Saturday, June 20, 2020

Juneteenth


I am beginning writing this on June 19, 2020. That date would not have had much meaning to me until this year, but the national news has had a lot of focus on the fact that June 19th is also known as “Juneteenth”. With this increased focus, I’d like to give a little historical perspective as well as investigate my own attitudes toward the principles being celebrated. Then I’ll take a brief look at how I have developed empathy before putting it all together.

[Emancipation Proclamation]



Historical Perspective

As noted in (*1), “Historically, Juneteenth has not been widely recognized outside of black communities, and it’s taken some time for the general public to acknowledge the date officially.” According to (*2), it was not an official holiday outside of a few states (TX, OK, FL, MN) until the last 20 years. Indeed, there was no proclamation of it in my state of PA until 2019 (*3).

When I was growing up in CT, the history of the US was not only part of the subject matter in elementary school, but was the focus of an entire year of social studies at the high school level. In our discussions of the US Civil War, there was a recognition that “Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.” But that simple statement masks a somewhat complicated timeline.

The US Constitution of 1787, while not using the term “slave” or “slavery”, did in fact make allowance for them in Article I, Section 2, where it allocated representatives based on “the whole Number of free Persons” and “three fifths of all other Persons,” thus noting that slaves were not worth as much as others. Thus, Lincoln was bound by the Constitution in what he was allowed to do as President. But there were other ways of making it happen.

First, the District of Columbia was not part of any state, but was under the direct control of the federal government. Thus, on April 16, 1862, Lincoln signed the “District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act” which ended slavery in DC (*4). This established the first “Emancipation Day” as April 16.

Second, during the Civil War, Lincoln, using his war powers as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, announced on September 22, 1862, and then signed on January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation (*5), which freed any slaves in an area which was taken under the control of the US military. This proclamation thus circumvented the wording in the Constitution. It also meant that the date that slaves became emancipated was dependent on when that part of the southern US became under control of the Union Army. It also was the official acknowledgement that the Civil War was not just about the states which had seceded from the US, but that the war was a bid to end slavery. Psychologically, it was the turning point of the war.

But by using this definition, the exact date of “emancipation” in each part of the country varied based on when the US military took control. As noted in (*6), Florida celebrated it as May 20 based on the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation there in May 1865; Mississippi celebrated it on May 8 (“Eight o’ May”); Eastern Kentucky celebrated it on August 8, and Texas celebrated it on June 19.

Moreover, since the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to those southern states that were taken control of by the Union Army, any slaves in the northern states were not freed by it. Most states in the north had already done so by this time, but because of the above inclusion of the three-fifths rule in the Constitution, it took a Constitutional Amendment, the 13th, to officially end slavery in the rest of the US. The amendment was proposed in January 1865, and was officially ratified by the necessary number of states on December 6, 1865.

So, when was “Emancipation Day?” It depended on where you lived. I grew up in CT where slaves were gradually emancipated, beginning with the blocking of importation of slaves in 1774, then the passage of the “Gradual Abolition Act” in 1784, proposed legislation in 1844, and finally the passage of “An Act to Prevent Slavery” in 1848 (*7). But this date was never celebrated, so if you asked me “when is Emancipation Day?” I would have answered with the April 16 date. Even though that technically only applied to the Federal Government, since that meant that some government offices were closed on that day, that would have had an impact on me.

Thus, until recently, Emancipation Day was a local celebration which happened on different dates in different parts of the country, and which had a level of significance which also varied – although it certainly had more significance among the African-American community. And it’s only been in the last two decades that the movement to focus on a common date has gained momentum with “Juneteenth” being “chosen” as that common date.


