Evoking both grief and gratitude, it's a day for reflection and remembrance.
 | By Laura Reston Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
When Charles Blow and I first got to talking about his column for Juneteenth, he mentioned one detail that stood out to me — a freshly starched skirt. |
Those of you who read his columns regularly know he has a way with details. As his editor, I am always drawn in by them. He can evoke emotion with the most minute description: skittles and a can of iced tea, a protruding brow, the remnants of old wallpaper clinging to the wood planks of a house. |
Listening to him describe his mother wearing a freshly starched skirt to the Juneteenth celebrations she attended as a girl in rural Louisiana in the 1950s, I found it hard to imagine a scene more quintessentially American. The men playing baseball, the women arriving with fried chicken and fresh baked rolls, a great-uncle barbecuing a goat. |
These days, some journalists covering Juneteenth have focused on the commercialization of the holiday. But that isn't the full story, Charles told me. |
In his latest column, he argues that we should be thinking "less about what making the day a federal holiday should compel and more about what it allows, centering Black people as we do so." This is an opportunity not just to celebrate the end of slavery but also to learn about the history. |
Even now, few people — Black or white — know much about Juneteenth. As the Civil War drew to a close, slaveholders, fleeing advancing Union troops, migrated to Texas, on the western frontier of the Confederacy, where rebel holdouts continued fighting for weeks after the South surrendered in April 1865. A few months later, on June 19, 157 years ago yesterday, as the writer Casey Gerald describes in a recent guest essay, the enslaved in Galveston finally learned of the Emancipation Proclamation. They then "transformed June 19 from a day of unheeded military orders into their own annual rite, 'Juneteenth,' beginning one year later in 1866," the historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes. |
During the Civil Rights era, many Black Americans began to see Juneteenth as an unpleasant reminder of the legacy of slavery, that even the news of freedom came late. |
But in his column, Charles reminds us of the beauty of Juneteenth. And now that it is enshrined as a federal holiday, he writes, more Americans are likely to reflect on that most fundamental question: What does it mean to be truly free? |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
Forward this newsletter to friends to share ideas and perspectives that will help inform their lives. They can sign up here. Do you have feedback? Email us at opiniontoday@nytimes.com. |
Contact us if you have questions about your Times account, delivery problems or other issues, visit our Help Page or contact The Times. |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment