“Any time while I was a slave, if one minute freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it — just to stand one minute on God’s airth [earth] a free woman — I would.”
Nearly 85 years before the date commemorating the end of chattel slavery in the United states, an African-American woman named Mum Bett sued for her freedom in Massachusetts. She won her freedom, and Massachusetts became one of the first states to abolish slavery — in 1780.
The holiday we celebrate for the first time today — Juneteenth — is in honor ofJune 19, 1865, when the Union Army fighting in Texas got the news that the South had surrendered, the Civil War was over and the slaves in Texas were free.
It was sort of a Texas holiday.
Clearly ending slavery mattered, even though we were one of the last so-called free countries in the world to end the practice. In fact, I was surprised to see that in 1776, slavery was still legal in Massachusetts.
It isn’t like the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery made things wonderful for African-Americans, either. Jim Crow laws, lynchings, separate but equal and all sorts of other things took a lot longer to go away. This was never going to be revolutionary change, and I’m not sure modern-day Americans have the patience for evolutionary change.
Very few people see themselves as the villains of the story, and most Americans don’t consider themselves racists.
The problem is that there are too many people who fail to see that the real differences between people aren’t ethnic or racial but economic. President Johnson understood it when he said that well-off white people could prevent poorer white people from resenting their station in life by reminding them that it could be worse. They could be black.
Three generations have come of age since 1964, and progress has been made. It may be another three generations before things will really have changed.
But Juneteenth is a start.
A good step.