On this day, 155 years ago, approximately 250,000 enslaved people in Texas were finally freed, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. As Henry Louis Gates explains in his history of Juneteenth, Texas was not as closely monitored as other states throughout the war, and many slave owners had made the trek to Texas with more than 150,000 enslaved people, counting on the negligible Union presence to enable them to escape the reach of the army and the Proclamation.
The freeing of 250,000 enslaved people is indeed something to celebrate. But, I think the history of Juneteenth is even more important as a lesson in the need for action rather than promises and the responsibility of those in power who proclaim change to make it happen.
Almost 100 years later, Martin Luther King led the historic march on Washington to insist that the nation make good on its promise. A few months earlier, in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. describes negotiations with local merchants in Atlanta where the merchants promised to remove “humiliating racial signs” that led the leaders of the nonviolent campaign to agree to a moratorium of all demonstrations. King continues:
As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained. As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action.
Today, hundreds of thousands are marching throughout the country and around the world to insist that the nation make good on its promise. In this moment, our deep political, social, and economic inequality has been magnified by the pandemic and illuminated by videos of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks. There is no pretending that we have made good on our promise of freedom; rather we have entrenched racism and tightened the shackles that leave the Black men and women in this country without the essentials of freedom: respect and dignity, due process, economic sufficiency, educational equality, employment and employment equality, stable housing, health care, ample food, freedom to exercise religion, freedom of speech, freedom to protest. As a nation, we have laws that promise some of these things, but our political, social, legal, and economic systems have continued to operate to deny our Black people anything that approximates the conditions necessary for freedom.
As a law school built on the mission of providing legal education to those from communities underrepresented in the profession, we must examine our history and our current policies and practices and our program to admit, apologize for, and reform those policies and practices that have served to entrench rather than break the patterns that enslave. There is no doubt that we have been struggling to do this work for many years, but there is also no doubt that need to seek forgiveness for our broken promise: we haven’t always centered the experience of our Black colleagues, we haven’t always followed through or prioritized creating the conditions necessary for our Black students not only to succeed but to thrive. The fact that our mission contains the promise does not excuse this work, it amplifies the responsibility we have to do it.
On this Juneteenth, let us anchor our actions in the fact that our history reveals our failures and our mission intensifies the need for action. Although they would have every right not to, I have I have great hope that our Black students, Black faculty, and Black staff will try one more time to be heard and then that the rest of us will do the work we need to do. Our action should be based on a full understanding of their lived experience and should be measured by whether they experience the change we mean to make based on that understanding.
Much of this work will be defined, prioritized, and initiated by our Race, Privilege, and Diversity Committee, but every committee and each of us in leadership must evaluate all of our work through a lens of equity. I commend to each of us the equity audit proposed by the Law Deans Antiracist Clearinghouse Project.
As a white woman, it would be a mistake for me to impose my agenda. It would also be wrong, though, for me to pretend we haven’t heard some loud and clear messages already. And it would be wrong to leave this message at promises. Here is the work we have already put in motion based on what we have heard.
We know we have to examine and reform our scholarship policy and this work has already begun.
We know we have to add more courses focused on critical race theory, and we commit to offering at least one in every semester.
We know we have to ensure that our faculty of color, especially our untenured and non-tenure-track faculty, are supported and that their voices contribute to our creation of our future, and this work has already begun.
We know we have to do more to support our staff of color and ensure that they have the conditions they need to lend their full talents to their work, and this work has already begun.
We know we have to continue Community Day and strengthen it and expand its anti-racism work throughout the year, and this work has already begun.
We know we have to integrate anti-racism work into orientation and support RSJO, and this work has already begun.
We know we have to look at the race impact of our Academic Standing policy, and this work has already begun.
We know we have to provide support for our students who are protesting, and this work has already begun.
I am so proud to be part of a Law School in which every student organization has not only spoken in support of BLSA and Black Lives Matter but has taken the time to detail the ways in which anti-Black racism has infected and affected the work they support. We have collected these statements on our website and shared them with our incoming students – they comprise a powerful anti-Black racism reader, which should be required reading for every entering law student across the country.
I hope you will all join me tonight at BLSA’s Town Hall. I hope you will all work with me this coming year so that next Juneteenth, we have more to celebrate than the promise of freedom.
Mary Lu Bilek