My Own Attitudes

Growing up in a small town in Connecticut, I had very little exposure to individuals who were other than of European extraction. As I noted in my autobiography:

The year [early 1960s] we traveled to Clarksville, GA, was my first exposure to the southern part of the US.  My sister and I were walking down the main street of the town with the daughter of the plant manager and I saw something on the other side of the street.  I wanted to cross over, but she stopped me because that was the “colored” part of town.  I was unused to this kind of treatment of race and it bothered me.  There were only a few colored folks in Wolcott.  One was a good friend in Boy Scouts, Shawn Moore.  He lived all the way on the other end of town and was awarded a scholarship to a private boarding school for high school, so I no longer saw him after that.  The other was a girl from Waterbury whose parents paid the tuition to send her to Wolcott schools which had a better reputation.  Her name was Sandra Raleigh, and since homeroom seating was alphabetical, I sat near her for our high school years.  As a result, color of skin was never significant to me. (*8)

My next exposure was the summer after high school, when I got a job recapping tires to help pay my college expenses. The co-workers at the small company where I worked were a very diverse bunch – the manager was of Swedish background, the foreman was Italian, and the other two workers were a French-Canadian, and a black fellow (*9). I got along with all of them, but it was certainly a mix that was very different from my high school class.

There were a few more non-Europeans in college, but none in the living unit where I spent those years, so I still had little interaction with them. Even when I married and started working, I was still pretty isolated. The small township where I now live only had .16% African-American in a recent federal census (*10).


Developing Empathy

Surrounded mostly by those “like me,” how could I develop empathy, the ability to identify with others who are not like me? That answer has three parts.

First, for the last decade of my working at Air Products, I was the IT Account Manager for our international subsidiaries and joint ventures. This put me in contact with various parts of the organization around the world, including Asia, the Middle East, parts of Northern and Eastern Europe, and Latin America. Since I most often traveled on my own, I took advantage of the opportunity to really get to know those from other cultures so that I could properly represent them to Global IT as needed. So being able to see things through the eyes of others was a skill that I needed to develop. I could give many examples of this, but that would not contribute to the subject under discussion, so I’ll refrain from doing so. But interestingly, when I retired, it was not my international relationships that I saw as my greatest contribution to the company. Rather, it was that by using those same skills, I was able to build an employee diversity group devoted to the needs of those with disabilities (*11).

Secondly, for about 20 years I worked as a volunteer for an international exchange student organization (AFS). This put me in direct contact with high-school students – both US students going abroad who needed training in cultural adaptation, and foreign students in the US. My wife and I also hosted a few students from other cultures. There is nothing so helpful in learning about other cultures than having daily contact. I was also fortunate enough to travel to several other countries (Hong Kong, Thailand, Costa Rica, Ghana) and spend time with a few of these students in their home cultures – in several cases living in their homes for a short period just as they had lived in mine (*12).

Finally, for the past several years I have gotten quite involved in genealogy research. While looking at just my ancestors only confirms the homogeneous nature of my heritage, as I look at my various cousins, second cousins, third cousins, etc. and see how my extended family has spread, I have come to appreciate the fact that there is a lot of diversity in that extended family. Diversity issues include things like race, gender orientation, politics, life style, etc. (*13)

As a result of all of these factors, I have been able to develop a strong sense of empathy, even though it has not been empathy for African-Americans. So, this year I am making an effort to focus some of it in that direction.


Putting It All Together

I noted in a posting about Black Lives Matter earlier this month (*14) that “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and seeing things from their perspective is HARD,” and that “I have a lot more thinking to do on this subject.” For the past two weeks I have been doing exactly that.

I’ve seen a number of postings on social media that say that since there are no persons now living who were slaves, nor are there any still living who were slave owners, that we should just be able to drop the whole issue and move on. But it’s not that simple.

