The Most American Holiday
Dear friends,
As you may or may not know, May 20th is Emancipation Day in Florida. Emancipation Day is when the Union Army came to the capital of Florida at the end of the Civil War, read the Emancipation Proclamation a month after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and publicly stated that chattel slavery was no more. To celebrate this occasion, our city is hosting a series of events called the “Journey to Juneteenth,” beginning with celebrations marking Emancipation Day. I was delighted to attend one of the first events that was a concert by the Choral Society of Pensacola, featuring several of our members, with numerous events that will continue until after the official Juneteenth holiday.
Forgive me for going down memory lane a bit as I talk about my experiences and thoughts on Juneteenth. A few years ago, I was at Scout camp with my son when I heard about the creation of the official holiday, and I remember chatter at our dining room table about how this was a new holiday. Having grown up in Texas, the home of the original Juneteenth celebrations, I had to educate my friends and tell them to this was far from a new holiday. Since the end of the Civil War, this holiday was a mainstay in Black congregations throughout Texas and beyond.
My first Juneteenth celebration was at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Corpus Christi, Texas. I can’t remember the exact year, but probably 1988. Holy Cross was the main predominantly Black Catholic church in our area, and the one that my aunts had been members of for years. I remember brisket served on Styrofoam plates along with a heaping spoonful of beans, coleslaw, mac and cheese, and cornbread. I also remember the speaker telling everyone what the Juneteenth holiday was and what it meant. To be honest, the memory might stick with me more because I thought the name was very clever. June 19th, condensed to Juneteenth. Several years later, a long-lost novel by Ralph Ellison was released and it was called “Juneteenth,” and that might have been the next time I had heard of the holiday, and it immediately brought me back to memories of my hometown in Texas. Since that time, I’ve tried my best to mark the holiday in whatever ways I could, whether it be joining big community celebrations, helping to organize with friends, or just dropping by the university celebrations.
Besides enjoying the holiday, I’ve also found reasons over the years to hold it closer than I did in my youth. As I mentioned in other letters and talks, my family history is layered and several members of my family made the choice to pass as white, thus cloaking the Blackness in my family for decades. While I knew that some of my direct ancestors fought in the Confederacy, I didn’t know that others were enslaved by people who fought in the Confederacy. On a personal note, this was a puzzle piece in my life that helped so much more make sense. Juneteenth is a holiday that brings back fond memories of my youth, but the holiday also gives me and many others a necessary opportunity to reflect on our ancestors—for many this could mean blood ancestors and for others this could mean chosen ancestors, like the people in our past that we align with historically.
To be honest, even though Juneteenth may come across to many people as a new holiday, it is probably one of the most American holidays we have. Considering Thanksgiving only became an official holiday in the last years of the Civil War, Juneteenth is about as old, and much less fraught we uncomfortable histories. When a country ends slavery, this should be celebrated, and should’ve been well known long before President Biden created the federal holiday. Juneteenth is a recognition of what Langston Hughes had written about in his poem, “Let America be America Again.” If you read the poem, you’ll hear Hughes asking if America was ever “America,” meaning the ideal land of freedom. Hughes questions whether this was the case for most oppressed people in the U.S., but still demanding that America become “America.” Not in the “Make America Great Again” way, but more so saying that it’s always been somewhat conceptual, with freedom often being in flux for most people. But since we’re here, having put so much of our blood, sweat, and tears into this country, maybe we have no other choice but to fight for freedom. If I’m reading Langston Hughes right, we either resign to our worst impulses or encourage the better angels of our nature as we continue the struggle for freedom. After all, are we comfortable living in a land that praises freedom, but has one of the largest prison populations in the world? Can we celebrate Independence Day easily, knowing that a large section of our population is far from economic independence, much less political independence? Can we think of ourselves as free, when the rights of so many others are being restricted—including many in our congregation and community?
What I like about Juneteenth is that it is not only a celebration of freedom from slavery, first and foremost, but it is also an aspirational holiday for freedom in our lifetime. For those who celebrated the first Juneteenth, I can only imagine what that feeling must have been like to live through slavery and learn you are free. I can also imagine how terrible it must have been to witness the rise of Jim Crow laws only a few years later, followed by codes that restricted movement and employment and the subsequent racial terrorism that was inflicted upon many of those people who were only recently celebrating freedom.
So as we are celebrating Juneteenth in the many different ways our community offers, let us also continue the work towards freedom so we do not continue to repeat the bad parts of our past. Let’s celebrate Juneteenth in the way it was intended to be celebrated, with BBQs in the community and celebrations honoring Pensacola’s Black community, while always remembering the ongoing struggles for freedom and independence as our driving light this summer and into the coming year.
Happy Juneteenth, y’all.
❤, Scott Satterwhite