Is Juneteenth Worth Celebrating?

June 20, 2008 by Marc Lamont Hill

Sure, black people need to celebrate winning their freedom, but is this really the right day for the picnic?

Why Juneteenth’s Not My Thing
By John McWhorter

I am John Hamilton McWhorter, the fifth. The first John Hamilton McWhorter was a slave. This Thursday is Juneteenth, when I might be inclined to celebrate the emancipation of John Hamilton McWhorter, the first.

Or not. Truth to tell, I have never quite gotten the hang of Juneteenth.

I suppose I should. What could be wrong, after all, with celebrating slaves in America being freed? Technically, Juneteenth arose to mark the day slaves in Texas were freed, but over the years it has been embraced nationwide as a celebration of emancipation.

But at the end of the day, I just can’t wrap my head around celebrating the fact that someone else freed my ancestors. It puts too much focus on a time when we were so starkly in the down position. Juneteenth seems to be about what someone else did.

Whites had been crucial to keeping the Abolitionist movement going. Certainly blacks worked alongside them: The career of Frederick Douglass is Exhibit A. And there were more slave revolts than we are often aware of.

However, we cannot say that blacks in America made their freedom happen. Freedom happened partly as the result of whites making other whites see the error of their ways. And Abraham Lincoln’s commitment was to preserving the Union as a political arrangement, which inherently included abolishing slavery. And even then, the Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves, just slaves in the Confederacy, over which Lincoln had no jurisdiction.

So, yes, blacks played a part—but if for some bizarre reason blacks had not participated in the Abolitionist movement and had never revolted, it is thoroughly plausible that emancipation would have happened anyway.

Think about it: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was something that happened because we made it happen. As we have recently revisited in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s famous comment, Lyndon B. Johnson was the one who pushed it through Congress. However, he wouldn’t have done what he did absent the ferocious tenacity of Dr. King, his black comrades and the countless black people who gave their time, energy and sometimes their lives to battling Jim Crow to its knees and changing the nation’s mind on bigotry.

Juneteenth has also always left me a little cold because of what happened after slaves were freed.

For the rest of the story, click here.

Categories: MLH
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9 Comments

1. knowledge_base wrote:

interesting article…

June 20, 2008 @ 3:02 pm

2. Tanya wrote:

I’ll wait until Obama solidifies it as a National Holiday, to celebrate it!

June 21, 2008 @ 7:57 am

3. CLM wrote:

Freedom (as well as ‘history’ and ‘heritage’) are worth noting and commemorating, particularly when others have tried to deny them. Freedom is a gift of God; celebrating it is an act of gratitude, worthy of note on the calendar, in our lives, and in our hearts.

Not all of our history (even this American experience) is riddled with dependance on others as we re-establish order and balance (namely, our freedom) to our people.

Juneteenth is a time to celebrate this particular part of our history and the larger ideal associated with our divinely-bestowed liberty.

Though picnics, parties, and parades might predominate, it is a fitting moment to reflect upon a broader rememberance of our story.

June 22, 2008 @ 12:52 am

4. jon wrote:

interesting article well said CLM.

without the (eventual or otherwise) freedom of slaves, the civil rights movement would not have been put into motion.

“…it is thoroughly plausible that emancipation would have happened anyway.”

its conjecture that slaves would have been freed without the participation of blacks in abolition. That implies black people had no part in relating and influencing the abolitionist movement, which certainly wasn’t the case.

June 22, 2008 @ 1:38 pm

5. Regkam2 wrote:

Tanya, LMAO, You’ll be waiting a long time….

June 22, 2008 @ 2:08 pm

6. Regkam2 wrote:

CLM, who said that we as a collective are Free? (Economically, psychologically, physically, and spritually).

June 22, 2008 @ 2:09 pm

7. CLM wrote:

Regkam2: Good question.

June 22, 2008 @ 7:46 pm

8. Nubian King wrote:

Not to turn this into a political dialogue but I can’t help but respond to Tanya’s comment (#2). I realize that you may have wrote that in gest but I know many African American’s do think that an Obama Presidency would feature measures such as making Juneteenth a holiday. I think there is nothing further fro the truth. Although I support Obama, I do not believe that he is “free” enough to support measures that are exclusively pro- African American. This is why I believe that Africans Americans may be expecting too much.

June 23, 2008 @ 1:14 pm

9. Loretta wrote:

Never in my life have I ever seen a Black man hold up for White people like this and you call yourself a Black man. You are a true uncle tom. We all know what the White peolpe did to help free us but it took Black slaves getting sick and tried of being broken down to take a stand and then White people agreed. When slavery was in process White people didnt say hey its wrong take them back, they all benifited off of Black people and then when Black people again statred to runawy and challege their treatment then and only then did some White peolpe say “oh yeah that wrong.”

June 28, 2008 @ 11:29 pm

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