step on a long journey towards a full and robust multi-racial democracy.
And many do just that. As Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in her inaugural essay in The New York Times 1619 Project:
My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal government, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace as soon as it showed the slightest tatter.
My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white plantation in Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over cotton from can’t-see-in-the-morning to can’t-see-at-night, just as their enslaved ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was an apartheid state that subjugated its near-majority black population through breathtaking acts of violence. White residents in Mississippi lynched more black people than those in any other state in the country, and the white people in my dad’s home county lynched more black residents than those in any other county in Mississippi, often for such “crimes” as entering a room occupied by white women, bumping into a white girl or trying to start a sharecroppers union.
… The Army did not end up being his way out. He was passed over for opportunities, his ambition stunted. He would be discharged under murky circumstances and then labor in a series of service jobs for the rest of his life. Like all the black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead.
So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.
I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as a people began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague connection to Africa, a place we had never been. That my dad felt so much honor in being an American felt like a marker of his degradation, his acceptance of our subordination.
Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us.
Ending Slavery Was a Big F’ing Deal
In terms of our evolution as a democracy, the end of slavery, at least for a brief period during Reconstruction when we had a fairly well-functioning biracial democracy, the end of slavery was a bigger deal than winning our independence from Britain. As British subjects, White Americans, especially the men, had substantial property, civil, and political rights, as well as substantial space for self-government. The republican spirit that had been unleashed in the Enlightenment was quite strong in Britain and the country would no doubt continue to build greater political rights atop the foundation of civil rights that started with the Magna Carta. It would have been a longer, more winding path, but in the alternate world without The War for Independence, we would have evolved in our relationship with England in a similar way to Canada or Australia.
Meanwhile, again, slavery was a totalitarian system of forced labor camps that employed physical and psychological terror to control the enslaved backed by state power. The Jim Crow system that developed to defeat Reconstruction was an authoritarian system of racial apartheid enforced by a combination of private murder and terror, reinforced by the state through legal and corrupt means. In most the outrageous cases, it simply reconstituted slavery under the barest fig leaf of the rule of law, essentially outlawing poverty through punishingly harsh vagrancy and similar laws. Those laws allowed the local police to enforce those laws arbitrarily along racial lines and then deliver Black Americans into forced labor camps.
They called those forced labor camps “prisons” so that everything had the appearance of being above board. In fact, the predicate for that was written into the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
" Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. "
A New York Times review of David Oshinsky’s 1996 book Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice described it this way:
They used convicts to build railroads, to mine coal and iron, and to fell timber, make turpentine, clear land and grow cotton. Since nearly all leased convicts were black, few whites cared what happened to them. And if the supply of convicts fell below the demand, compliant legislators and country sheriffs stood ready to increase the supply. In 1876 the Mississippi legislature enacted the egregious ''pig law'' defining the theft of a farm animal or any property valued at $10 or more as grand larceny, punishable by up to five years in state prison. The convict population quadrupled overnight. Many contractors made fortunes from the cheap labor that they could exploit with impunity. Slaves had at least possessed the protection of their value as property; the lives of black convicts had no value in the eyes of whites. Mortality rates in convict camps rose to shocking levels. The death rate among convicts in Mississippi during the 1880's ranged from 9 to 16 percent annually. ''Not a single leased convict,'' Mr. Oshinsky notes, ''ever lived long enough to serve a sentence of 10 years or more.''
It was this system, not the Parchman prison, that the Southern reformer George Washington Cable described as ''worse than slavery.'' By the 1880's the barbarism of convict leasing had become an embarrassment even to white Mississippians. Reformers in all Southern states crusaded against the system. By the early 20th century they had succeeded in getting it abolished almost everywhere, though in several states it was replaced by state or county chain gangs -- not necessarily a great improvement.
Americans, especially White Americans, tend to give the country a pass regarding the state of our democracy while maintaining slavery and then Jim Crow apartheid because we were the first modern democracy and among the first to endure. We tend to think of the country as a shining democracy just with an asterisk.
A simple thought experiment draws the question of whether we should let ourselves off so lightly into sharper relief.
South Africa has had regular elections since its independence from Great Britain in 1910, and similar to the US, had had a fair amount of elected local self-government as a colony before that. The system of racial apartheid in South Africa ran from 1948 until 1993. South Africa had an elected president and parliament. Women (White women) had gained the vote in 1930 and poor voters not long after that. I remember the end of apartheid. South Africa was considered an authoritarian country because of the authoritarian way apartheid was enforced on the Black majority, in spite of the fact that the White minority held regular elections and governed themselves in ways that mirrored how other advanced democracies function.
If we didn’t consider South Africa to be a real democracy under Apartheid, should we consider the United States to have been a full democracy under Jim Crow or the slave system?
In fact, Apartheid in South Africa was partially modeled on Jim Crow apartheid in the American South. German Nazis in the 1930s also drew inspiration for the erection of their racial apartheid of the Jews from Jim Crow.
As race law’s global leader, Whitman stresses, America provided the most obvious point of reference for the September 1933 Preußische Denkschrift, the Prussian Memorandum, written by a legal team that included Roland Freisler, soon to emerge as the remarkably cruel president of the Nazi People’s Court. American precedents also informed other crucial Nazi texts, including the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934–35, edited by the future governor-general of Poland, Hans Frank, who was later hung at Nuremberg. A pivotal essay in that volume, Herbert Kier’s recommendations for race legislation, devoted a quarter of its pages to U.S. legislation—which went beyond segregation to include rules governing American Indians, citizenship criteria for Filipinos and Puerto Ricans as well as African Americans, immigration regulations, and prohibitions against miscegenation in some 30 states. No other country, not even South Africa, possessed a comparably developed set of relevant laws.
Especially significant were the writings of the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” who spent the 1933–34 academic year in Fayetteville as an exchange student at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Seeking to deploy historical and legal knowledge in the service of Aryan racial purity, Krieger studied a range of overseas race regimes, including contemporary South Africa, but discovered his foundation in American law. His deeply researched writings about the United States began with articles in 1934, some concerning American Indians and others pursuing an overarching assessment of U.S. race legislation—each a precursor to his landmark 1936 book, Das Rassenrecht in den Vereingten Staaten (“Race Law in the United States”).
America did not become anything approaching a full democracy until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968. Even with progress like the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 and the expansion of same-sex marriage to all fifty states in 2015, we still have work to do for all Americans to live and move about the United States as full and equal citizens. Any American should find it shameful, and not just inconvenient that slavery and Jim Crow provided inspiration for antisemitic Nazis and racist South Afrikaners. Juneteenth should be a day of proud celebration for all Americans. For any American who aspires for America to be a full democracy and all Americas to enjoy and practice full citizenship, the final ending of slavery in America in Galveston, Texas wasn’t just a day of relief for our African-American brothers and sisters, it was the first day that the United States of America could legitimately be considered something close to authentic democracy. We should all celebrate it as such. A second Independence Day for us all.
*This includes Thomas Jefferson’s rape of Sally Hemmings. Perhaps not as brutal and more gentile than most owner/slave rapes, it doesn’t change the fact that Sally Hemmings was in no position to properly consent to sex with Jefferson or that Jefferson maintained his son, the offspring of rape as property rather than kin.