Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, Black Independence Day, Jubilee Day, Officially Juneteenth National Independence Day are some of the other names for Juneteenth. On June 19th, 1865 the United States moved a step closer, as a nation, to honor the words written in the U.S. Constitution about all men being created equal. To Fredrick Douglass and his abolitionist colleagues, Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation wasn't passing the truth test. When the truth about the Emancipation Proclamation was known it became clear the document completely overlooked all of the slaves in friendly northern states so: what to the northern slaves was the Emancipation Proclamation on June 19th, 1865?
Not much, and especially not a document of freedom for the slaves in friendly union states. By the end of that year (1865) that oversight would be remedied with the passage of the 13th Amendment, and the following year, 1866, on the one-year anniversary of General Gordon Granger's reading of General Order No. 3 the first official Juneteenth Celebration was held. This time ex-slaves, north and south, could participate in the freedom celebration because it was the 13th amendment that abolished slavery everywhere throughout the United States.
The following year in June congress would pass the 14th amendment, which was ratified in July 1868. The 14th amendment made the ex-slaves citizens of this nation they had sacrificed their African identities for and toiled as slaves for more than 400 years. In my opinion, the most important part of the 14th amendment is the equal protection under the law the 14th amendment gave to the ex-slaves and their descendants.
The 14th amendment did much to help form the more perfect union referred to in the constitution and the reason I believe Juneteenth is the true National Independence Day. When asked to speak at a 4th of July celebration Frederick Douglass asked in his speech: what to the slave is the 4th of July? Because not only were the enslaved Americans not free at that 4th of July celebration, celebrating freedom from British rule, those same slaves were not considered citizens of the nation so many had fought and died for in the colonial war.
The 13th amendment made it possible for blacks and whites to celebrate a national independence day. Freedom from British Rule and Freedom from slavery, reduced down to its lowest denominator, freedom. The name chose for that new National Independence Day was Juneteenth. That is how all of the above appears to me anyway.
Slavery needs to be talked about in our schools, up to and including the end of slavery because the slave trade was a big part of American History, in much the same way slavery was part of Roman and British history as well as dozens of other world powers. New and better school textbooks are needed, more detailed than the textbooks I had in school along with teachers willing to teach history the way American history really was. Juneteenth and its rise to a national holiday should also be included along with the people and politics to make it happen because while Juneteenth is now a federally recognized National Holiday it is still illegal to teach about Juneteenth in more than a dozen states.
