American History Hit - What is Juneteenth?

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

June 19, 1865 - Galveston, Texas, a general in the Union army announced to the people of Texas that all enslaved African Americans were free. Over time the date has grown from a local to a national holiday, a marker of freedom, of family, and of joy and continued struggle that emerged from this cauldron of the war.Don's guest today is Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University and host of Left of Black.Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Galveston, Texas, June 19, 1866. A crowd, numbering 1,000 strong, is gathered at the African American Church on Broadway.

Their voices raised together, singing John Brown's body lies moldering in the ground. They've come together one year from the day when the order declaring emancipation was delivered here in Galveston, here in Texas, and they were finally able to celebrate freedom from enslavement. At the end of the Civil War a year prior in April 1865, there had been many such celebrations across the country, certainly in the north. But folks in Texas had been the last to hear, the last concentration of formerly enslaved people

to be informed of the new reality. So now it's a year later, here in Galveston, and these freed men, women, and children, having moved peacefully throughout the town, are congregated here at the church in celebration and joy. For decades of struggle still to come, through Reconstruction's failure, through the agony and violence of Jim Crow, and later the civil rights movement. This date will remind all Americans of what precious freedom meant to millions

of formerly enslaved and what it continues to mean to the nation today. This day, the 19th day of June, June 10th. It is American History Hit, and I'm your host, Don Wildman, here to welcome you to June 10th, or at least our episode on this important federal holiday in America. When the nation's celebrates the day 160 years ago in June of 1865 when enslavement was erased in Texas and therefore fully across the South. Americans have made and continue to make wrong assumptions about the institution of American enslavement, and one of them is how it was somehow dismantled. It ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. No, it did not. It ended with Lee's surrender at Appomatics. No, it didn't. Fact is undoing a centuries-old institution stitched into the culture of

a far-flung nation took time, and June 19, 1865 is now recognized as the day when Word finally reached all corners of the formerly enslaved South. And we were on our way. To discuss events integral to all this and more is Mark Anthony Neal, who is the James B. Duke, distinguished professor of African and African American Studies, chair of the department at Duke University. He is the author of a list of books, including Looking for Leroy, illegible black masculinities, soul babies, black popular culture, and the post-soul aesthetic. And at the end of this conversation, we will learn how to know more about this man's good work. Mark Anthony Neal, Professor, welcome to American History Hit.

Thank you, Don. Civil War history, complicated. 160-year-old history now. And over this time, special interests have seized the narrative imposing their versions of the truth, and then history gets corrected. It is an ongoing process. But the moment we're discussing today has been relatively obscure for so many Americans. for so long. Juneteenth wasn't made an official federal holiday until 2021. And it was at that point

that millions of people suddenly took notice of what black communities had always celebrated. Why did it take so long for Juneteenth to go mainstream? And what makes this such an important day for the nation? You know, I think in the context of American history, so many folks are not fully aware of the specific details of American history. It's not something that is really embedded in K-12, the way it might have been when I was growing up. And so folks know about the Civil War, folks know about the Emancipation Proclamation, they know about linking.

But I don't think folks process the specific details of what happens, right? That the time that it takes for the emancipation proclamation, you know, to be announced for it to be ratified in the Senate and the House, for it to literally travel around what at the time, as you mentioned, was a far-flung nation. And so it really was in the state of Texas,

and that part of the South that folks began to recognize this moment, whether it was Juneteenth, the Jubilee Day. And it was something that was really specifically important to black communities in the South. There was not really any knowledge of it, you know, for a long time outside of the Deep South. And clearly, most in the mainstream white Americans were not aware what was happening until they became become really specific demands within the last decade about making it a national holiday. There is a very specific chronology of events to understand here. You've mentioned it already. Emancipation proclamation happens in January 1863. Bold endeavor, yes, but way less than freeing the

enslaved than honestly Lincoln deserves. It does not abolish slavery in the border states, for one thing. It can be argued as a military move, a strategy, allowing formerly enslaved to join the Union Army. Lincoln had been all too willing to leave slavery in place if the South was willing to rejoin the union. Absolutely. This is, I mean, W. Du Bois writes about brilliantly, and what I think is his finest, you know, offering his book Black Reconstruction, right? Where he talks about the dynamics about, you know, how much of a ally, if you will, Abraham Lincoln was, right?

