Juneteenth Quotes

Words of Emancipation didn't arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

Nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down superfine, but it doesn't just blow away.

Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.

It's the little things that find us out, the little things we refuse to do in order to avoid doing the big things that can save us.

It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and not celebrated until 'Juneteenth'. There may be those in Texas now who believe they can insulate their state—a state that had its own courageous revolution—from the news of evolution and from the writing in 1786 of a Constitution that refuses to mention religion except when demarcating and limiting its role in the public square. But we promise them today that they will join their fore-runners in the flat-earth community, and in the mad clerical clique of those who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Yes, they will be in schoolbooks—as a joke on the epic scale of William Jennings Bryan. We shall be fair, and take care to ensure that their tale is told.

Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places—and people, ourselves included—without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses.

But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.

A start is a start, and 'is' is 'is' not 'was'.

So now they're shaking in their boots and looking for someone to give them the answer they want to hear. Not the truth, but some lie that will protect them from the truth

History is always being revised, as new information, comes to light and when different people see known documents and have their own responses to them, shaped by their individual experiences.

The practice of alchemizing suffering into meaningful art as well as social and political advancements has been one of African Americans’ greatest gifts to humanity. Many have followed their lead in this regard and that practice can make a lot of positive difference during this time of renewal and re-weaving.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

that’s when you got your first peep through the crack in the wall of life and saw hell laughing like a gang of drunk farmers watching a dogfight on a country road.

Juneteenth Day celebrations (commemorating the day the last slaves in Texas learned they were free, two years after Emancipation)

It’s not just a matter of having lost the land and the wealth that came with it. It’s a matter of the fact that we lost a way of life that we should have been able to pass on to our children and to their children, but which we can’t because of what was taken from us. (Harris Neck, Georgia native Wilson Moran as quoted by Aberjhani in The American Poet Who Went Home Again)

Even the church has to have its outhouse, just as it has to have a front door as well as a back door, a basement as well as a steeple. Because man is always going to be man....

For white Americans (whiteness itself a societal construct that has changed in it definition over time), this new national holiday of Juneteenth, this day off from work, should be like an American Yom Kippur, a Day of Atonement, a day of reflection, a day to keep learning more about how we have failed as a society to live up to our ideals, and what we as individuals can do to make it better, more real, closer to our vision of justice and liberty, a vision that our founding forefathers could not even imagine. 'Do better' should be what all who carry any kind of privilege in this society should say to ourselves and to each other - what can we do, what can you do, to 'do better'?

We shall demonstrate once again that in this great, inventive land man’s idlest dreams are but the blueprints and mockups of emerging realities, technologies and poems. Here in the fashion of our pioneer forefathers, who confronted the mysteries of wilderness, mountain and prairie with crude tools and a self-generating imagination, we are committed to facing with courage the enormous task of imposing an ever more humane order upon this bewilderingly diversified and constantly changing society. Committed we are to maintaining its creative momentum.

Well, few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world. Poor Galileo, poor John Jasper; they persecuted one and laughed at the other, but both were witnesses for the truth they professed.

The law might say I could go to a school or into a store. But it could not ensure that I would be welcome when I came to these places.

Land taken from Native peoples in Texas was then cleared by enslaved people, who were then put to work planting, tending, and harvesting crops.

worshiping heroism, as typically defined, works against the idea that the lives of more common people count and hold lessons for us as well.

Because slavery in the United States was racially based, it was easy to graft the legally imposed incapacities of slavery onto Black people as a group, making incapacity an inherent feature of the race.

Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and for nations. They inform our sense of self; telling us what kind of people we believe we are, what kind of nation we believe in. They usually carry, at least, a hope that where we started might hold the key to where we are in the present. We can say, then, that much of the concern with origin stories is about our current needs and desires (usually to feel good about ourselves), not actual history.

Still, 150 years after its birth, Juneteenth remains largely unacknowledged on America’s national calendar. Many Americans are unaware of its existence, or its roots. Sadly, that ignorance of Juneteenth reflects a deeper issue: the continued existence of two histories, black and white, separate and unequal.

why “Six Flags.” The six flags refer to the six flags of the countries that flew over Texas in history: Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, and the Confederate States of America. I have no idea if it’s the same way now, but the original park had sections that depicted Texas’s time under each particular flag, a conceit that would make less sense as the franchise expanded to places outside of Texas that had no similar multinational history.

