Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth. I don’t remember when I learned the meaning of it, but it hasn’t been long. I think that’s shameful I never learned about it in school. In fact, during my entire 12-year experience, we never got past the War of 1812, although Robber Barons (1890s) sounds a tad familiar from ancient American history twelfth grade.

Slavery is our nasty sin no one wants to talk about. We fought a civil war over it. President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The news spread quickly enough in most states and the Thirteenth Amendment, basically ending slavery in the US, came into being earlier in 1865.

News traveled slower than molasses in Texas. On June 19, 1865, some Union soldiers came to Galveston, TX as a part of the Reconstruction. In Galveston, TX, they discovered Black people who were still enslaved! So, the commanding officer broke the news to everyone that they were free and had been for two years. Naturally, the newly freed enslaved celebrated.

When did I learn this? I’m embarrassed to say it’s only been in the last few years, ever since the controversy began over the book 1619. I read it and, in many places, my hair about stood on end and I felt like I was going to throw up. Yes, I felt uncomfortable. I also wished I’d learned about Juneteenth earlier.

I read Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison.

I wanted to read other books, too. I wanted to learn what I hadn’t in school.

I read:

Across That Bridge, by former Congressman John Lewis

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

A Way Out Of No Way by Sen. Raphael Warnock

The Hate U Bring by Angie Thomas

Punch Me to the Gods by Brian Broome

Didn’t Nobody Give A Shit About Carlotta by James Hannaham

The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris

These are books related not just to the Black experience but also to the experiences of marginalized, mistreated groups.

I mentioned that as a kid and teen, most of what I learned about what went on in history was from reading books.

I learned about Jim Crow and racial discrimination from To Kill A Mockingbird

I learned about ongoing racial discrimination from In the Heat of the Night and a boatload of other books.

I learned about Christian missionaries wiping out the native Hawaiian population from Hawaii by the ideas and diseases they brought. From the same book, I learned about Japanese Americans interred in concentration camps.

I learned about the slaughter and decimation of the Native tribes from Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

I learned about the Holocaust from Exodus

I wish I’d learned these things in school. As I read, there was no guidance. There was no teacher to help explain more of the history and the whys of it all. There was no one with whom I could share my shock and grief that these horrible things really happened.

Especially when you are a child (and I mean right through the teenage years), learning historical facts as awful as these are “discomforting” and that is ever so true. But feeling uncomfortable can be a good thing in the right hands of a teacher. These are events in our history and to learn them doesn’t mean we have to feel uncomfortable or guilty. It just means that we admit the wrong and take responsibility for it. In that way, we don’t keep repeating the wrong.

I am still learning more historical moments I didn’t know before, and I have to say I was today old when I learned it. I can live with the discomfort. I wish half the country would say the same.