Lincoln's concern was about keeping the union together. And if slavery was one of the things that's on the table, maintaining it in certain places, in those border states that he didn't want to alienate, you know, as part of the union, There were also, you know, recommendations basically to send black folks back. You know, and this is 50 years, you know, before Marcus Garvey's back to Africa movement. So, you know, Lincoln was mainly concerned by keeping the union together and generating a kind of sustained economic union in the context of all of this. It was a difficult conversation. As you mentioned, we talked about 1863, almost a year before.

either one of the congressional bodies begin to take it on. And again, it's not even until December of 1965 that you actually have enough states who ratify the 13th Amendment for it to become officially law. The proclamation becomes kind of part of the white savior myth in an America in a way, doesn't it? That's how I learned about it was, oh, the great savior Lincoln signs this thing in all as well. That's kind of how it's taught. The surrender at Appomatomatics happens on April 9, 1865, when Robert E. Lee gives up the army of Northern Virginia, starving, strapped, beaten as they were. This misunderstanding, then, is that once Grant and Lee signed the agreement, enslave millions immediately go free and life is good. Again, misunderstood.

Yeah, I mean, there folks who absolutely benefited on the lack of information that enslaved populations had, you know, to be able to maintain the system as long as they could before, you know, eventually a light would be shined or what they were doing. And that's why Juneteep was so significant, right? It's finally when they get to the outskirts, someplace like Texas, General Granger shows up and issues the proclamation to let folks know that this is over, right? And it's an interesting critical moment, right? Because I don't think we ever fully understand the psyche

of those enslaved black folks to process mentally or mostly what they're supposed to do next. After this long process of being enslaved and raising your families, and having certain kind of social wars, that certainly they have the moment of the right to literally walk off these plantations. I don't think even literature of the period is correctly capture

or really sufficiently captured what the emotional state might have been for that particular generation of black folks. It's so interesting because, and part of the reason that this holiday matters so much, is that what is declared on that day is so exceptional. June 19th, 1865, more than two months after Appomattox, General Gordon Granger, you've mentioned him,

arrives in Galveston, Texas with 2,000 Union troops to enforce the emancipation and to begin overseeing the process of reconstruction in Texas. This is going to happen all over the South, you know, for the coming months and years. It is then that Granger reads the military degree, and you'll indulge me, I'm going to read this. It's called General Order Number Three, and it reads like this. The people of Texas are informed. that in accordance with a proclamation from the executive of the United States, the president, all slaves are free.

This involved an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves. Okay, I'm going to stop in the midst of this just because we can lose ourselves in the words. This is important. Absolute equality, he says, full personal rights and you can own property. Is that right? Is that what he's saying? I think he's making that claim. Yes.

Yeah. I mean, it's pretty extraordinary. This is why I'm trying to underscore the fact that this is what's so exceptional about this day is a federal general rides into town and reads this thing that people just can't believe, you know, after hundreds of years of enslavement. He tells the property that the property can own property. That's right, exactly. Okay, I'll go on. And the connection hereetofore existing between them, meaning the masters and slaves, as he says, becomes that between employer and hired labor. Boom. Enslaved is not just free, but is now part of the free labor force in a rapidly expanding America.

Now comes the last part. 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 they will not be supported in idleness. Okay, that's a little wiggly. Here's a whole population that's been working for free for centuries being told by a white guy that they should not depend on the government or be slackered. Anyway, this is an extraordinary declaration that this general makes. Did he write it himself? Were authorities above him aware of what he was saying? That I'm not sure of at all, though I can't imagine that there were some embellishments as he traveled through the South to various places.

