Juneteenth

Imagine that you were convicted of a crime you did not commit. You are in prison and being treated as someone not even human. Everyone in the prison says you deserve to be there, that you are nothing but a beast. Your life, your movements, your family relationships, and access are all subject to the control of others. You are beaten for any infraction. Your life is pure misery and it seems there is nothing you can do about it. If you were to attempt to escape, you might be killed. You know of countless others who have suffered the same fate.

Now imagine that an attorney comes to the prison and says that you and your wrongfully incarcerated fellow inmates were exonerated over two years ago, but the warden refused to tell you or release you. You are finally free to return to your family, free with nothing but the shirt on your back. Your jailers tell everyone that prison is not so bad, that you were better off there.
You are free! You know you never should have been locked up, never should have been treated as anything less than a full human being, and certainly should have been released more than two years ago. But you’re finally free!

Juneteenth is a holiday to commemorate the day on June 19, 1865, when slaves and slaveholders in Texas were finally told by Major General Gordon Granger that the slaves had been emancipated two and a half years earlier on January 1, 1863.

Were the slaves really free? The entire economy of the Southern United States was built upon the backs of unpaid labor. The whole country benefitted from this. People were bought and sold as commodities. Female slaves could be and often were raped by their slaveholders to create babies who would grow into additional slaves. Family members could be sold away, never to be seen again to pay off debts. The slaveholding states and those who were enriched by their labors were not so willing to let it all go.

There was a system that had been in place during colonial times called peonage. Officially outlawed by Congress in 1867, employers could compel a worker to pay off their debts by providing unpaid labor. According to a PBS documentary called “Slavery by Another Name,” …after Reconstruction, many Southern black men were swept into peonage through different methods, and the system was not completely eradicated until the 1940s.
In some cases, employers advanced workers some pay or initial transportation costs, and workers willingly agreed to work without pay in order to pay it off. Sometimes those debts were quickly paid off, and a fair wage worker/employer relationship was established.
In many more cases, however, workers became indebted to planters (through sharecropping loans), merchants (through credit), or company stores (through living expenses). Workers were often unable to repay the debt and found themselves in a continuous work-without-pay cycle.

But the most corrupt and abusive peonage occurred in concert with southern state and county government. In the south, many Black men were picked up for minor crimes or on trumped-up charges, and, when faced with staggering fines and court fees, forced to work for a local employer would who pay their fines for them. Southern states also leased their convicts en mass to local industrialists. The paperwork and debt record of individual prisoners was often lost, and these men found themselves trapped in inescapable situations.

Those minor crimes were often crimes created for the purpose of forcing the now-unemployed former slaves back into this new kind of slavery. The 13th Amendment that ended slavery allowed for unpaid labor to continue through the penal system for someone convicted of a crime. Vagrancy and loitering were new criminal offenses allowing a person to be charged with a crime for being unemployed.

So, while Juneteenth is becoming a nationally recognized holiday to commemorate the freeing of the Texas slaves two and a half years after Emancipation, for those whose ancestors suffered under the yolk of slavery, then peonage, and those whose more recent family members have continued to suffer in a criminal justice system riddled with injustice, Juneteenth is finally a recognition of what many have known all along. United States citizens of African descent are full human beings deserving of equality, dignity, and recognition of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And that is something we should all celebrate.