The fear of the Black imagination was strong all throughout slavery. That was one of the reasons free African Americans posed such a problem and was one of the reasons the Texas Constitution prevented the immigration of free Black people into the republic. Seeing that Black people could exist outside of legal slavery put the lie to the idea that Blacks were born to be slaves. Making life as hard as possible for free African Americans, impairing their movement and economic prospects—even if that meant the state would forgo the economic benefits of talented people who wanted to work—was designed to prove that Blacks could not operate outside of slavery.

any individual or family who tried to do this on their own in the wilderness of East Texas would face years of toil and strife without a real prospect of success. Still, nothing is inevitable. Things could have been different. The choice for slavery was deliberate, and that reality is hard to square with a desire to present a pristine and heroic origin story about the settlement of Texas. There is no way to do that without suggesting that the lives of African Americans, and their descendants in Texas, did not, and do not, matter.

Well, few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world.

Of great importance, as I have said in another context, the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.

Empowered Black people made the intangible benefits derived from Whiteness less valuable.

Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections.

People want the individuals from the past they admire to be “right” on the question of race—no matter how wrong they actually were—so that admiring such people poses no problem. The difficulty is that not many European-Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were what we would consider to be “right” on the question of race, which, at a minimum, requires believing in the equal humanity of African Americans.

Dutch was the first language of noted abolitionist Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Baumfree in Swartekill, New York, near the end of the 1790s. She almost certainly spoke English with a Dutch-inflected accent. Yet, reproductions of her speech were written in the stereotypical dialect universally chosen to portray the speech of enslaved Blacks, no matter where in the country they lived. Under this formulation, the experiences of growing up hearing and speaking Dutch had no effect upon Truth. It was as if the legal status of being enslaved, and the biological reality of having been born of African descent, fixed her pattern of speech, almost as a matter of brain function.

when I hear people say “Six Flags,” my mind fills in “Over Texas” and I have to resist the temptation to explain why “Six Flags.” The six flags refer to the six flags of the countries that flew over Texas in history: Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, and the Confederate States of America.

When I was growing up, we took Texas history twice—if I remember correctly, in the fourth and the seventh grades. I cannot say with certainty that slavery was never mentioned. Of course, I didn’t need school to tell me that Blacks had been enslaved in Texas. I heard references to slavery from my parents and grandparents. A common retort when another kid—often a sibling—insisted you do something for them you didn’t want to do was “Slavery time is over.” And we celebrated Juneteenth, which marked the end of the institution. But if slavery was mentioned in the early days of my education, it didn’t figure prominently enough in our lessons to give us a clear and complete picture of the role the institution played in the state’s early development, its days as a Republic, its entry into the Union, and its role in the Civil War and its aftermath. Instead, as with the claim “The American Civil War was not about slavery. It was about states’ rights,” the move when talking about Texas’s rebellion against Mexico was to take similar refuge in concerns about overreaching federal authorities. Anglo-Texans chafed at the centralizing tendencies of the Mexican government and longed to be free. As one could ask about the states’ rights argument—states’ rights to do what?—I don’t recall my teachers giving a complete explanation for why Anglo-Texans felt so threatened by the Mexican government.

I get the distinct impression that the prominence of Parker’s husband and son shaped the presentation of how she ended up as part of the Comanche community in the first place. Parker’s life is judged by the men to whom she was attached: a powerful and important husband and a powerful and important son. That she was kidnapped is fine because she married well.

And who can blame those who don’t feel that they have to worry about the complicated truths we have to struggle with? In this country men can be born and live well and die without ever having to feel much of what makes their ease possible, just because so much is buried under all of this black and white mess that in their ignorance some folks accept it as a natural condition. But then again, maybe they just feel that the whole earth would blow up if even a handful of folks got to digging into it. It would even seem a shame to expose it, to have it known that so much has been built on top of such a shaky foundation. But look, Hickman—Alonzo … this is here and now and the stuff has begun to bubble. The man who fell and the man lying there on the bed is the child, Bliss. That’s the mystery. How did he become the child of that babyhood … father to the man, as it goes? And how could he have been my child, nephew and grandchild and brother-in-Christ as he grew? The confounding mystery of it has to be struggled with and I wish it was all a lie and and we could go back home and forget it.

