Speech delivered at Juneteenth Celebration at Parkland College, a Comprehensive Community College in Champaign, Illinois where I served as President for sixteen years www.parkland.edu.
Thank you, Dr. Lau for inviting me back to Parkland College.
I am grateful for the invitation to return home to celebrate a historic day in American history.
In August 34 years ago in 1990, I stood on this stage for the first time to introduce myself as President of Parkland College.
Juneteenth brings back beautiful childhood memories of families coming together, listening to rhythm and blues music, dancing, turning the handle on an ice cream maker, and eating barbecue.
I was four years old when I attended my first Juneteenth celebration in 1944 with my mother, father, and four older siblings in the deep piney woods of East Texas—Wiergate, a sawmill town of less than a thousand residents—our family owned a small cotton farm. We also raised sugar cane, coffee beans, corn, and green vegetables. A large fruit orchard with pears, strawberries, plums, figs, and apples sat beside the cotton field.
As my family walked toward the Juneteenth Celebration, for what seemed forever, into the wide-open clearing in the woods, there was a large crowd of Black people of all ages – some dancing to the pulsating music, children my age running around in a circle playing “Ring Around a Rosey” and some adults and children jumping rope. The tangy smell of fresh-cut pine was in the air. I could feel the joy. There was absolute happiness in those East Texas woods.
I don’t recall anyone telling me the history of the celebration, but freedom is still etched into my memory. I was free. I ran away from my parents and climbed on the platform where the band was playing; I danced around and around to the beat of the music while the musicians laughed and egged me on. A crowd gathered around the platform and started clapping. My father tried to pull me off the platform. He reached for me as I darted behind the musicians.
Finally, my father stepped onto the platform and picked me up gently.
It was years later before I learned what the Juneteenth celebration meant to me and other African Americans in Texas.
I now consider Juneteenth as American as Independence Day. Both are national holidays; both included major wars where men died to gain their freedom. One was fought to end slavery and preserve the union, while the other was for self-rule. The significant difference between the two wars is that while the colonies declared their independence from Great Britain on July 4, 1776, slavery still existed. It was not until June 19, 1865, that 250,000 enslaved people in Texas were told that slavery had ended two- and one-half years earlier. Slaveholders did not tell enslaved people they were free, and the federal government did not enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas.
Yet, most Americans do not have a clue about Juneteenth, and if they know, it is not considered a part of their history unless their foreparents were enslaved.
And now, I have lived to see Juneteenth become a national holiday, signed into law on June 17, 2021, by President Biden.
Our schools in Texas did not teach students about slavery; not even the segregated Black schools were allowed to include slavery or Negro history in their curricula.
I verified this by calling one of my best friends in high school and asking if we were taught about slavery.
She verified the one or two paragraphs we had in World History about the war of the states. So, we never learned about our history from grade school through high school. In college, a historically Black college, the most I learned about my history was in a political science course where my professor, who studied the voting patterns of Negroes in the South, presented his findings to the class. I believe he placed his findings within the context of the barriers Black people faced in voting, but I don’t recall having any interest in the topic. At the age of 17 and a sophomore in college, I had no doubt developed a psychological avoidance of discussing slavery. The absence of teaching it in the schools and my family’s seeming fear of discussing slavery contributed to this dissonance. Also, my family's happy, secure life gave me a sense of security. I did not believe white people were my friends, and I knew to avoid them. White people lived in one world, and Black people lived in another.
My family’s history is tied closely to slavery, so it allowed me to know more about my lineage and brought me closer to understanding Juneteenth celebrations.
My father was 73 when I was born. My mother was 33 with four young children. Her husband died from pneumonia when her youngest child was eight months old, and her oldest was five.
My father was born on December 28, 1866, in Newton County, Texas, one and one-half years after Major General Gordon Granger, accompanied by 2,000 Union soldiers, issued General Order Number 3 in Galveston, Texas. General Order Number 3 informed enslaved people they were free on June 19, 1865, 2.5 years after President Lincoln declared slavery had ended in 1863.