I mean, when you hear that proclamation, the thing that's important is that you hear some of the broader concerns that the nation would have for this now community, these numbers are free black folks, right? The question about idleness, right, which initially, which immediately gets translated into these black codes that emerge all throughout the South that essentially criminalizes black folks for not working, criminalizing black people for being lazy. You're stuck between a rock and a hard place for these folks. It's like, you have very little negotiating power, have to attempt to negotiate a wage and a life with someone who formerly enslaves you and wholly exploited as your labor, right? And if you don't accept the terms of that

deal, you're going to be criminalized, right? Forget the byproduct of this particular error is sharecropping. And sharecropping was just as insidious in many ways, in many ways more, because while folks are being wholly exploited, now they had to pay for housing and clothing and tools. And inevitably, at the end of the year, the bill comes due of what you now owe back to the plantation and you're stuck on the plantation sharecropping for another year. Black men, in particular, who get sent to prison farms like Parchman in Mississippi, again, because of that one kind of dynamic of the 13th November, yes, slavery abolished unless, of course, it's in the enforcement of a crime, which is why we have a kind of prison industrial complex that we have now. It's, to your point, it's an extraordinary

and layered document that wasn't just about, hey, you folks, you can walk off the plantation, now and do what you want. Black folks couldn't do what they want, right? And that's not even to raise the question about what they're involved with would be in a civic life without their voting rights being guaranteed. And even when the voting rights for black men are guaranteed, they're not guaranteed for black women until the 1920s. And then the idea that, you know, you had the past laws in the 1960s to actually protect those rights of voting. It's a really complicated and layered history that is, again, not as simply as telling black. folks, you're free now. It's so exceptional. It's important. Along with Juneteenth, the word and

holiday, we need to remember general order number three. Gigantic high water mark in this process that gets everybody excited. You know, this is amazing. And as of course perceived as a threat by many others. It also goes further than what Amendment 13 will do, right? I mean, the 13th Amendment does not grant full personal rights or declare they are now earning workers. And it doesn't get ratified until December 1865, six months later. No, again, it's the idea that first of all, law gets passed in this regard when it finally gets ratified by the number of states who needed to ratify it at the time. But you're also dealing with a legal apparatus and a political and social practice.

And there are many folks in the South, white folks in the South, who were not ready to move on from the system and exploitation that existed. There are some folks in the United States now, right? You are not ready to move on from that system of exploitation, right, actively trying to bring us back to that early historical moment. So let's talk about the simplicity here. Juneteenth is a portmanteau. It's a, I love that word. It's a combination of June and 19th.

Is it known as a holiday in Texas right away? Or when did the celebrations start in black communities? The first celebrations in Texas occurred the very next year. You know, the folks acknowledging what had changed in the year's time. And again, you can just imagine. what the significance of that would have been for folks who for decades, right, had been enslaved, right? So the date becomes very, very significant for those folks. It begins to get more of a national feel as you start to see these waves of black migration from the deep

south of north, right? So that first great migration wave around 1910 and afterwards, you know, black folks leaving the deep south, going to Chicago, New York, and places like that, a second wave post-World War II where folks are going from Texas and Louisiana and places like that out west to Los Angeles and cities like that. I always joke, if you ever listen closely to the cadence of Snoop Dog, Snoop Dog sounds like he's from Louisiana, right? And that, in fact, you know, is reflective of a migration pattern from his family and many others who are out there in the West Coast, right? So it really begins as a celebration, right? And again, there's so many black spiritual and cultural practices that were intended to be solely celebrated within the context of black communities. Juneteeth is a black celebration, for lack of a better way to describe it. Yeah, exactly. The Galveston Juneteenth must be something to see in life, huh? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, for these towns and cities, these regions who have been

practicing and celebrating these rituals now for more than a century, it is a very important. is quite extraordinary, right? Everything from the red drink to the music and to the food that's cooked, right? Again, I think the only comparison I can think about in terms of black life would be the emergence of the Christmas holiday Quanta in the 1960s, but even Quanta pales in comparison to what Juneteenth has met in many of these southern communities. Yeah, you have to figure this is a population that prior to 1865, I mean, even dressing up was a big deal. We're in the finest clothes, all of that sort of thing, every Sunday, of course, but for a holiday, that was part of this. You mentioned the dressing and the clothing, but just the ability to publicly congregate