I often encounter great hesitancy about, and impatience with, discussing race when talking about the American past. The obvious difficulty with those kinds of complaints is that people in the past—in the overall American context and in the specific context of Texas—talked a lot about, and did a lot about, race. It isn’t some newly discovered fad topic. Race is right there in the documents—official and personal. It would take a concerted effort not to consider and analyze the subject, and I realize that evasion is exactly what happened in many of the textbooks that Americans used in their school social studies and history classes. This, in part, accounts for the pained accusations about “revisionist” history when historians talk about things that people had never been made aware of in their history educations.

There is no way to get around the fact that, whatever legitimate federalism-based issues were at play, slavery was a central reason Anglo-Texans wanted out of Mexico. Using unpaid labor to clear forests, plant crops, harvest them, and move them to market was the basis of their lives and wealth. As Austin perceptively noted, any individual or family who tried to do this on their own in the wilderness of East Texas would face years of toil and strife without a real prospect of success. Still, nothing is inevitable. Things could have been different. The choice for slavery was deliberate, and that reality is hard to square with a desire to present a pristine and heroic origin story about the settlement of Texas. There is no way to do that without suggesting that the lives of African Americans, and their descendants in Texas, did not, and do not, matter.

A public service announcement from that era, designed to combat littering, featured an Indian man (the actor Iron Eyes Cody, who was actually Sicilian) in full dress walking through a modern United States covered in litter. In the final frame, he sheds a single tear. All of this fit with the hippie-themed back-to-the-land movement that romanticized Indigenous people as much as taking them seriously. It was also of a piece with earlier responses to Native Americans. After removing them from their land, preventing them from becoming a threat, Americans often claimed to admire the special virtues of Native peoples, who were supposed to possess a unique spirit. They named towns after them, states, later sports franchises. That iconic commercial with the “Crying Indian” played to the idea that Indigenous people have a spiritual connection to the land that others do not possess. The people who took their land did not appreciate it, or care for it properly. This was almost a half-hearted confession that what had happened was wrong. That didn’t mean the land would be given back to them, of course.

A display cake read JUNETEENTH! in red frosting, surrounded by red, white, and blue stars and fireworks. A flyer taped to the counter above it encouraged patrons to consider ordering a Juneteenth cake early: We all know about the Fourth of July! the flyer said. But why not start celebrating freedom a few weeks early and observe the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation! Say it with cake! One of the two young women behind the bakery counter was Black, but I could guess the bakery's owner wasn't. The neighborhood, the prices, the twee acoustic music drifting out of sleek speakers: I knew all of the song's words, but everything about the space said who it was for. My memories of celebrating Juneteenth in DC were my parents taking me to someone's backyard BBQ, eating banana pudding and peach cobbler and strawberry cake made with Jell-O mix; at not one of them had I seen a seventy-five-dollar bakery cake that could be carved into the shape of a designer handbag for an additional fee. The flyer's sales pitch--so much hanging on that We all know--was targeted not to the people who'd celebrated Juneteenth all along but to office managers who'd feel hectored into not missing a Black holiday or who just wanted an excuse for miscellaneous dessert.

Maybe I'll go to Rosedale's, get some really good seafood. Maybe I'll see if there is a recipe in here for shrimp and grits, which Taffy prepared for me whenever I visited Atlanta, knowing it's my favorite. Whenever I asked my mother-in-law for the recipe she would smile and say, "Oh, it's just a little of this and a little of that." Except, no, I wouldn't be able to find stone-ground grits in the city and would have to put the shrimp over rice instead. Maybe I'll make the trout stuffed with bread crumbs, shallots, and lemon slices, or the chicken and dumplings, which are simply biscuits made with cream, cooked on top of a chicken stew. I keep turning the pages of the book, thinking I might make dessert, too. Something comforting. Rice pudding, or a fruit cobbler. The first dessert listed is called "Juneteenth Cake." Juneteenth, I read, is a celebration of blacks' emancipation from slavery. The cake is made from fresh coconuts, both the grated meat and the milk from within. Sounds delicious but laborious.