Earlier this week I read an article entitled “3 Things Schools Should Teach About America’s History of White Supremacy” (*15). The three points of this article are (1) that the aftermath of the Civil War did not really end until the 1940s, (2) the Jim Crow era (which lasted until the 1950s) was violent, and (3) that racial inequality was preserved through housing discrimination and segregation (which did not end until the 1960s). So, while “slavery” in the pre-Civil War sense ended in the 1860s, there were other kinds of racially-motivated oppression that carried on for another century. And even though “redlining” which kept African-Americans in segregated urban settings ended several decades ago, there were other things that continued to reinforce that segregation that are still continuing until today – including such things as (1) welfare policies that reward poor urban families if the father is not in the home and thus continuing things into further generations, and (2) the “like me” syndrome that we all have that makes us mentally want to be with others like ourselves and thus encourages the urban “clumping” to continue (*16).

I’ve seen other postings complaining, “Why do we need yet another holiday? Isn’t having Martin Luther King, Jr. Day enough?” But that’s like asking, “Why do we need to have the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and Veteran’s Day? Isn’t one holiday about war enough?” So yes, I do believe that we need to have another holiday. And just like you can celebrate the Fourth of July even if your ancestors did not come to this country until 200 years later, so you can celebrate Juneteenth if you are not black. As an article in The Atlantic put it, “And so, in the middle of a chaotic period in this nation’s history, Black Americans pause to celebrate. They will barbecue, and dance, and pray, and love, and live in the name of freedom. The rest of American can use the day off to work on its own freedom – from a shameful past and a violent present.” (*17).

So, while the date of June 19th is historically only significant in Texas, it’s good that we can align around a common date to recognize the legal end of slavery in the United States of America. After all, we aligned around the Fourth of July in a similar fashion (*18).

I’d like to close with a quote from Alveda King, a niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. “Yes, segregation is over. Yes, Jim Crow is over. Yes, slavery is over. This year it’s time for us to learn to live together as brothers and sisters.” (*19)


Notes:






3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. By 1800, there were 951 slaves in Connecticut.
    By 1820 there were fewer than 100. the 1848 legislation freed 6 slaves.
    There were concerns with manumission about welfare of the slave.
    Someone enslaved for most of their lives had no opportunity to create capital, to have skills to earn a living, and were sometimes no longer able to support themselves.
    Some of the concerns were that a slave owner could not shirk the duty of providing for a slave that could no longer work and force the former slave into abject poverty. Slavery was wrong, but determining how to emancipate the slaves was not as simple as it sounds. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4564&context=ylj. I find this a fascinating speech, in which the authors seek that which could pass, ending importation, while making arguments that could equally apply to slavery in general; i.e. the art of the possible. How many of your ancestors would have been at the Corporation of Freeman's meeting in Farmington in 1774? My understanding is that it was a gathering of all eligible to vote in Farmington, which included up to Avon, Berlin, Southington, Bristol and part of Wolcott in 1774. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx? c=evans;cc=evans;q1=Liberty;rgn=div1;view=text;idno=N11133.0001.001;node=N11133.0001.001:2
    https://portal.ct.gov/SOTS/Register-Manual/Section-VII/Connecticut-Towns-in-the-Order-of-their-Establishment

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    1. Thanks for the further background on slavery in CT. You also ask an interesting question about which of my ancestors would have been at that meeting in Farmington in 1774. Wolcott was not inforporated until 1796, and before that was the parish of Farmingbury, being half in Waterbury and half in Farmington (the half in Farmington became part of Southington in 1779 when that town was spun off from Farmington). So, who would have been living in the Farmington half of Farmingbury in 1774 and thus would have been invited to the meeting? For an answer, the history of Wolcott records the initial meeting of the new Farmingbury parish church in 1770 and notes in which part of town many of the families lived, with those to the east of the "Bound Line" being legally part of Farmington. There are 16 families with notes indicating that they are from that part of town (since I know the geography very well). Of these, roughly half (9/16) are families that are related to me - either by being direct ancestors or fairly close cousins (Talmage, Upson, Norton, Hotchkiss, Hall, Beecher, Brocket, Plumb, Bronson). There were probably others who actually lived in Farmington at the time, but this does give you some indication of my ancestors involvement in this key meeting on slavery in CT. Thanks again for your input.

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