It’s Juneteenth, and a White Nationalist Is President

By Barrett Holmes Pitner, The Daily Beast

Marking the holiday and wrestling with our troubled past is the way to find the path to a more equitable future.

With the South rising again on the watch of President Donald Trump, who plans to turn the Fourth of July this year from a celebration of America to a celebration of himself, it’s time for Americans who champion equality to begin celebrating Juneteenth.

June 19, 1865 — “Juneteenth” being a combination of June and nineteenth — should remind all Americans of the long and complex fight required to end slavery here.

On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act ending slavery in the District of Columbia by paying slave owners up to $300 for each slave they set free. The federal government allocated $1 million (the equivalent of $30 million today) to compensate D.C.’s slave-owners. The Act also paid the newly freed $100 if they chose to leave America and colonize Haiti, Liberia, or elsewhere. Roughly 3,000 slaves in D.C. became free, but to America’s chagrin most of them stayed in the country. In 2005, Emancipation Day became an official holiday in D.C…

It was more than two years later, on April 9, 1865, that Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox to end the Civil War; the Emancipation Proclamation then applied to the Confederate states. Even then, the South still required Union soldiers to enforce the law.

Texas ignored the Emancipation Proclamation, and so on June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger and Union troops arrived at Galveston, Texas and issued General Order Number 3 proclaiming that “all slaves are free.”

Sadly, the Order also advised freedmen “to remain quietly at their present homes, and work for wages” and stated that freedmen “will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” Despite emancipation, the expectation was that black people would remain under the financial control of their former slave-owners, and the government would provide no compensation for a lifetime of slavery…

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