This meant that all the slaves were now free. The slaves in Texas where the last slaves to be set free, and the day when General Gordon Granger declared freedom is still celebrated as Juneteenth.

In this country men can be born and live well and die without ever having to feel much of what makes their ease possible, just because so much is buried

under all of this black and white mess that in their ignorance some folks accept it as a natural condition. But then again, maybe they just feel that the whole earth would blow up if even a handful of folks got to digging into it. It would even seem a shame to expose it, to have it known that so much has been built on top of such a shaky foundation.

people face Death and even go a piece with him and then wrestle with him and get away, thank the Lord, and return. Yes, but how many have I seen pass on and

if you don’t, you’re already dead anyway. Now hush, because you’re simply thinking words, old saws. So hush…all is noise.

Don’t laugh at fools. Some are His.

And he’ll learn that his index and second fingers are meant for something other than playing the game of stink-finger and pulling his bow.

Kainat Calling (The Sonnet) I'll take your leave now, Kainat is calling - Ain't gonna stay amidst your narrowness no more. You conquered moon, you'll conquer mars, yet what's the point, when your heart is still beastly sore! Break your sleep, o drowsy doofus, Wake up to the auspicious joyville! Where love and light are supreme law, Wake up to that valley of joy and zeal! Everyday is Christmas there, Everyday is Ramadan and Juneteenth. Stay in your archaic muck if you like, I gotta go now, Kainat calling!

you ought to know better’n me that they respect some things of ours. Or at least they leave them alone. Maybe not our women or our right to good food and education, but they respect our burying grounds.

Do you still call it ‘Juneteenth,’ Revern’ Hickman? Is it still celebrated?

Even let them eat hummingbirds’ wings and tell you it’s too good for you.—Grits and greens don’t turn to ashes in anybody’s mouth—how about it, Rev. Eatmore?

Why would White Texans be more obstreperous than other White southerners? It has been suggested that this was because, unlike other Southern states, Texas had not been defeated militarily. They had won the last battle of the Civil War. That the state had been its own Republic, within the living memory of many Texans, also set them apart from the other Confederates. The very thing that has been seen as a source of strength and pride for latter-day Texans, may have fueled a stubbornness that prevented the state from moving ahead at this crucial moment. [p. 131]

[B]lack Texans, in the face of this hostility, went about the business of making new lives in the state, when they could have, in some places, unleashed carnage on their former enslavers. They, like freed people throughout the South, focused on other things: solemnizing their marriages, keeping away from the violence of Whites, trying to reunite with family members who had been sold during slavery, working, and, very happily, taking advantage of the schools the Bureau created. Adults sat in classrooms with children, all eager to learn to read and write. In the midst of all this, any false step by a Black person, any wrong decision by the Bureau—and there definitely were some—was taken as proof that the whole effort was a grievous mistake. [p. 131]

The people from Texas took Juneteenth Day to Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and other places they went. Even now, with barbecues and red soda pop, they celebrate June 19, 1865, the day Union soldiers rode into Galveston, announced that the Civil War was over, and released the quarter-million slaves in Texas who, not knowing they had been freed, had toiled for two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

He placed a big old kiss right on Juntie’s sloped yellow forehead. “Girlie, let’s you and me get one thing straight. I’m the one who’s in charge here. Got that?” Missouri

as if taking the body of Christ at communion made much more sense.

Yet his baby fluttered on soft wings of creation just underneath her heart, and was the most patient child whenever she talked to her pupils about world history and geography. Oh

left the room, as if she weren’t significant enough to argue with.

On the day God said, “Let there be light”, he had Juneteenth in mind.

We seek not perfection, but coordination. Not sterile stability but creative momentum.

have assembled a partial list: Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619–1877; Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow; Tina Cassidy, Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait?: Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson, and the Fight for the Right to Vote; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63; and Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth. I would also recommend reading writings by or about some of the pivotal figures in the fight for political equality, such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Ellison stated that “by a trick of fate (and our racial problems notwithstanding), the human imagination is integrative—and the same is true of the centrifugal force that inspirits the democratic process.

