Introduction

Is this newly minted Federal Holiday designed to commemorate the necessarily long and tortured road from the depravity of slavery to where we are today? A nation celebrating equality under the law, and sufficient and growing opportunities for everyone?

Or is it designed as a platform to perpetuate the dangerous lie that America was built on slave labor, that the Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, and that America is still systemically racist, i.e., racist to its core? 

That is the subject of today’s 15 minute episode.

Continuing

Adding Juneteenth takes us to 12 Federal holidays in 2021. Most years there are “only” 11 Federal paid days off; on presidential election years the Feds add Inauguration Day as the 12th day off. That’s right, Inauguration Day is an excuse to have a paid day off. Of the usual 11 Federal Holidays, 4 of them, over one-third of our holidays, celebrate the necessarily difficult and bloody rise from slavery to freedom, listed in order of their annual celebration: 1. Martin Luther King Day 2. Memorial Day 3. Juneteenth 4. Independence Day

MLK Day is an obvious part of this list. No explanation is needed.

Memorial Day, the day that we remember America’s war dead. In the Civil War, the war fought to preserve the Union and free the slaves, 110,100 Union soldiers died in battle: 67,088 KIA, and 43,012 mortally wounded. 224,580 died of disease. 2,226 were wounded. 1 Army commander, 3 corps commanders, 14 division commanders, and 67 brigade commanders, including 32 generals, were killed in the Union Army. The Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment freeing the slaves, and obviously, Juneteenth could not have happened without their sacrifices.

Juneteenth is another obvious one for inclusion in this list. And it will be helpful to discuss what this day means, what it stands for, and what led up to it. On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that as of January 1, 1863, all enslaved people in the states currently engaged in rebellion against the Union “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” But his signing the Proclamation did not free anyone. Not a single slave in the separate nation, the Confederate States, was freed by the Union’s Proclamation. Had the Allies in WWII make a similar proclamation, say in January of 1943, that all of those held in Nazi concntration camps were, “…“thenceforward, and forever free,” nothing would have happened until the Allies defeated Germany and entered the camps as liberators. Same thing with the Civil War. Freedom for the slaves became memorialized in the Constitution when the 13th Amendment was passed by Congress on January 31, 1865; it was ratified December 6, 1865. Let’s look at the wording of this Amendment. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The Confederate States were not a part of the United States, and until the surrender were not subject to Union jurisdiction; they had seceded and formed a separate country. Only when the South surrendered on April 6th, 1865, when Lee surrendered to Grant, did the edicts, proclamations and laws of the Union have full force and effect on the seceded states. Only then were we once again one nation. The United States was once again united–not two separate countries with two separate governments and two warring armies. The original Juneteenth occurred on June 19th, 1865 in Galveston, TX, when Major General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3, announcing to the last town in the US to receive the news, Texas was now again part of the Union, that all the slaves had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. A Proclamation that would have had no force or effect had the Union lost the war, had Grant been the one to have...