Juneteenth is arguably our most relevant national holiday. The religious holidays Christmas and Easter may be more significant to truly devout practicing Christians — a relative minority within that majority — but to that extent they are not truly national celebrations. As national holidays the former celebrates family and giving; the latter is a sort of debased fertility festival. (The bunny is its symbol for a reason.) Thanksgiving is also family and giving, divorced from its initial sentimentalization of the supposed welcome of European refugees by the natives whom later Europeans would largely subjugate, steal from, and largely destroy. (The less said about Columbus Day, beyond this, the better. The best thing about Columbus Day is Indigenous People’s Day’s appropriation of it. Italians should celebrate Garibaldi Day.)
Memorial Day and Veterans Day are mostly honored symbolically, often without the real dedication to more than perfunctory and symbolic support that comes with serious care for those who serves, beyond thanking them for their. Valentines Day is commercialized and President’s Day is sentimentalized; St. Patrick’s Day celebrates getting drunk and Labor Day is sales and lip service. Arbor Day is invisible and Earth Day not much less so; even Martin Luther King’s Birthday has been denatured as the fiery and passionate Dr. King gets recast an advocate of color-blindness without the underlying justice he preached.
Juneteenth, though — that is going to be a tough nut for the holiday hijackers to crack. It marks the last step in the formal cessation of slavery; that is something that should warm the heart of every American, but it doesn’t. (For one thing, slavery came back in altered forms; less degrading than the worst of it, but still plenty awful — some of which still thrive today.
But think back to the original story of Juneteenth — Blacks were still being held as slaves in Texas. Many slavers had retreated there to be able to continue the practice for years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed them and two months after General Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, because their supposed “owners” and those around them conspired to withhold information of their legal freedom from them. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery was passed in December of 1865 and in 1866 freed slaves began to celebrate “Jubilee Day,” the anniversary of then Union General Granger came to Galveston and read aloud General Orders #3, declaring that “by Executive Order “the people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” This was reprinted in newspapers throughout the state. (Oddly, El Paso was cleared of slavery soon after the Emancipation Proclamation itself.) Juneteenth was not actually the day that the last slaves found out about their emancipation — some farmers continued to withhold the news from them until after the autumn harvests — but it was the writing on the wall, the beginning of a process that would take a couple of years.
But my take is that our celebration of June 19 should not simply be about the freeing of the slaves, a Black American version of the Jewish holiday of Passover. It’s also about something beyond slavery. It’s about propagation and maintenance, by the government and the powerful few, of a Big Lie.
Juneteenth is perhaps the most literal instantiation of the phrase from John 8:32 that “The Truth Shall Set You Free.” It literally did so that day.
I left out at least one truly national holiday, one widely observed in my list (which I made without consulting a calendar): April Fools Day, which celebrates the joy (ideally) to be had in imposing and encountering benign lies. Juneteenth is the 80th day starting with that day, and is to some extent its bookend: it celebrates the relief to be had from release from the effect of a malign lie. As such, it represents freedom from being lied to, especially from those with power.
Obviously, a holiday celebrating relief from such lies is a dicey proposition these days, because powerful lies convince many Americans that what’s true is a lie and what’s false is true. That is a heavy burden for a joyful and celebratory to bear. But no other national holiday is better prepared to address the role that lies — not just force, not just trickery, but sheer perversion of the public’s ability to think and reason clearly — have in oppression. They were lied to — and they overcame it.
This is not the usual interpretation of Juneteenth, but the holiday as a national celebration is still young.
Epilogue
The bowl illustrating this story comes from about 20 years ago, when I was working as a summer associate in my then law firm in New York. I was externed for part of the summer with the Brennan Center, working on a Supreme Court appeal of a Florida case demanding reinstatement of rights to those who had committed felonies under the Fifteenth Amendment. So far as I can recall, it’s the only Supreme case where I’m listed on a brief — deservedly near the bottom of the list. But I was still expected to come back after work and enjoy associate parties and outings; in this case, it was at the start of the trend of people going out to pottery shops to paint unglazed white pottery with designs of their choice. I chose to inscribe mine with the words of the 15th Amendment. Now it sits in our kitchen holding some bags of tea and many more packets of Truvia. That strikes me as odds within the spirit I’d like ascribed to Juneteenth, the celebration of welcoming the truth. You’ll hear more about the 15th Amendment in a couple of weeks.
NICE! Welcome back.
And — I have my mouse working again! Anything is possible!
July 4 and Juneteenth are the bookends of the American Revolution, the two important celebrations of American liberty. Like the American Christmas and Easter. Christmas is Jesus coming to accomplish what he did on Easter. July 4 is when we said we’d be free and Juneteenth we finally were all free.
But yeah, death of a Big Lie too.
“All free” (in relative terms) for about eight years — and that’s if one doesn’t count women and Native Americans, among others..