Zamir Ben-Dan, Esq. is a staff attorney in the Community Justice Unit at the Legal Aid Society. He has taught Lawyering Seminar in the day program at CUNY School of Law for the past academic year, and he will serve as the Acting Director of Lawyering Seminar for the day program for academic year 2021-2022. He can be found on LinkedIn.
When Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, it signaled the end of one of the bloodiest wars in U.S. history. It was also supposed to signal the end of the enslavement of African Americans, given that the south waged war to preserve the institution of slavery. Further, the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln in January 1863 ordered an end to slavery in confederate states. However, some enslavers had other ideas.
As the tide turned against the confederacy in the latter years of the civil war, the spirit of defiance drove many slaveowners further south and west to avoid the inevitable emancipation of those in bondage. Texas became a choice destination for enslavers during the war. There was very little fighting in Texas, and the presence of Union soldiers was meager. Thus, the white slaveowners who moved there carried on as if the confederacy was still a legitimate government that hadn’t been defeated. Approximately a quarter of a million African Americans remained enslaved in Texas for two months after General Lee’s surrender.
On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas. They took control of the state and announced that, pursuant to the Emancipation Proclamation, all enslaved Black persons were to be freed. Many African Americans in Texas—although not all, since some enslavers waited until after harvest season to disclose the news to those they held in bondage—rejoiced when they learned the news and walked off the respective plantations where they were held. From that day forward, African Americans celebrated June 19th as Jubilee Day, Freedom Day, Emancipation Day, and, as it has come to be most popularly known, as “Juneteenth.”
We should celebrate Juneteenth, but we should not oversell its significance. Slavery in America did not end on June 19, 1865. Aside from the Texas slaveowners who delayed informing the African Americans they ruled over about their emancipation, chattel slavery persisted in Delaware and Kentucky, until the ratification of the 13th Amendment later that year in December. Both Delaware and Kentucky were Union states that held slaves, so the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to them; and, although both states were bound by the 13th Amendment once it was ratified, neither state ratified the amendment until after the 19th century.
Native American tribes allied to the confederacy also delayed in releasing the African Americans they held in bondage. Most importantly, while chattel slavery may have been outlawed in America, slavery itself was never abolished. The text of the 13th Amendment transformed slavery by conditioning its legality on a criminal conviction. Thus, from its passage until the present, America has continuously weaponized criminal judicial systems against Black people; it is the vehicle America has used to surveil, and ultimately re-enslave, African Americans.
As we celebrate Juneteenth today, we must be cognizant of the smokescreen that blinds us into thinking that true progress has been made, when it hasn’t. We must no longer accept tokenism—a token law, a token Black face in a high place, a token holiday, a token conviction, etc.—in place of substantial and positive change. The date that gave rise to Juneteenth was followed by three amendments, progressive-sounding legislation, and flirtations with social equality; but it was also followed by the birth and meteoric rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the gutting of newly acquired rights by the United States Supreme Court, eventual political indifference to racial issues, and decades of unimaginable horrors that included sadistic lynchings, white massacres of Black civilians, and the wholesale destruction of many African American communities.
When the African Americans in Texas were emancipated on June 19, 1865, they celebrated their emancipation with hopes of a brighter future, a future consisting of healing from the traumas of the past and recognition as equal human beings. One hundred fifty-six years later, we celebrate Juneteenth with similar hopes, but also with healthy trepidation. America must do better by its African American citizenry, if these hopes are ever to be realized—and if the fears of betrayal are to be dispelled once and for all.