was something that they did not have a right to do. The idea of mass assembly, outside of mass assembly in a cotton field or in a church, it was, you know, there's a way to think about Juneteenth as being the apex of the experience of freedom for many black folks, right, who was still, of course, being locked in and criminalized in other ways within the South, even after the end of quote-unquote slavery. It was taken on by black thinkers at the time as a very useful process on the national basis, isn't it? You know, as a vehicle of sorts, right?

Absolutely. To be able to tell the story of Black freedom, June team provided a wonderful opportunity for that to connect. Because, again, you know, so much about this period of time is about disbursement. on a localized level, the idea of removing children and wives and husbands from families dispersing them to plantations around the region, but also because of migration, right, folks who are leaving the Deep South and leaving those kind of cultural ties that have been

established in the South to reestablish new cultural ties in places up north. And I think in that regard, June Teeth was critically important in terms of maintaining some sort of even symbolic connection to the Black South. Well, you see the pictures. I mean, I have a picture here of 1905. There's a rally of basically Juneteenth parade going on through the streets of Richmond, Virginia, of all places, the capital of the Confederacy. And these are children holding hands and men and women in fine dress blocking traffic. You know, not intentionally, but I mean, it's not a protest.

It's just there's a lot of people. And for that to have happened in the South prior to 1865, oh my gosh, you know, that's the nightmare. You never met imagine, right? And, you know, the funny part about it is that you mentioned the name Juneteenth. There are many white Americans, you know, as late as 2020, 2020, 2021, who would hear a term Juneteenth in their response is that, well, that's a made-up holiday. And it's like, well, you've got to remind folks that most holidays are made-up holidays, right?

But they're about accepting and embracing rituals that are connected to a community. And in that regard, Juneteenth has always been vitally important to many segments. of the black community, even as it was absolutely obscure and unknown amongst, you know, many others in the nation. Yeah. It's also exceptional for its joy aspect. I mean, that's really important. And that's why the dress is so important.

That's why the decoration and everything about it is about joy, isn't it? Absolutely. And it's not a joy that is disconnected from political realities, right? You know, it really is an opportunity to acknowledge surviving. another year, surviving another season, another period, and taking a moment to kind of catch your breath, right, and embrace each other, you know, as the folks think about moving forward from that period of time. In the 20th century, Juneteenth celebrations seem to die down in the face of Jim Crow and then

revive again in the 1960s. Talk about the ebb and flow through, from Jim Crow into the civil rights era. You know, it's important to remember how much black. freedom was constrained in that period between World War I and post and post-World War II. Up until the early parts and even middle parts of the 20th century, you know, lynching is still a reality. When you think about the images of black folks that circulated in American culture, in American popular culture in film and then later television in print, even in music, right? you know, black folks are being regularly caricatured in the popular culture of the time. And so black folks are trying to move forward and progress and develop political power at the same time.

Right. At the thing that's always interesting when we talk about Granger going into Texas, you know, back in 1865, the folks that he are talking to, you know, their kids aren't going to sit in American civics classes. There's no public schooling apparatus as we know, right? to help them think about what it means to be a citizen of a nation, right? This is still an experiment that's working out, not just for black folks, but also for generations of European immigrants and Asian immigrants who are coming to, right? It is a grand experiment in folks, experiment,

and folks are trying to figure out their way. And so while june teeth is a vital part of black folks acknowledging this longer history, black folks realistically are catching hell in this period of time. So it's not surprising that we see in almost rebirth of Juneteen celebrations in the 1960s, as black folks are embracing notions of public pride as they're becoming politically engaged, both in terms of electoral politics, but also very forceful political agitators like a Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael, a Martin Luther King. Right. As black folks are coming to political voice, they're also coming to their full cultural voice.

