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Last year Juneteenth came to Berlin (Germany).
On June 19, about 100 people gathered at Bethanie — a former hospital in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, since the 1970s as a site for artists and a platform for the presentation of contemporary art — to commemorate the emancipation of African-American slaves. Because Bethanien’s long history was at the heart of progressive politics, it was the perfect place for people to celebrate the liberation of Black Americans.
Organized by an African-American woman who lived in Berlin, the full-day celebration featured people singing anthems, reading poetry, and crawling. Although our bodies were dreaded by the cold weather and rain that flowed intermittently throughout the day, our minds were warmed by the influence of love.
I’m ashamed to admit it, but it was a Juneteenth celebration I ever had. I had never attended such an event before moving from the United States to Berlin. That solution doesn’t have to endure just mine.
When I was growing up in Florida I didn’t study at Juneteenth School. Moreover, they did not want to teach me as comprehensive as the history of slavery. What I know about Black American history was that I learned outside of the school system. I was curious, and I already felt the weight of being a black American woman. I was educated in radical anti-racism with the help and guidance of librarians in my neighborhood library and my seniors. I learned as much as I could about black slavery, racism, and resistance. I learned about the Haitian Revolution and how my ancestors fought against chattel slavery and French tutelage. I heard about African American gay Bayard Rustin, who worked to confirm the gay presence in the Civil Rights movement, and who shaped Martin Luther King’s activism. But still, I knew quite a bit about Juneteenth and his meaning.
Juneteenth, a mixture of June and 19, recalls the abolition of U.S. slavery with the emancipation proclamation given by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, announced by a Union Army general in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865.
Also known as Freedom Day, Jubilee Day and Liberation Day, Juneteenth has been observed for more than a century each year. Many African Americans, especially Texans, have long marked this day by organizing rallies, parades, and picnics, reading, reciting poetry, and simply rejoicing in their liberation. African-American teacher Brittney Cooper recently wrote her first holiday experiences Is Juneteenth for Everyone? “Juneteenth, for me, has always been a fact of life, something I remembered before I knew I was doing that,” he wrote. “I remember learning in a name book, when I was young, and then I noticed that my mother often took me to my local HBCU campus every summer, which always happened around the weekend of June 19th.”
Texas officially turned Juneteenth into a vacation in 1980 and was followed by 46 other states and the District of Columbia. But in many states, such as my hometown of Florida, Juneteenth didn’t get much attention until recently.
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, was brutally murdered by police and sparked a wave of racial racism across the United States. This led to Juneteenth being placed under a national focus and calls for federal vacations were growing. Earlier this week, President Joe Biden heeded those calls and signed the June 19 law into a national holiday.
This last year at the expense of race has obviously not garnered Juneteenth’s wide attention and has become a federal holiday. He also began discussing how many scholars and activists are teaching and perceiving history in the US.
People began to demand that America’s history be whitewashed and the country’s random celebration of racism come to an end. They have overthrown slaves, segregationists and colonialist states. Recently, the U.S. Geographic Names Commission voted to remove the word “Negro” from about 20 geographic sites in Texas. These names were very appropriate and offensive to blacks, but they also showed how racism is cultivated in Texas and the vast U.S. landscape.
Since Floyd’s death and the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement, there have been more and more calls to see, discuss, and honor Black American history. Activists are demanding that the nation’s slavery heritage and psychological, material, and physical damage still cause systemic racism to black Americans, but also that the country wants responsibility for the systemic expropriation of black Americans since 1619. the first African slave arrived in the Virginia colony.
In fact, if we look at Texas, we will see that the history of the black state is in no way limited to slavery. For example, Aleshia Anderson, a human resources worker born in Lockhart, Texas, will be able to return her father’s lineage to St John’s Colony – a community built by freed slaves in the early 1870s. “It didn’t get as rich as Black Wall Street, but a lot of us are still proud of that area,” he told me.
Blacks have always been an integral part of Texas history. Black slaves not only literally built the state – cleared forests, harvested crops and built houses – they continued to be a key part of social, political, economic and artistic life after emancipation. Although blacks in the U.S. faced many obstacles, they built, created, endured, and that should be appreciated.
Today is a turning point in the United States. Demands for racial equality and justice are growing every day. The path to true racial justice, however, is still fraught with obstacles. And if we study history and truly understand it, we can build a better future for all.
As Annette Gordon-Reed wrote in her book On Juneteenth, “History is about people and events in a particular environment and context, and how things have changed in ways that differentiate the past from our time, these changes were not inevitable.”
If we examine history simply, leaving behind the prejudices engraved in our systemic racism, we can clearly see the steps we need to take to achieve true equality and racial account in America – reparations, the return of the oppressed.
Juneteenth alone will not improve racial differences in the US. However, this holiday offers Americans the opportunity to celebrate the achievements of black Americans from the perspective of oppressed (rather than oppressive) history and to acknowledge the suffering of black Americans.
Too little has been done to address the damage done to black Americans by centuries of slavery and systemic racism. Even less has been done to rejoice in how blacks grew up against this savage system of people. This is why Juneteenth, a festival that celebrates emancipation, is not only important but also very important.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the attitude of Al Jazeera’s editorial.
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