Juneteenth: A Time for Celebration, Reflection and Action

Tomorrow is Juneteenth, the holiday that observes the day when the last of the people enslaved by the Confederacy were freed at the end of the Civil War. On June 19, 1865, U.S. troops arriving in Galveston, Texas, read the Emancipation Proclamation and, more importantly, had enough numbers to enforce it. History books will tell you that the war, and legal enslavement of African Americans, ended in 1865.
But really.
My city’s local Juneteenth celebration will take place in a city park in what is locally referred to as “the black part” of town (even though people of every ethnicity live there). The fact that we still think of neighborhoods as being “black” or “white” is an annoying symptom.
More problematic is the fact that it’s easier to buy liquor on the east side of town than fresh fruit. The city has two hospitals located less than a mile from one another – a good 20 minute drive from the park where we’ll be Saturday. The city has placed magnet programs in the arts, math and science at this neighborhood’s schools, but white families still drive their kids across town to schools with larger populations, but more white faces. Glance at a map of the city’s trash and hazardous waste dumps – almost all in the “black parts” of town. The public housing projects? Same. The new baseball stadium? On top of what used to be a mostly minority neighborhood full of black-owned businesses, before the state built an interstate highway through the middle of it.
One of the things I’ll be doing Saturday is registering people to vote. We’ll also be educating people about the upcoming municipal elections. People get very involved in national races – president, Congress – but tend to zone out when it comes to the city council, mayor or school board. But since it’s those local officials who decide where the sidewalks get built and how the after-school programs are funded, we need to stay on top of them, too.
Juneteenth is a time for all of us to celebrate the end of legal enslavement in this country. But when it comes to ending racism in public policy, we’ve still got a long, long war ahead.