and Juneteenth becomes part of that expression. A perennial issue is that some black communities don't necessarily want to be reminded about slavery. They want to move on. That becomes a constant theme, I suppose. That becomes a constant theme, right? And of course, Juneeteenth, while it was very prominent in the sounds, it didn't necessarily resonate in the same way, particularly in the late 60s and going into the 70s, of black folks who grew up in those spaces, who had been living in the North for two or three generations, who honestly,

Like many white Americans had no idea what June Teeth actually was. The first acknowledgement, I remember of celebrating a June Teeth event, I was in my early 20s, and it was in Buffalo, New York. You know, because Buffalo was one of those places where there was kind of like this consistent connection to the South. But that was a case where you might find a pocket of a city or region in, so I say, upstate New York in this case, right? But that might not be something that's being practiced in Pennsylvania. or Ohio or someplace like that. Tell me about that first Juneteenth of yours in Buffalo. What was that like for you?

It was like, for me, I was being exposed to something that I didn't know existed. You know, there's no Google in the world yet. So it's not like I can just pull out my phone and Google Juneteenth and figure out what this history was. For me, it was a portal for me to find out more about that historical moment, but also to find out more about how black folks have celebrated their freedom going forward in the country. I think what we've discussed is so important that this white guy has basically,

probably by mistake, according to his structure that he's from, has just said life needs to be normal now. We need to be joyous on equal terms. And he just sort of says it out there. Then we get into all the decades that follow of all the reconstruction failures and so forth. But there's that day when a member of the Army comes in and says, this is how it should be. And I think that's a,

a really important factor in this. I mean, we have to obviously wonder whether not Granger took some poetic license, right? I mean, you wonder how he even delivered it, right? Was it in some sort of stoic way, or was it with a, you know, a hint of

excitement or, you know, for black folks, right, in this notion of preachers delivering the word on a Sunday morning, right? Did he deliver the word or did he just say some words? Right. I'm just circling back. because that can't be forgotten that this moment had happened.

Also very important to understand is there is no abolitionment day. You know, there is no federal holiday that says slavery ended and we're glad of it and we're proud of it. That was never set up at all. No, not at all. And, you know, I'm someone who was of a mixed bag around Juneteenth's becoming a national holiday. I think it was or is important because it does provide some sort of close. around that particular historical moment. We celebrate independence, the independence of the United States, July 4th.

We even celebrate in a country that is fundamentally anti-labor, right? We celebrate Labor Day, right? We celebrate, you know, folks who lost their lives, you know, in war, Armed Services Memorial Day, celebrate veterans. It did strike you as a little odd, right? You know, I grew up, because I grew up in the north, I grew up in New York City, I actually remember celebrating Lincoln's birthday when I was growing up of February 12 and was shocked.

You know, that was something that wasn't necessarily celebrated across the nation, right? In places in the South, they're not talking about celebrating Lincoln in that way. It is fascinating that there was not this day to kind of put a pen in the end of what this moment was. And I think it's a few things, right? I think it's folks who I think quite honestly are shableness. shamed about that history and don't want to market, right? And that's both for, you know, goodhearted white folks who are ashamed of what American history was, but also black folks who

don't want to have to engage and have to be in conversation all the time with the shame of what it meant to be enslaved. There's no question that when we see this movement towards a holiday and when it happens, and is very specifically in response to the political moment of the time, very specifically in response to Black Lives Matter and response to the killing of George Floyd. And I think outside of that context, it would not have taken on the national scale that it did. Well, that's true of all holidays, actually, you know, in their, each in its own way. It's fascinating to think about Ralph Ellison, who wrote a novel or posthumously it was produced as a novel, entitled Juneteenth. For anyone who doesn't know, he was the author of Invisible Man, a seminal writer.

It was published in 1999 long after he died. There was a scene at a Juneteenth celebration in that writing in Alabama where a preacher is giving a sermon. A short paragraph I'll read here. At the heart of the book, this happens, never mind the laughers, the scoffers, they come around because they can't help themselves. They can deny you, but not your sense of life. Just keep on inching along like an old inch worm. If you put one and one and one together soon, they'll make a million. There's been a heap of Juneteenths before this one, and I tell you there'll be a heap more before we're truly free.