My father’s father, my grandfather, was a slaveholder, and his mother, my grandmother, was enslaved. My grandmother Rose, like other former slaves, had no provisions after her freedom, though slaveholders received their land back after it was confiscated during the American Civil War.
President Lincoln’s Order Number 3 told enslaved people to remain in their current housing and work for wages. The new relationship with their slaveholder was “employer and hired labor.” Idleness would not be tolerated, nor would staying around military posts be tolerated. Many former enslaved people left Texas, going North to find loved ones or to other states where their families had been sold. Some enslaved people were murdered by former slaveholders if they attempted to exercise their freedom.
Some former slaves stayed on the land they had worked on and continued to work under the same conditions, except that, by law, they had to be paid for their labor.
Former slaveholders often ignored Order Number 3, which freed the enslaved people in Texas. Others minimally complied with the Order but charged formerly enslaved people for their housing, food, and other costs. At the end of harvesting, many formerly enslaved people, now laborers, owed their employers money. The system of sharecropping became prevalent in former Confederate states. Formerly enslaved people could barely survive, and there are a few Blacks around my age who lived and worked under this second form of enslavement.
The Freedmen Bureau was established in 1865 by Congress under the War Department to assist former slaves and poor whites in the South and District of Columbia. The Bureau closed in Texas in 1870 due to lack of funding, declining interest by Congress, and the violence the Ku Klux Klan and similar white terrorist groups perpetrated against newly freed Black people. The Klan became active in Texas in 1868. For those who want to explore this topic further:
Despite these obstacles, The Bureau assisted thousands of Blacks and impoverished Whites. Schools were established, hospitals were built, and some people were fed. (It is now that I wish I had enough knowledge to have questioned my father, but he passed when I was sixteen)
In my grandmother’s case, she stayed on working for her former slaveholder and had a child with him in 1866 after slavery had ended. That child was my father. She lived a long life and died in the 1930s before I was born in 1940.
I learned this story in bits and pieces. My mother would talk about my father’s life at random times. I was around 10 or 11 years old before I could create the story from what my mother had told me. I had many questions, and it was confusing to a young child whose grandfather owned slaves and whose grandmother remained an enslaved person although she had been granted her freedom. Through reading history that was denied me for many years, I have come to terms with what happened to my grandmother and other newly freed slaves during the period of Reconstruction, 1865 to 1877. Federal troops that protected the newly freed slaves were pulled from the South in 1877 because of a political deal, the Compromise of 1877. In a contested presidential election between Republican Rutherford Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden, Hayes promised to remove federal troops from the South. That compromise of 1877 cost African Americans the freedoms they were promised under the Constitution and all the political gains they had made. And, Rutherford Hayes became the 19th U.S. President.
Jim Crow laws were immediately implemented by Southern states to prevent the advancement of Blacks and to maintain the social order under slavery. Many Blacks were elected to public office and the U.S. Congress. All of that progress was impeded by Jim Crow laws that further denied former slaves their rights as guaranteed under the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments under the Constitution – abolishing slavery, granting citizenship to Blacks or anyone born in the U.S., and the right to vote, respectively.
American history that included slavery was not allowed to be taught in schools. Why is it so hard to deny the truth about our history, mainly since slavery played such a pivotal role in America becoming a world superpower? Imagine how fast any economy could grow if you didn’t have to pay the workers for nearly 250 years of hard labor under inhumane conditions.
The slave system prohibited slaves from learning to read or write. Between 1740 and 1867, anti-literacy laws prohibited slaves from learning to read or write. Literate slaves were a threat to the slave system. In most southern states, anyone caught teaching a slave to read or write would be fined, whipped, or imprisoned.
The recent public outcry and the laws enacted by governors and state legislatures to prohibit teaching children about Black history are embedded in slavery.
