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Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, annual holiday celebrated on June 19 in the United States to commemorate the ending of slavery. For more than a century, Juneteenth was observed mainly in Texas and parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. In recent decades, communities across the nation have adopted the holiday.
June 19 marks the day in 1865 when word reached African Americans in Texas that slavery in the United States had been abolished. More than two years earlier, on New Years Day, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Delivered during the American Civil War, this proclamation ordered the freeing of all slaves in states that were rebelling against Union forces. The proclamation had little effect in Texas, where there were few Union troops to enforce the order.
News of the proclamation officially reached Texas on June 19, 1865, when a Union general backed by nearly 2,000 troops arrived in the city of Galveston. The general, Gordon Granger, publicly announced that slavery in the United States had ended. Reactions among newly freed slaves ranged from shock and disbelief to jubilant celebration. That day has been known ever since as Juneteenth, a name probably derived from the slang combination of the words June and nineteenth.
Juneteenth celebrations began in Texas the following year. Within a few years they had spread to other states and became an annual tradition. Celebrations often opened with praying and religious ceremonies and included a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. A wide range of festivities entertained participants, from music and dancing to contests of physical strength and intellect. Food was central to the celebrations, and barbecued meats were especially popular.
In the late 19th century, African Americans in the largely segregated South began migrating north and west in search of a better life. Many of these blacks transplanted their Juneteenth celebrations with them. African Americans continued to migrate from the South to other parts of the country during the late 1930s and 1940s. By World War II (1939-1945), however, Juneteenth celebrations began to decline. Historians cite several reasons for this. Many African Americans, removed by 70 years or more from the 1865 emancipation, were less inclined to carry forward the enthusiastic celebrations of earlier generations. In addition, some historians note that many African Americans wanted to distance themselves from vestiges of slavery.
Interest in Juneteenth celebrations further waned during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when the holiday was associated with past repression and segregation. In some southern cities, Juneteenth was the only day each year when all-white local governments would permit African Americans to use city parks and zoos. In 1980 Juneteenth became an official state holiday in Texas. Since then, observance of Juneteenth has spread to other parts of the United States.
Today, Juneteenth celebrates freedom for African Americans in addition to many other themes, including education, self-improvement, African American accomplishments throughout history, and tolerance and respect for all cultures. Festivities may include parades, picnics, tributes and speeches, music, gospel performances, exhibitions, baseball games, rodeos, and other activities.
Juneteenth
Ellison's emblem of liberation & Inspiration for a novel and a nation tortured by race
By John F. Callahan
June 18 - On June 19, 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamationwas decreed, Union troops landed in Galveston, Texas, and their commanding officer told the weeping, cheering slaves that
they were free. That great "day of deliverance" has been known ever since by the lovely, vernacular name of Juneteenth.
Throughout four decades of labor on his second novel, Ralph Ellisondrew inspiration from the Civil War, the end of slavery and the subsequent tortuous path toward liberation.
MOST WHITE PEOPLE know little, if anything, about the Juneteenth observances that take place throughout black America. And yet, there is some underground knowledge. I was surprised to hear my younger brother, Brian, say he remembered accounts of Juneteenth parades in the New Haven Register
from the 1960s. In Ralph Ellison's letters there are fond references to Juneteenth as a day of jubilation. Writing to his friend, the novelist and cultural critic Albert Murray, Ellison speaks of "a Juneteenth ramble in the woods," and recalls "the old Basie band playing the Juneteenth ramble in Forest Park in Oklahoma City."
JUNETEENTH AS LIBERATION
Ellison, author of the landmark 1952 novel, "Invisible Man," numerous short stories and essays, was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He died in 1994, leaving unfinished the voluminous manuscript that had consumed his imagination for more than 40 years. As literary executor of his estate, I was asked by his widow, Fanny Ellison, to edit his posthumous novel.
Mulling over what to name it, I was struck by "Juneteenth," the title Ellison had given the published excerpt in which Reverend Alonzo Hickman and the young Reverend Bliss deliver a Juneteenth Day sermon in the high mode of call-and-response. Finally, I remembered hearing Ralph speak eloquently in 1973, years before I knew him, about the sources of the American language: "And when you look for the spiritual context of that language, you can be sure that some of the passion for the unfulfilled ideals of democracy comes from the voices of those black and unknown bards, as well as from my mama and papa crying in church, protesting in pool halls, cussing in shine parlors, and celebrating Juneteenth (that's what we call emancipation.)"
RIVER OF INSPIRATION
Of all that Ellison wrote on his unfinished saga of a novel, "Juneteenth" is the narrative that best stands alone as a single, self-contained volume.
Like a great river, perhaps the Mississippi, for Ellison, "the great highway around which the integration of values and styles was taking place," Juneteenth draws from many uniquely African American (and American) tributaries: sermons, folktales, the blues, the dozens, the swing and velocity of jazz. Its form borrows from the antiphonal call-and-response pattern of the black church and the riffs and bass lines of jazz. Through its pages flow the influences of literary ancestors, among them Twain and Faulkner, who, like Ellison, were men of the territory. Above all, perhaps, in this novel Ellison converses with Faulkner.
Read an excerpt from Ralph Ellison's "Juneteenth."
"Juneteenth" realizes Ellison's dream, articulated in "Brave Words for a Startling Occasion," the acceptance speech he delivered in 1953 when he received the National Book Award for "Invisible Man," of putting into a novel "the rich babel of idiomatic expression around me, a language full of imagery and rhetorical canniness."
