Category: History

The Most Important Holiday in Black America

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The late civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hammer is famously quoted, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put his own stamp on these words by saying, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” 

What is Juneteenth and why do I (and why should you) celebrate it? This day (June plus nineteenth) marks the oldest-known celebration ending American slavery and the enslavement of Black people. 

This year marks the 155th anniversary of the celebration.  

This celebration started on June 19th ,1865 as it was the day when Union Soldiers made it to Galveston, Texas, which ended the Civil War and freed the slaves. With the United States still divided over the institution of slavery and the Civil War recovery, members of the Confederacy weren’t eager to spread the word.

Note that this date was two-and-a-half years after President Lincoln’s January 1, 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact in Texas due to the small number of Union Soldiers in place to enforce that Executive Order. 

Despite the two-and-a-half-year delay, Major General Gordon Granger decreed to the people of Texas:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

—General Orders, Number 3; Headquarters District of Texas, Galveston, June 19, 1865

When Texas fell and Granger dispatched his now famous order No. 3, it wasn’t exactly instant magic for most of the Lone Star State’s 250,000 slaves. On plantations, slave owners had to decide when and how to announce the news — or wait for a government agent to arrive — and it was common for these owners to delay notifying their slaves until after the harvest. Even in Galveston city, the ex-Confederate mayor flouted the Army by forcing the freed people back to work, as historian Elizabeth Hayes Turner details in her comprehensive essay, “Juneteenth: Emancipation and Memory,” in Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas.

The first reactions to this circumstance ranged from shock to immediate joy. To realize their new freedom, many left the plantations to go North (the place known for freed blacks) or reach families in other states such as Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. 

From this year on, Juneteenth became a prominent celebration for former slaves and their descendants making the pilgrimage back to Galveston for festivities. Defying confusion, delay, terror and violence, the newly “freed” black men and women of Texas, with the aid of the Freedmen’s Bureau (itself delayed from arriving until September 1865) now had a date to rally around. In one of the most inspiring grassroots efforts of the post-Civil War period, they transformed June 19 from a day of unheeded military orders into their own annual rite, “Juneteenth,” beginning one year later in 1866.

See the source image

Almost synonymous with summertime, the traditional Juneteenth festivities included barbecuing and potlucks alongside popular foods like strawberry soda. 

Dressing one’s absolute best is also an important element, particularly because there were many laws that prohibited or limited the type of clothes slaves could wear, which were now invalid. Although early celebrations were met with resistance by barring the use of public property for celebrations, once African Americans became landowners many donated their land for celebrations, or the festivities would be held on church grounds. 

The celebrations also included readings of the Emancipation Proclamation, religious sermons and spirituals, the preservation of food delicacies (always at the center: the almighty barbecue pit), as well as the incorporation of new games and traditions; from baseball to rodeos and later, stock car races, and overhead flights.

With the social unrest happening in our country now as many cry out against racial injustice, I’m celebrating this Juneteeth as a time of jubilee and Black joy. Regardless of how racist the Confederate States were against Black people, removing the Confederate flag and statues/names celebrating the Confederacy is the most American thing any state or local government could do. Why celebrate treason?

Even though I can’t barbecue because Covid is still running around, that doesn’t take away the enjoyment or the connection. I invite you to take some time and invest in learning more about this holiday:

Origin of Juneteenth  Enjoy Cooking? Here Are 20 African American Cookbooks You Must Buy https://i0.wp.com/blacksouthernbelle.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/61s6yK8hmNL.jpg?resize=438%2C500&ssl=1
10 Thought Provoking Facts About The Emancipation Proclamation   The Meaning & Symbols in the Juneteeth Flag (Smithsonian)
See the source image

As the Golden Rule states, “Treat others the way you would want them to treat you.” If we do not take care of ourselves, we cannot care for others. If only people would do this, we would have a lot less to worry about in this day and age.

We Were Here

NykeLeave a comment

It’s Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (and my birth month xD) and although it’s coming to an end, we have to say thank you to the many Asian and Pacific Islander Americans who dedicated themselves and gave their lives for us to live the way we do.