The well-documented 1619 Project, sponsored by the New York Times, presents a more comprehensive look at American history and includes African Americans' roles from the country’s inception. Award-winning journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones leads the Project. There are curricula for all age groups. In addition, the project is augmented in a six-part series on Hulu. I encourage faculty to review this material.
The 1619 series is entertaining, informative, and well-documented. It features leading scholars, census data, and other documents from archives that have never been publicly disclosed.
I believe in our democracy, as did my parents; my mother prayed for a better day. My dad kept his family away from whites in East Texas. We stayed in our all-Black loving, safe community except on rare occasions when he would stock up on farm supplies in Newton or Jasper.
My father’s oldest son fought in World War I. He lived in Harlem, New York, and died in 1950 when I was ten years old. Through the years, I saw the pride of close relatives coming home on leave in uniform during WWII. My brother, a medic in the army, did several tours in Vietnam. He believed in America. I believe the stories of our patriotism should be told. Black Americans have fought in every war to protect our freedom. We are, by definition, true patriots.
I live in a senior independent living apartment with nearly 100 other seniors. It’s a beautiful place with loads of activities. My son and daughter live separately but within 5 minutes of me.
I have developed a friendship with a celebrated national artist, Okie Anderson, whose book and drawings appear in the Congressional Library. She is an 85-year-old white woman who gave me a history book, which includes drawings called A Pursuit of Equality, chronicling the lives of famous civil rights leaders. Her story gives me hope and I have always sought stories of Hope. And this one is one of the best yet. I asked her if I could share her story of redemption. Our conversation started with me asking what inspired her to write the book. She told me that her grandson, who was attending Texas A&M University with a 4.0 average, asked her a pointed question about her life.
“MoMo,” he said, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings but what did you think about all the things that went on during segregation that were so wrong when you were young.”
That question, and the discussion that followed, prompted Okie to research the Jim Crow Era.
Okie continued, “I was utterly amazed by the extent of Jim Crow laws as I did research for my book. I cried a lot as I read about that kind of cultural acceptance.”
Okie continued: “I was not taught about [Jim Crow Laws] in school or throughout my formal education -Master’s degree Licensed professional counselor certification, Mediation certification, two state licenses in alcohol and drug abuse, and on and on. How can we expect to keep that kind of thing from continuing to repeat itself when we never acknowledged it with past generations? Nor do we today.”
Okie was proud to give her grandson the book his question had inspired.
My friend Okie’s experience reminded me why governors and state legislators have passed laws prohibiting the inclusion of Black history. To remain ignorant of our history allows horrific laws to be passed unnoticed and without widespread dissent. And those of us who should know our history are not encouraged to study our past, our resilience, and our contributions to this nation.
I recall the late sixties and early seventies when there was a renaissance of learning among Black students and academicians. I was a graduate student at the University of Kansas. Dr. King had been murdered and there were protests in major cities around the country.
We read, we studied seeking answers to the strong resistance to justice and equality. Discussions about books were common at parties. We attended lectures of authors who peddled false narratives about slavery and the innate inferiority of Blacks. I recall a book by Stanley Elkins that advanced the notion that Black slaves in America were docile because they did not lead any slave rebellions and Arthur Jensen, an educational psychologist used data to show that genetics played the most important role in intelligence and that Head Start and other compensatory programs were a failure. He ranked Asians as the most intelligent racial group, followed by whites and then Blacks.
Finally, my 85-year-old friend Okie and I both grew up under the same Jim Crow laws. We are both Texans, but our realities are starkly different.
And we are still affected by those realities. They don’t just disappear. Within that reality, we are friends. Neither of us can erase our history.
I am hopeful that our classrooms will be used to reflect on our great nation. And that Juneteenth will be discussed in classrooms in red and blue states so our students will know who we are as a nation and how we are still evolving into that perfect union. And it is all our responsibility to move us in that direction.
Thank you.
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