Ohhh Freedom!

Juneteenth: Celebrating True Freedom, Not Just Release.

In 1863, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared more than three million slaves living in the Confederate states to be free. More than two years would pass, however, before the news reached African Americans living in Texas. It was not until Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, that the state’s residents finally learned that slavery had been abolished. The former slaves immediately began to celebrate with prayer, feasting, song, and dance.

The following year, on June 19, the first official Juneteenth celebrations took place in Texas. The original observances included prayer meetings and the singing of spirituals, and celebrants wore new clothes as a way of representing their newfound freedom. Within a few years, African Americans in other states were celebrating the day as well, making it an annual tradition. Celebrations have continued across the United States into the 21st century and typically include prayer and religious services, speeches, educational events, family gatherings and picnics, and festivals with music, food, and dancing.

Juneteenth became a state holiday in Texas in 1980, and a number of other states subsequently followed suit. In 2021 Juneteenth was made a federal holiday. The day is also celebrated outside the United States, being used by organizations in a number of countries to recognize the end of slavery and to honor the culture and achievements of African Americans.

But just think of it though! Music and merriment. Feasting and frolicking. Friendship and fellowship all centered around FREEDOM!

I can only imagine how my ancestors must have felt when just the hint, the very notion of freedom, hit their tired ears. To have worked their fingers to the raw, their souls tired but their resolve intact. It must have felt like waking up from a long nightmare. For slaves who knew they were not supposed to be slaves to at long last hear, “You’re free!”, is something I don’t think many of us will ever understand.

It’s hard to grasp the atrocities of slavery if one has never been in bondage. Difficult, to say the least, to try and fathom being whipped within an inch of your very life, then expected to get back out there and work in order not to be whipped again. Hard, no doubt, to comprehend what freedom sounds like if the strike of the hammer of hard labor against the anvil of anguish has never rung in your ears.

This Juneteenth ‘hit different’. As a returning citizen, I pondered on how formerly incarcerated men and women must have felt to find out the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition has paid their fines and fees so that they may finally have the opportunity to engage in democracy.

For many, to hear this joyous news must have felt like freedom. True freedom. Not release. Freedom! There’s a revelation of a difference between the two. To have the heavy burden of insurmountable debt lifted. To have the bondage of disenfranchisement broken. To breathe the fresh air of hope in your lungs for the first time in a long time.

FREEDOM!

There is a contradiction in release but no freedom. That is what many returning citizens face everyday in America. Release, but not freedom.

Released from prison, but still on probation. Released from probation, but still under the yoke of collateral consequences that keep one from experiencing true freedom.

One of the great contradictions of the Revolutionary War was that men fought long and hard to be free. They risked their whole lives so that they might be removed from the tyranny of England and enjoy the wonders of freedom in what would become the United States of America. What irony then, that the very men who fought for freedom endorsed slavery and owned slaves. Freemen who owned other men.

There’s a contradiction somewhere. So utterly cataclysmic was the institution of slavery that it became one of the primary reasons for a civil war.

Friends, when you find freedom- true freedom- you ought to offer it to other folks too. That is why we all in the spirit of Juneteenth and good will of democracy ought to offer that same freedom to every returning citizen in our nation. We ought to urge Congress to pass House Resolution 1, the For the People Act of 2021.

We ought to keep up the fight to end discrimination against and dismantle the disenfranchisement of people with convictions.

There’s nothing like being free. When you find true freedom for yourself, you don’t hold others in slavery. You join the chorus of the old negro spiritual with one heart and one voice, singing……..

Ohhhh freedom. Ohhhhh freedom. Ohhhhhh freedom over me.

And before I be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave; and go home to my Lord and be freeeeee.

Freedom ain’t freedom until we’re all FREE!

May the joy of Juneteenth perpetually be yours. Now and always.

FREEDOM!