I guess he's indicating the importance of the symbolism there. Juneteenth, while politically and historically we talk about it in terms as an ending, for many black folks, it is just a historical marker. There will be other moments, you know, in Black American history that will be just a significant that needs to be marked the same way. And as part of what Ellison is articulating through this character, right? There are many of these moments that occurred before Juneteenth that for whatever reason we don't have historical memory of, right, both in terms of a national scale, but obviously on a local scale, right? And if the Black nation, if you will, is to go forward and progress, there has to be many more these moments where we pause and acknowledge that we've come through something, right?

But this is not an ending, right? we continue to progress forth, right? This is not, everything doesn't become all better because of Juneteenth. It wasn't used as a, well, the lost cause movement, of course, wanted to take the focus off of slavery and put it on to states' rights as the primary reason for the civil war. Juneteeth is helpful in that regard as well, reminding us that, no, that was not the case. There was a lot more at stake in enslaving people.

It is Joe Biden who makes Juneteenth, the, National holiday. You've already mentioned this. Sad, but true, that the reason for this, the prompt is George Floyd's murder and all which happens after all in Black Lives Matter. Do you think when historians look back, they'll give Joe Biden credit for this? Or was that just inevitability? It's hard for me to think about giving Joe Biden credit in that moment for something that black folks had acknowledged and been practicing already. I just said a white savior moment for Everybody wants to know. Absolutely right.

And I understand the political efficacy of that moment for Joe Biden and why it was important for him to do what he did, right? But again, you know, he didn't create June teeth. I'm sure if you were to sit him down and have a long conversation with him about what it was, he probably can't tell you all the details. He understood why it was important to his political base, right? So you give him credit for that in that regard. But whether or not that happened, you know, at the time that it did,

Black folks were going to continue to practice Juneteenth and celebrate June teams going into the future, right? The only difference now for many folks is that your employer now gives you a day off, right? I'd like to think that many of those folks who are given a day off for Juneteenth would rather have higher wages than the day off. There is something to be said for, you know, the good or bad of the nation now kind of appropriating this day for ourselves. You know, as happy as the symbolism is, that's also, you know, taking away the credit where credit is due. It's absolutely absurd. You know, I was fortunate to do a public radio program with the great late black comedian Paul Mooney about 15 years ago, right? And it was a conversation.

This 2007 was the conversation about Juneteen. Paul Mooney, who wrote, you know, for Richard Pryor and so many other folks, had a really, really kind of sharp wit and sharp tongue about these things. And in his mind, he thought it was almost ridiculous. to celebrate Juneteenth, right, given the reality of what black folks was still going through after that holiday. And his great line was, you know, sugar got free before black folks did. And that line is always resonated for me, right, that the absurdity that a country that has so benefited on the exploitation of black labor, labor in general, that is benefited from the system of slavery would actually create a.

national holiday to acknowledge their mistakes at the same time that they're eroding the civil rights of the very people that they're quote unquote celebrating in this moment. Well, hopefully there's a tool, you know, to pointing up that hypocrisy and the work that still need to be done. Can you describe a typical Juneteenth at your household? Usually we'll go to a Juneteenth celebration. There's one that's going to occur on my campus next week. And I always think about it as a wonderful opportunity. just for folks to gather, the shell stories, to share stories to be able to be in community with each other, to be able to touch hands and hug and all those kinds of things.

Any opportunities that we get within the context of this political reality to come together and just share some time is vitally important to me, right? And unfortunately, you know, it shouldn't be simply be because of Juneteenth that we take those opportunities. The healing process continues. Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African and African American Studies. He has a remarkable resume. Where can people find out more of what you're doing today, Mark? They can follow me on Instagram at Booker, B.B. Brown. They can follow me on X at New Black Man.

And they can follow my own podcast, Left of Black, which is available on YouTube. Fantastic. Well, happy Juneteenth to you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Don. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. As you've made it this far, why not like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts? American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.