Juneteenth, January 6th and July 4th

IN HIS celebrated 1936 essay “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” If that part of the author’s confessional wisdom was true in the Thirties, it’s just as true today, for America and Americans. 

Holding two opposed ideas at the same time has also been the preoccupation of this country in matters of race. We’ve long navigated that duality, performed the social gymnastics of a racially divided nation, juggling contrary mindsets and principles. The observance of Juneteenth is a towering case in point. 

At almost the moment the unexpected happened June 15th – when Congress overwhelmingly voted to recognize Juneteenth as a federal holiday, marking the centrality of June 19 in the African American experience – Twitter obliged us with a snapshot of irony that put everything in our untied states in perspective: Juneteenth has become a federal holiday at practically the same moment that educators in a number of states are blocked from explaining the reasons why Juneteenth has become a federal holiday.

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Let’s try anyway. On June 19, 1865, a group of Union soldiers led by Major General Gordon Granger briefly took command of a home in Galveston, Texas, for the sole purpose of delivering a message, his General Order No. 3, a statement whose brevity ably disguises its power and reach. 

From Granger’s order: The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of personal property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. 

There was joy, and certainly a barely submerged outrage, when slaves in Texas thus discovered that the powers and permissions of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – enacted in January 1863 – had been denied them for two years, six months and 18 days. 

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Juneteenth has vaulted into the national calendar with a full historical narrative behind it, albeit one most Americans know little or nothing about. Ironically, and somewhat like the slaves of Civil War-era Texas, many Americans were surprised to discover Juneteenth, 156 years after the revelation that made its observance possible in the first place. 

Irony piles on irony: Texas, where Juneteenth began, has taken point in renouncing critical race theory, the long-practiced but recently reviled academic pursuit of explaining the systemic relationship -- connecting the dots -- between racism and our national institutions, between our past and the present day. Juneteenth joins two other dates in a broad chain of disappointments, in showing us both how far our nation has come and how far it has to go. 

The Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, announced the American brand to the world. What was codified on the original July 4th was reinforced in the unambiguous language of Granger’s order. July 4th. Juneteenth. The principles of American democracy were upheld on those points on the calendar. But the process of making them a reality has always been under siege, never more directly than on Jan. 6, 2021, during a deadly violent insurrection by domestic terrorists against the duly elected government of the United States. 

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That insurrection, powered to great degree by white supremacists and their apologists, was one of the latest disconnects of our values and our politics. The very latest: The Senate’s tireless efforts to prevent the John Lewis Voting Rights Act from gaining the legislative traction it needs to become law. 

Juneteenth. Jan. 6th. The Fourth of July. The connection between those dates is less tortured or tenuous than one might think. They form what may be the most consequential triad of American observances: Even as one celebrates the genesis of American democracy, and a second marks the resilience of that democracy’s promise (even if deferred for years), the third date, the most recent, indicates the fragility of that democracy, and how it’s no automatic, no given, nothing to be taken for granted. 

The message for cynics – those who look at Jan. 6 and see just another tourist day in Washington, the ones for whom July 4th is a backdrop for mattress sales and baseball, the ones who look at Juneteenth and see nothing at all – is irrefutable. Symbols matter. They represent the best of what we are. In our flag-draped, image-besotted American culture, there’s substance in symbolism. A lot of it.

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Image credits: Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger: public domain/Wikimedia Commons.