COMPLEXITY AND ELOQUENCE
In the wake of "Invisible Man," Ellison dreamed of a fiction whose theme was the indivisibility of American experience and the American language as tested by two equal protagonists. In "Juneteenth," the two
principals are the Reverend Hickman, jazzman turned Baptist minister and Senator Adam Sunraider, a self-named, race-baiting politician, formerly known as Bliss. Ellison described Bliss as "a little boy of indefinite race who looks white and who, through a series of circumstances, comes to be reared by the Negro minister."
Juneteenth
byRalph Ellison
In different ways, expressive of radically different values and purposes, each character possesses an "intellectual depth," complexity and eloquence visible from the inside out, and, therefore, heard on the lower
frequencies Ellison had identified with democratic equality in "Invisible Man." With a level of fidelity that is stunning, Ellison conveys the intricate inner rhythms of consciousness felt by Hickman and Bliss, alone
and in profound relation to each other. "Sometimes," he explained in an introductory note to "Night-Talk," an excerpt published in 1969, the two men "actually converse, sometimes the dialogue is illusory and occurs in the isolation of their individual minds, but through it all it is antiphonal in form and an anguished attempt to arrive at the true shape and substance of a sundered past and its meaning."
The relationship between Hickman and Bliss revolves around mysteries of kinship and race. As a boy seeking his lost mother and unknown patrimony, Bliss runs away from Hickman and later reinvents himself in the guise of a moviemaker and flimflam man. He ends up a race-baiting senator from a New England state.
SOMEHOW BLACK
Ellison knew that liberation is the never-ending task of self, group, and nation.
After decades of separation during which he keeps track of Bliss through a Negro American network of "chauffeurs and pullman porters and waiters, anybody who traveled in their work," Hickman hears ominous tidings of danger. He arrives in Washington with members of his congregation to warn his prodigal son but is allowed nowhere near the senator; the closest he and his followers get are seats in the Senate gallery for one of Sunraider's speeches. There, suddenly Hickman's worst fear comes true: a young black man rises up and shoots the senator. Reeling from the impact of several bullets, the senator loses control. "Lord,' he heard," his standard idiom giving way to African American vernacular, "LAWD, WHY HAST THOU ." To his astonishment, the senator recognizes Hickman's voice responding from above him: "For thou hast forsaken me." At the hospital, he calls for Hickman to be brought to his bedside.
Throughout the unexpectedly resumed relationship between the two men, in Ellison's words, "time, conflicts of value, the desire of one to remember nothing and the tendency of the other to remember too much, have rendered communication between them difficult." But as the novel progresses, Hickman's will to remember and the senator's will to forget engender paradoxical shared and solitary acts of imagination. Hickman's fatherly preacher's presence and the blues tones of his voice stir the embers of the dying senator's soul.
At the climax of their interior journey, Hickman compels Bliss to confront more fully and honestly than he desires the long-buried memory of the Juneteenth night that sent him wandering the ends of the earth like a
biblical outcast. Under Hickman's prodding, he comes to realize with a psychic pain as searing as the physical pain of his wounds that he is tragically outcast from his true American self, which, whatever the
unrevealed particulars of his genetic heritage, is "somehow black."
A VANISHED TRIBE
Always in progress, like the unfinished work of the nation, Ellison's work may now find pause, not cessation but pause, in the gift of "Juneteenth" to his readers.
In the end, as he sinks into delirium and the fever dream of approaching death, the senator hallucinates a succession of frightening, unforgiving and vengeful black American figures, and reaches feebly for the
consolation now offered only by Hickman, the spokesman and elder of "that vanished tribe," the "American Negroes," to whom Ellison dedicates his book. Throughout four decades of labor on his second novel, Ellison found his imaginative, critical deep well of inspiration and interpretation in the Civil War, the end of slavery and the subsequent tortuous, zigzag path toward liberation. In a letter written on the heels of the Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954, he spoke of "the evasion of identity which is another characteristically American problem." Five years later, the "problem of value" was on his mind. "Which is why," he wrote Albert Murray, "those old Negroes whom I'm trying to make Hickman represent are so confounding, they never left the old briar patch. You can't understand Lincoln or Jefferson without confronting them."
THE TASK OF LIBERATION
Ellison knew that liberation is the never-ending task of self, group, and nation and that to endure, liberation must be self-achieved and self-achieving. In his novel, Ellison speaks of false and well as true liberation and of the courage required to tell the difference. Even in the face of his deepest betrayal, Ellison's Reverend Hickman keeps the faith. In the end, perhaps, his democratic faith is vindicated by the senator's belated, never-to-be consummated deathbed strivings toward "the way home," - the name Ellison gave to "that condition of man's being at home in the world which is called love and which we term democracy."
Dismissive at first of Juneteenth as "the celebration of a gaudy illusion," the senator realizes too late that his liberation is bound up with the African American communion expressed by and on Juneteenth Day. But
as Ellison hints in his epigraph, it is not too late for those surviving "[t]o become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern." Always in progress, like the unfinished work of the nation, Ellison's work may now find pause, not cessation but pause, in the gift of "Juneteenth" to his readers.
John F. Callahan is Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College. He is editor of the Modern Library edition of "The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison," and is literary executor of Ellison's estate.
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