On June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger read General Orders No. 3 in Galveston, Texas. This order, given more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, marked the true end of slavery in the United States.
I recall learning about this from my dad one summer after I had gotten in trouble at school. I had been drinking strawberry soda years before Juneteenth was made a national holiday. It became a federal holiday in 2021, a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was at its height and when we saw concessions given left and right. While at first I was happy to have the holiday I learned about shared with the whole country (the day off work is certainly a bonus), which brings to mind a famous Malcolm X quote. He once said, “The white man will try to satisfy us with symbolic victories rather than economic equity and real justice.” Paradoxically, I think the state recognition of Juneteenth has diminished its true significance.
Freedom someone else gives you on someone else’s timeline. It was two years late to Galveston. It was a century and a half late to a federal calendar. Freedom given is freedom that can be revoked, repackaged, turned into a toothless three-day weekend. I didn’t sit there, suspended from school at the brink of summer, so my dad could teach me about a day off. The real meaning of the lectures, homemade worksheets, and strawberry sodas was that liberation comes when you make it happen, not by accident, not by magic, not by someone else’s decree.
This month’s issue has a lot of election coverage. Just like I said last month, we are swimming in promises right now. Candidates left and right are telling us what they will do for us. To those promises, I say that if your freedom depends entirely on who wins in November, what you have is not freedom. Once again, I recall my message in our paper last month: I want this paper to encourage people to take action for themselves. I meant it then, and I mean it more now. Go vote, bring your neighbor, bring your abuela, your brothers, sisters, cats, dogs, but know that the ballot is by no means where participation ends. The real work is what happens between elections. The organizing, the showing up to the city council, the mutual aid, the coalition building.
Juneteenth reminds us that proclamations do not free people. People free people. The question is, are we waiting to be freed, or are we already doing the work of freeing ourselves and each other?
Happy Juneteenth.