My God, you don’t write out of your skin; you write out of your imagination.” Ralph Ellison

Ellison gave our age a new metaphor for social alienation. His definition of invisibility is so common now, so much a part of the culture and language—like a coin handled by millions—that it is automatically invoked when we talk about the situation of black Americans and any social group we willingly refuse to see.

At that time in New Iberia there were black people still alive who remembered the Emancipation, what they came to call “Juneteenth,” and there were white people who had seen General Banks’s Federal soldiers, twenty thousand of them, march through town in pursuit of the chivalric Confederate general, Alfred Mouton.

I thought about how Juneteenth is a holiday that inspires so much celebration, born from circumstances imbued with so much tragedy. Enslavers in Texas, and across the South, attempted to keep Black people in bondage for months, and theoretically years, after their freedom had been granted. Juneteenth, then, is both a day to solemnly remember what this country has done to Black Americans and a day to celebrate all that Black Americans have overcome. It is a reminder that each day this country must consciously make a decision to move toward freedom for all of its citizens, and that this is something that must be done proactively; it will not happen on its own. The project of freedom, Juneteenth reminds us, is precarious, and we should regularly remind ourselves how many people who came before us never got to experience it, and how many people there are still waiting.

the past is never dead. It’s not even past.

When you come down to the ground of humanity from your pedestal of intellect, then you realize that though white Americans received independence from British occupation on July 4th, 1776, it meant nothing as to the fate of the Black Americans, for they still continued to suffer as slaves officially until the declaration of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st 1863, and somewhat unofficially till Juneteenth, that is, June 19th, 1866. I say somewhat unofficially because, it ought to be clear to anybody with half a brain by now that, slavery didn’t actually end either with Emancipation Proclamation or on Juneteenth, it morphed into racism.

The Juneteenth Sonnet Once upon a time but not long ago, They brought us to America in chains. Thinking of themselves as superior race, White barbarians kept us as slaves. But the sapling of humanity found a way, To break those chains causing ascension. Whites and blacks all stood up together, And lighted the torch of emancipation. Juneteenth is now declared holiday, Yet to some it feels like a critical dishonor. The human race comes from a black mother, Yet they treat people of color as inferior. The America handed to us is far from civilized. But together we'll make our home humanized.

在澳购买毕业证【咨询Q、微:2026614433】（办理LTU毕业证成绩单原版）如何在澳洲办理拉筹伯大学毕业证本科学位和硕士学位毕业证。 SSBNSVBSSVBNSVBSNCSVSCSSKJSLKSJSKLSJKSLSJSNMSSNBVSBNVSNBSVSBN A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view--whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent. The book won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review and elsewhere. Born and raised in New Orleans, he received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.

There was a flap in Fremont, California, about how to celebrate the Fourth. The city put up American flags, to be sure, but vice mayor Steven Cho thought this was not inclusive enough, so the American flag shared honors with flags from 25 other countries, including Qatar and Mongolia. San Francisco celebrates diversity with cash. In 1999, the Cinco de Mayo Carnival and Parade got $162,500, the Japanese Cherry Blossom Parade got $40,000, the American Indian Festival got $27,000, Martin Luther King Day got $21,000, Juneteenth got $13,000, Samoan Flag Day got $12,000, and the Min Sok Korean Festival got $7,500. Veterans were angry to be fobbed off with only $1,000 for Veterans Day.

Amidst the illusive fog of color and geography, When did humanity cease mattering most! Sentiments and dreams have no borders, Character isn't exclusive to any single coast.

SEC. 6. All free white persons who shall emigrate to this republic, and who shall, after a residence of six months, make oath before some competent authority that he intends to reside permanently in the same, and shall swear to support this Constitution, and that he will bear true allegiance

SEC. 9. All persons of color who were slaves for life previous to their emigration to Texas, and who are now held in bondage, shall remain in the like state of servitude:provided, The said slave shall be thebona-fideproperty of the person so holding said slave as aforesaid. Congress shall pass no laws to prohibit emigrants from bringing their slaves into the republic with them, and holding them by the same tenure by which such slaves were held in the United States; nor shall congress have power to emancipate slaves;