America today celebrates Juneteenth, commemorating both the horrors of the nation’s original sin, slavery, and its end.
The holiday traces to victorious Union Gen. Gordon Granger’s June 19, 1865, order putting the Emancipation Proclamation into full legal effect across Texas and freeing all the state’s remaining slaves. It has since spread, culminating in federal recognition in 2021.
But what, as a holiday for all Americans, should we make of it?
Let us not treat black history and black life as somehow unapproachably apart from the larger history and life of this country.
As the great sociologist and civil-rights warrior W.E.B. Du Bois said in 1905:
We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America. The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone but for all true Americans.
Precisely. The black quest for freedom and dignity is inextricably linked to the larger ideas that breathed life into this nation, reminding us all that liberty and dignity are not to be taken for granted, but to be continually fought for and defended.
With long and bloody struggle, the nation ended slavery; with a much longer struggle, black Americans won long-denied legal rights.
Though black Americans still face obstacles, the new separatism — in which our different races, not our commonalities, will define us for good and all — will not advance the battle Du Bois waged.
As we fight that battle onward, we stand on the shoulders of Du Bois and also Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Frances Harper, Booker T. Washington and countless others.
Yes, we: It’s our battle, no matter what the prophets of division argue.
And we should be as proud to take it up as we are awed by the weight of suffering it carries.
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