Last week, on Juneteenth, the nation enjoyed the new national holiday celebrating the freedom of the slaves at the end of the Civil War. This week marks the 10th anniversary of Shelby v. Holder and the impending decision of the Supreme Court on affirmative action in college admissions. The juxtaposition is a stark reminder that the struggle for equal justice for all is ongoing. Each step forward is met with a furious reaction; each reconstruction with concerted efforts to roll back the progress. And today, we are once more in the midst of that reaction.
June 19, 1865, was the day that US Major General Gordon Granger declared that the Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, had freed all the slaves in Texas — an estimated 250,000. The proclamation, a wartime measure, was limited: it applied only to those states still in rebellion. Lincoln always gave precedence to the survival of the Union over the question of slavery. With the proclamation, slaves in states that were not in rebellion — like Delaware and Kentucky — remained in bondage. And the news was slow to travel to distant slave states like Texas, even after the surrender of the Confederate armies under Gen. Robert E. Lee. The proclamation took hold only as US troops extended their victory. It took the passage of the 13th Amendment to end slavery throughout the United States.
Needless to say, that profound reform was met with a furious reaction. The plantation class in the southern states began a campaign of systematic violence to squelch Black freedom. The Ku Klux Klan, among others, spread the terror of lynching across the South. In the end, the federal government gave in. A political deal removed federal troops from the defeated Confederate states. A reactionary Supreme Court ratified “separate but equal” as constitutional. Segregation — legal apartheid — settled in across the South. Juneteenth marks not the triumph of equal justice; but a large step forward and the beginning of a new era of struggle.,…
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