A Juneteenth Reflection
By Patrick Hanley, NTD President
Thursday evening, the New Trier Democrats hosted a Community Conversation, centering the legacy of Juneteenth, the story of America, and the meaning behind our public holidays. We were honored to be joined by Caine Jordan, University of Chicago historian, and Illinois General Assembly Assistant Majority Leader and State Representative Kam Buckner.
Jordan opened our conversation with the rigorous, evocative words of Frederick Douglass, when he asked ‘What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?’ in 1852. Jordan, quoting Douglass, commenting on our Founders, reminded us how “oppression makes a wise man mad,” and, “your [founding] fathers were wise men…” The horror of slavery made its intergenerational mark not only on enslaved men, women, and children, but on our country’s constitution, its political trajectory, the evolution of our legal system, and on economic and race relations to this day.
Leader Buckner drew on personal experiences celebrating Juneteenth - ‘Jubilee’ to his Gulf Coast extended family - with comfort food and fireworks. Buckner stressed how his parents would remind him and his siblings the Juneteenth story - dwelling on that year and a half between when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863, and when actual emancipation ultimately, finally reached enslaved people in Galveston, Texas on June 19th, 1865, as the rebellion finally collapsed around them.
Buckner and Jordan related how Emancipation and the Reconstruction Amendments would prove merely partial in raising formerly enslaved Black Americans out of crippling poverty and affording them the dignity of equality. They shared how freedom for so many was reduced to slavery in all-but-name, often in the very plantations, tied to the very families that freed people had once served. They connected the twin-meanings of Juneteenth: celebration and delay; disappointment and progress.
Then Buckner struck a powerful chord of inclusivity. He spoke from the heart about his hope for young people to engage with a richer American history - one which tells all our stories while bringing Americans together - less a melting pot, but rather a salad bowl, or a gumbo.
Our conversation was rooted in the past and yet urgent and instructive for our role as community members and Democrats today.
Juneteenth is the corrective to a white-washing and misdirection of our country’s past, so helplessly advanced by anxious politicians on the Right. When Independence Day stirs our patriotism and pride for our founding ideals, Juneteenth recalls us to our original sin. When Memorial Day trains our hearts to honor the dead, Juneteenth calls on us to lift up those living - still - under the long shadow of slavery: the legacies of trauma, violence, and racism.
And yet - and also - the Juneteenth story holds a fundamental optimism.
Juneteenth Day is dedicated in the name of progress - to the fact of Emancipation, partial and eventual - to the lengths we’ve traveled, with imperfect tools held in human hands, to build up a thriving, healthy, multiracial democracy together.
With Juneteenth, our summer holidays, taken together, march us through a moving procession of service, sacrifice, patriotism, the dignity of work - and now - the celebration of freedom and equality, the high cost of hard-fought rights, and the long tail and final failure of hate.
Thank you Caine, Leader Buckner, our hosts Mimi and Ben Rodman, NTD Board Member and Events Committee Chair Jennifer Lind, and to all those who joined our conversation Thursday evening.
Wishing you a meaningful Juneteenth weekend.