This month, however, caused an old question of mine to resurface once-again: why do people act as if certain ethnic and cultural history and present doesn’t exist?

Hula performance at the Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park’s 32nd Annual Cultural Festival (National Park Service)

Think about it. In school, Black peoples get a paragraph or two that start with slavery (not to mention that not every Black person in America was a slave *facepalm*), maybe the Harlem Renaissance, skip to the Civil Rights Movement (maybe a pause for Black Power) and end with Barack Obama’s presidency as if it magically changed something. Nothing about the inventors, many of whom created things of utmost importance today, or our Caribbean brothers and sisters who were all up in this too. Hispanic peoples get grouped as only Mexican and even then we might be taught about Ceasar Chavez, but that’s all Latin America is, right? (*insert eye rolls*). All the history of our First Nations family is dumbed down to Thanksgiving, reservations, and casinos due to broken treaties. Then, for our Asian Pacific family, there is Japanese Internment and Pearl Harbor, Chinese immigrants (and not in a good way), and maybe some talk about Hawaii only?

Why are our histories so vague or half-true? Let me put it simply: because knowledge is power. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I am not angry because, unfortunately, this is what people do and it would take more energy out to focus on the negative rather than to correct and create the positive. I knew, even as a child learning from all the old-heads, that I couldn’t take what I had been taught at face value. That there was always more to the story, especially when a certain people group was excluded from telling their own stories and creating their own media.

Grant Hirabayashi, Chungking, China [March 1945] (Library of Congress)

For those of you who don’t know, there is a reason behind May as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. It was to honor the first Japanese Americans who came to the United States on May 7, 1843, and mark the anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869. I’m highlighting these dates, too, because it bothers me that people still treat our Asian Pacific American family as if they didn’t exist as Americans until last year and didn’t add to the wealth of American culture and history. Watching Moana should not have been the first experience of children with Polynesian culture.

But that is a conversation for another day, another post (or feel free to hit me up on Instagram).

Back on the positive side, how did you celebrate this month? Did you learn something new that wasn’t in a school’s history book?

Fake News: Black Power and Global AfroAsian Solidarity

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“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses…If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

— Malcolm X

Just the other day, my mother was engrossed in the Netflix & Fusion limited series, Who Killed Malcolm X? I watched some of it, but I knew it would only piss me off. Malcolm X is dear to me because I was born on his birthday and learned so much about him growing up, including his recognition of issues within the Black community and even something to which he had dedicated his entire life and family.

Yuri Kochiyama, Malcolm X

For those of you who don’t know, it’s been common knowledge that Malcolm X was killed by other Black people after he left the Nation of Islam. Seriously, if I were to ask my Southern family, most of whom lived through extreme racism in Mississippi, they would unanimously say that the Nation of Islam killed Malcolm X. No one knows the details, but it’s a common agreement. Even if the United States government was in on it, the agreement had to be made with people who were able to get somewhat close to Malcolm X. If you watch the limited series, there are quite a number of details that barely (if they do) make it into the history books.

Richard Aoki

That’s why I find it tragic that we still do this to each other, particularly in academia and in film. Why do we erase people who are involved or, you know, actually did the work? Why is it that Black people and Black bodies are still the butt end of the joke—worldwide? What happened to Third World solidarity? Why do people not know about the Red Guard, modeled on the Black Panther Party(1), and other Asian Americans not of Chinese-descent who protested with the phrase “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power”? Why is Yuri Kochiyama completed erased from Spike Lee’s X? Why are people unaware of Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston and other Black creatives’ involvement in speaking out against the U.S.’s foreign policy in Asia and for Korea’s independence from Japan?

I’ve spent years deconstructing cultural representations in media and studying Africana Studies and only recently did I discover DuBois’s travels to China or Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain. Where were these things in my Africana Studies classes? Why do we miss these things, especially during Black History Month?

And this is why we have stereotypes that still persist as real representations of people, to the point where even those within believe them sometimes. All I ask is that we question some of these things—even if they are made by “us.” Just question and rethink.

And always stay blessed. ; )

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  1.  Bill V. Mullen, “Persisting Solidarities: Tracing the AfroAsian Thread in U.S. Literature and Culture,” in AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 248.