Juneteenth Reflections
June 19, 2020
Earlier this week Governor Northam of Virginia declared June 19 as a day to reflect on the meaning of Juneteenth. The University of Virginia also honors this day.
Juneteenth, like America, is an unfolding, unfinished story.
It is a story about Black slaves in Galveston, Texas, learning the news on June 19, 1865, that major Confederate armies had surrendered to Union Troops and that Black people in Texas were legally free. Union General Gordon Granger read aloud the wartime Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln two and a half years earlier. Even if some plantation owners tried to conceal the news until after the harvest, “Freedom Day” had finally arrived.
This story is embedded within a longer story. A story of heroic efforts to end the dehumanizing international slave trade and abolish everywhere its American cousin of racialized chattel slavery. Anti-slavery crusaders were active from before the American Revolution and continued through the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in December 1865. Heroes of this story include former slaves Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and numerous allies like William Lloyd Garrison and Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner (the inspiration for my second son’s name).
This story is part of a still-larger story of redeeming America’s founding promise of freedom and equality. After the formal end of slavery, we know that new villains in the story emerged: Jim Crow, segregation, mass incarceration, and racial inequity in healthcare, education, housing, employment, voting rights, and criminal justice, just to name a few. This story has multiple subplots of successes and setbacks. Courageous heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer. Moments of hope like the Presidency of Barack Obama. Moments of despair, with the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many more.
Juneteenth, like America, is a story still being written.
This summer my family will move into one of the 10 Pavilions on the historic Grounds at the University of Virginia. These early 19th century mansions, buffered today by flowering backyard gardens, mark the perimeter of UVA’s Lawn, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most beautiful college quads in the world.
Founded in 1819, the vision for UVA was for students and faculty to live amongst one another around the Lawn, relate to each other with minimal hierarchy, and form an Academical Village to educate leaders for our young democracy.
The irony, of course, is that the Pavilions were not intended for people like me, a Black man, and my family, at least not to live in the main house, above the basement. In the original concept of the University, black lives did not matter, other than as enslaved labor — property to be borrowed, bought or sold; bodies denied the freedom to choose or refuse.
One of my friends asked me recently what I thought it would be like living in a house built by slaves. She asked if I was worried about their ghosts in the house or in the gardens where their toil had been previously hidden from view. I paused to think about the people who built the Pavilions, and the generations after them who have maintained the buildings and grounds. Could they have imagined me as a Dean and my family someday occupying and leading in this space? What do I owe their sacrifice and memory?
The history of liberation is not a simple narrative of good and evil, of linear human progress, and of decisive historical turning points. It has more layers, more complexity, and more mud. Many of its major characters remain unnamed and unknown. Some of its most celebrated characters, like Thomas Jefferson, reveal both courage and contradiction. Even 155 years after the Civil War, the work of healing, reconstruction, and repair remains incomplete.
This Fall, when I teach seminars in the sitting room of the Pavilion and when my wife and I host students and faculty as our guests in the garden, we will add our own chapter to this evolving American story. It is a chapter of change, hope, and possibility.
As I reflect on the opportunities for the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and my role on UVA’s Racial Equity Task Force, the legacy of Juneteenth reminds me of the need to implement and fulfill our founding ideals. We need to break the bonds that still enslave too many of us, whether they be legal, political, social, economic, or psychological. We need to commit to racial equity and justice. We need the courage to confront the contradictions of our past and to hold ourselves accountable for the future.
I want my students, like my sons, to fully experience freedom as their birthright, and also their opportunity. The genius of America is our capacity for reinvention, renewal, and progress. We have a moment now, working together, to write the next chapter of our story.
How we redeem the promise of Juneteenth, like America, is up to us.
