Between Juneteenth and July 4th
By Annette Gordon-Reed
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/04/opinion/juneteenth-july-4th-holiday.html#click=https://t.co/Poc3m7Da9K
"When I was growing up, my family celebrated Juneteenth and the Fourth of July.
....
The slaves haven’t really been freed,” my father said almost every year, as a provocation. Family and neighbors would laugh knowingly, understanding that he was calling attention to the fact that Black people in Texas were, in the 1960s and 1970s, the years in which I came of age, still being treated as second-class citizens.
To be sure, we were not in the same predicament as our enslaved ancestors, whom the law allowed others to treat as property. We didn’t fear separation from our family members by sale, devise or gift. We didn’t experience the violence that was endemic to slavery. Although violence at the hand of the state (the police) was always a threat, we had, at least, the hope that that problem could be ameliorated.
These were the immediate post-Civil Rights Act, post-Voting Rights Act years, a time that was also bumping up against the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” My father could speak sardonically about our state of relative unfreedom, and his listeners might agree. But they all knew Juneteenth was but one positive marker on African Americans’ journey through United States history. The current generation was making others."...(more)