On June 19th, millions of Black Americans of African descent will celebrate Juneteenth, a joyful holiday observing the end of enslavement as experienced by their ancestors on June 19th, 1865, in Galveston, Texas.

While Oxfam America observes Juneteenth as a paid holiday for all staff, the organization has not always recognized this holiday in this way or given it the kind of attention it deserves. In fact, it was established as an official organizational holiday only recently, in 2021 (and should have been much sooner).

As part of our organizational journey and ambition to become explicitly anti-racist, we will continue to mark this date on our calendars as an important time for reflection, appreciation, learning, and togetherness in our individual and professional lives. Likewise, we are committed to the duty we believe we are each called to in ending systemic racism and dismantling White supremacy. For us, recognizing “Black Independence Day” as a special American day of remembrance is an important piece of a much larger and intentional endeavor.

I invite you to join me in wishing all Black Americans who celebrate Juneteenth a restful and restorative day of pride, joy, and fellowship with their friends and family. 

How their story is passed from one generation to the next is deeply important.

For Americans whose ancestors were not enslaved, Juneteenth is a different kind of holiday

We are invited to reflect on our country’s history of chattel slavery, the deeply destructive war fought over it, and its long shadow that continues to cast a pall over our society, politics, communities, and even families. It is an opportunity to learn, explore, and recommit to the fight against systemic racism and all forms of racial oppression.

What anti-racist action–small or large–can you commit to doing in observation of Juneteenth? What kind of ancestor will you be?

It's a point of particular shame for me to admit that Juneteenth is not a holiday I’ve known about for most of my life. I have a feeling that is true for millions of other White Americans, as well.

I was born in Jacksonville, Florida, after desegregation, and I attended integrated public schools there and in Tallahassee for 16 years. Not once, however, was I taught about Juneteenth or its significance, even by my Black friends and coworkers–which was not their responsibility–and I somehow never thought to ask why they always threw such wonderful parties and cookouts in June (to which I, rightly, was never invited). It was likewise something my own family never discussed.

As a descendant of colonizing enslavers–my family has deep roots in the South, having emigrated to Virginia from Britain in the 1600s, and we had lived in Florida since 1856–I felt like this story had been hidden from me. But by whom? And why?

It matters how the word is passed. For White folks, it is often not spoken at all.

This very year, I discovered that the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is traditionally sung on Juneteenth, was composed in 1900 by two brothers–James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson–in the very city of my birth, in a community that was once known as “The Harlem of the South.” (That neighborhood, La Villa, is less than two miles from where I was born.) The anthem was first performed publicly in Jacksonville that same year by a chorus of 500 students.

What a spectacular story and what a great thing to know about my hometown! I studied history for years in Jacksonville schools and it never came up–not once.

Why would such a wonderful and relevant local story be omitted from my education? 

The answer is simple: White supremacy.

It is an insidious thing, and it harms us all in its various ways. It has kept me and millions of others ignorant of Black progress and achievement and, more importantly, Black joy. I don’t blame my teachers, several of whom were African American; I blame a system that devalues Black history, even when, in my case, it should have been a point of pride for everyone in my community. Keeping me and other young White folks ignorant of these things served a dark purpose.

Thankfully, for the residents of Jacksonville, that story is now more properly being celebrated.

June 19th, 1865, was not, alas, the end of White supremacy–its mechanism simply evolved to suit changing conditions–but it was the beginning of Black Americans’ struggle for authentic freedom and equality under the law and in the eyes of their fellow citizens. 158 years later, there remains much work to be done.

Years before that day, on July 5th, 1852, the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave a now-legendary speech at an event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In that speech, he said:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

For many Americans, perhaps especially those who, like me, identify as White and of European descent, Douglass’s critique stings. He challenges us to re-evaluate our assumptions about our country’s founding story and who, exactly, the Declaration of Independence–at the time of its writing–really included.

Indeed, people of all backgrounds in this country–perhaps especially the living descendants of enslaved people–have the complicated burden of holding two truths at once: that the United States can yet be a beacon for democracy, equality, and opportunity throughout the world; and that it is also the site of deep and lasting injustice that has yet to be fully rectified or healed.

Douglass’s words reach out to us across time as a reminder that we must remain forever vigilant in our understanding of the principles of freedom, liberty, and human rights, and that complacency–to say nothing of ignorance–is dangerous and harmful.

President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued January 1st, 1863, sought to correct what the Declaration of Independence had failed to do. It was an important and necessary first step, but it went unheeded in many parts of the American South (at the time, the Confederate States of America), including Texas, as the Civil War raged on. But on the 19th of June 1865–more than 30 months after Lincoln’s proclamation, and just over two months after the official end of the war–Major General Gordon Granger spoke to the people of Galveston, Texas, and informed them–and all Texans – that:

…in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor…

An outpouring of exuberant celebration among the formerly enslaved people of Galveston ensued. This event has come to represent emancipation as it was broadly experienced across Texas and the rest of the South, eventually giving us what we today call Juneteenth.

That same year, Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, formally ending chattel slavery in this country. (And I use the word ‘formally’ with intention: the institution and instruments of enslavement also evolved to adapt to changing legal circumstances, namely, but not only, in the forms of convict leasing and our present-day school-to-prison pipeline.)

How will you pass the word to others?

In whatever ways you and your family and community plan to spend Monday June 19th, 2023–whether it’s a holiday, a day off, or a regular workday–I encourage you to be mindful of its significance for so many of our fellow Americans and remember that while freedom, equality, and human rights may be natural human entitlements–as Oxfam firmly believes they are–they are never guaranteed. It is our duty to ensure that the circle of freedom is forever expanding.

Lift every voice and sing

Till earth and heaven ring,

Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;

Let our rejoicing rise

High as the listening skies,

Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.   

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,

Let us march on till victory is won.

(From “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, 1900)