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Happy Juneteenth
19 June 2024
While it's only the fourth year that Juneteenth has been celebrated as a national holiday, the people of Galveston, Tex., where it all began, have always celebrated the day 250,000 people learned they were no longer slaves.
In an NPR article, Alana Wise visited the island city and talked to 67-year-old Roy Collins about the original celebration there after Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 announcing that in accordance with the Emancipation Proclamation, "all slaves are free." Collins told her, "I have newspaper records of my great-grandfather -- who was by this time, in 1885, he would have been 25 years old -- and he was given the role of reading the Emancipation Proclamation at that celebration."
Since then, the citizenry has gathered in the city park every Juneteenth to celebrate the day with picnics and barbecues.
"My father and his friends were very creative with the barbecue experience," Collins said. "They would use meats that you could recognize and they also had some meats that no one could recognize and you just didn't want to ask too many questions about what that meat was."
It sounds like fun.
But there's a cloud hanging over every party these days. We're not the nation we pretend to be. And the ugly side has become unashamed of itself.
Which just means, as the old typing test had it, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
In A Proclamation on Juneteenth Day of Observance, 2024, President Biden said:
On Juneteenth, may we celebrate the essence of freedom that galvanized the country, the progress we have made in our Nation, and all that is possible when we march forward together. May we all recommit to redeeming the very soul of America -- choosing love over hate, unity over division, and progress over retreat. On Juneteenth, may we celebrate the essence of freedom that galvanized the country, the progress we have made in our Nation and all that is possible when we march forward together. May we all recommit to redeeming the very soul of America -- choosing love over hate, unity over division and progress over retreat.
Light the fire. Baste the meat. Redeem the soul of the country. Today reminds us it's never to late for it to be a good day for it.