Juneteenth
Juneteenth is a day to reflect on Freedom, and to strive for equality.
Knowing today was Juneteenth, last evening I watched, for the umpteenth time, one of my favorite movies featuring my most admired historical figure. The movie was “Lincoln,” and it tells the story of Abraham Lincoln’s dogged pursuit to push—no…rather, shove, cajole and bully—the House of Representatives to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery.
After a brief battle scene, the movie opens with two Black Union soldiers who have approached Lincoln amid the commotion and confusion of a civil war encampment. It’s a chilly and rainy evening in January 1865, two months after Lincoln’s re-election. Lincoln is seated on what looks like a steamer trunk set upon a small stage on the parade grounds adjacent to the Washington Navy Yard. The two soldiers, part of an all Black regiment, are preparing to be shipped out for the assault on Wilmington, North Carolina.
Sheltered from the rain, Lincoln sits just above the milieu of milling soldiers. You first see the two Black Union soldiers from over Lincoln’s right shoulder—so that the already unusually tall Lincoln peers down upon them. Almost like a King upon a throne.
What starts out as mundane soldier banter—who fought where and when, where are you from—takes an abrupt turn when one of the soldiers, the fictional Corporal Ira Clark from Massachusetts, brashly presses Lincoln about the unequal treatment of Black soldiers and the future of Blacks after the war.
“Now that white people have accustomed themselves to seeing Negro men with guns fighting on their behalf and they can tolerate Negro soldiers getting equal pay,” Clark says to Lincoln, with a bit more than a hint of sarcasm, “Maybe in a few years they can abide the idea of Negro lieutenants and captains. In fifty years maybe a Negro colonel. In a hundred years…the vote.”
The conversation’s unexpected change of direction—from friendly chatter to challenging the President about the fate of the Black race—leaves Lincoln discernably uncomfortable. Quickly, and somewhat clumsily, he changes the subject. “What will you do after the war” he asks Clark. “Work,” replies Clark, though he refuses to let Lincoln off the hook. “But you should know sir that I get sick at the smell of boot black and I cannot cut hair.”
Yet again, Lincoln deflects—segueing to a humorous quip about his hair and how his barber has threatened to kill himself cutting it. You do have “springy hair for a white man,” observes Clark. Lincoln chuckles.
Well, Clark has had enough of Lincoln’s dodging. He’s made his point to the Commander in Chief, and whether Lincoln listened, or not, he does not know. He turns “smartly,” according to the screenplay, and walks away to rejoin his unit—but then stops, turns around, and in what the screenplay calls “a tone of admiration and cautious admonishment, reminding Lincoln of his promise,” begins to recite the final lines of the Gettysburg Address: “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
What the young, fictional, Corporal Clark could not have known at the time is that while he was preparing to join the Union assault on Wilmington, Lincoln was already preparing his assault on slavery and the House of Representatives. The United States would begin, in earnest, the too long, too slow, and too painful, rebirth that Lincoln had foreshadowed back at Gettysburg.
Juneteenth, June Nineteenth, celebrates the day that word of the Emancipation Proclamation finally came to slaves in the slave state of Texas—some two years after Lincoln signed it. No doubt their masters already knew. It is thought to be the last of the South where Blacks were so freed. Lincoln had issued the Proclamation in 1863, freeing the slaves in the Confederacy only, as mostly a war measure—and meant to disable the South by eliminating their most valuable economic resource—slaves. It was criticized by friend and foe alike.
In a letter to the abolitionist Horace Greely in 1862—Greely had complained that Lincoln was not doing enough to end slavery—Lincoln wrote “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”
Lincoln ended the letter by telling Greely, “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.”
But the Emancipation Proclamation—as limited as it was, as unacceptable to abolitionists as a half-measure as it was, as unacceptable to white supremacists in any shape, or form, as it was—set Lincoln and the country on the inevitable course towards the Thirteenth Amendment and the abolition of slavery.
In another scene from the movie, Lincoln is shown explaining to his reluctant Cabinet, many of whom have expressed reservations about pursuing the Amendment when its passage in the House was uncertain, why the Thirteenth Amendment could not be delayed.
“Two years ago I proclaimed these people emancipated – ‘then, thenceforward and forever free,’” he says, “But let's say the courts decide I had no authority to do it [the Emancipation Proclamation]. They might well decide that. Say there's no amendment abolishing slavery. Say it's after the war, and I can no longer use my war powers to just ignore the courts' decisions, like I sometimes felt I had to do. Might those people I freed be ordered back into slavery? That's why I'd like to get the Thirteenth Amendment through the House, and on its way to ratification by the states, wrap the whole slavery thing up, forever and aye. As soon as I'm able. Now.”
Sadly, Lincoln would not live to see it through, as the Amendment was not ratified by the requisite three-quarters of the states until December 1865, eight months after Lincoln was assassinated.
While the amendment abolished slavery, it did not abolish racism. And nearly 160 years later we have still not wrapped “the whole slavery thing up.”
“Juneteenth,” writes Niha Masih in the Washington Post, “a combination of the words ‘June’ and ‘nineteenth’ — has been celebrated for decades by Black communities as Emancipation Day, but the recent broader reckoning over racial injustices and deepening political polarization has thrust the day further into national and cultural prominence.”
Opal Lee, however, the Texas woman who is credited as the driving force behind making Juneteenth a national holiday, is optimistic. She told NPR back in 2021, after the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to pass legislation approving the Juneteenth holiday, that “now we can finally celebrate. The whole country together.”
During the House floor debate, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Houston, and one of the bills sponsors, described Juneteenth as a “joyous” day, “because it allows children in schools to be taught the wonderment of America and that America can overcome its ills to be able to rise to its better days.”
A “birth defect.”
A copy of the Emancipation Proclamation is permanently displayed at the National Archives, and Condeleezza Rice, the former US Secretary of State, wrote eloquently of feeling “the presence of my ancestors” as she read it. “I said a little prayer of thanks to them—and to God—for the great fortune of being born American.”
But Rice, then, and now, is under no illusions. “Despite our nation’s extraordinary founding documents about equality, this country was founded as a slave-owning state. That is our birth defect,” she wrote. “But the words in those carefully crafted documents—written by great men who were themselves flawed human beings—ultimately lit the way toward a more perfect union. In some sense, the history of the United States is a story of striving to make their soaring words—We the People—real to every American. It’s the story of becoming what we profess to be.”
Stephen Spielberg’s fictional Corporal Clark understood—only too well—that the Civil War was only the very beginning of Black American’s fight for freedom and equality. He knew hard and frustrating times were ahead. Lincoln knew that too.
“With high hope for the future no prediction in regard to it is ventured,” he told the thousands attending his Second inaugural Address. While the war was not yet over as he spoke in early March 1865, the tide had turned against the South. The end of the war was drawing near, and though more death and destruction lie ahead, it would permit, finally, for some reflection.
The War, Lincoln sermonized, was God’s punishment for the evils of slavery, and for the blasphemy and tolerance that allowed it. “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other,” Lincoln said. “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered, that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”
“If God wills that it continue,” Lincoln told the crowd, “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'” The war, as Lincoln saw it, was divine retribution for the sin of slavery.
We are, in many ways, still paying for that sin—a sin for which we have only partially atoned. But Lincoln was right. Slavery’s end was a new beginning for America, it was, both literally and figuratively, a “new birth of freedom.” That’s something we can all celebrate.