Happy Juneteenth

Today’s celebration of Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the United States in 1865. It is also a reminder that what ended on paper has taken much longer to end in fact.

June 19, 1865, was the day toward the end of the Civil War when a Union general landed in Galveston and advised “the people of Texas” that “all slaves are free.” The general declared: “This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer."

Abraham Lincoln actually issued his Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862. He said as Commander in Chief that slaves were free in any of the Confederate States of America which did not return to Union control by January 1, 1863.

It was probably no accident that the wording was quite calculated, and not without some loopholes. The two and a half years it took for emancipation to become effective in Texas are often seen as emblematic of the nation’s half-hearted commitment to ending slavery.

Indeed, in 1862 the Republican leader in the House of Representatives saw emancipation primarily as a wartime tactic to disable the South’s economy. As originally framed, it did not free any slaves in the border states or any Southern states already under Union control. So it could not become effective in any Confederate state until the presence of Union troops made it so.

By July of 1865 nearly all of the estimated four million slaves had been freed. Slavery was finally abolished as an institution by ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution on December 18, 1865. But official oppression continued for another hundred years—through Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws and segregation—until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Houston Chronicle columnist Cragg Hines uses the occasion of Juneteenth to note that we still have work to do before we can be satisfied that the legacy of slavery has been overcome. He suggests that official apologies for slavery are a constructive way for the country to atone and perhaps begin a final chapter in the healing of our oldest national wound. He also notes some progress—in some surprising places.

Below is his column, originally available at
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/hines/4895211.html

Why it's important to get the debate on slavery right

The approach of Juneteenth brings us again to an annual reminder of the nation's indelible sin of slavery.

Remarking on the "peculiar institution" and the continuing lack of national atonement seems, judging by the vein-popping e-mails that pour in when I write about the issue, to discomfit a lot of people.

Good.

A number suggest, as did a particularly tone-deaf white Virginia legislator amid consideration of an Old Dominion apology measure this year, that blacks "should get over it."

Just so you get the full picture, let's note that Delegate Frank D. Hargrove Sr., a suburban Republican, went on to ask in a newspaper interview: "Are we going to force the Jews to apologize for killing Christ?"

Yes, this debate regularly — if unintentionally — reveals how far some people have not come. It is clearly not time to "get over it" but to continue to examine the history of slavery, the diabolical role it played in our nation and its continuing manifestations.

But even among the continued outcroppings of hatefulness, there have been some achievements over the last year.

The most stunning development, at least in symbolic terms, was a resolution adopted by the Alabama Legislature expressing "profound regret" for the state's role in slavery "and its aftereffects" on the nation.

An apology, the resolution said, "cannot erase the past, but confession of the wrongs can speed racial healing and reconciliation and help African-Americans and white citizens confront the ghosts of their collective pasts together."

In signing the resolution, Gov. Bob Riley, a Republican, said: "I want the world to understand that Alabama has changed for the better."

Alabama was not the first state to act, but given its record — do we need to say anything more than "Selma"? — the action in the capitol in Montgomery seems the most notable. Even now, eight Republican state senators took the trouble to vote against the apology measure, and some GOP members in the House, where there was a voice vote, tried to demand a roll-call so that they could officially record their opposition.

The Alabama resolution observed that "the vestiges of slavery are ever before African-American citizens, from the overt racism of hate groups to the subtle racism" found in commerce, health care, education and law enforcement.

The legislatures of three other states in which slaves were held at the time of the Civil War — Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina — have also moved this year to adopt apologies.

It's a step that any state with a slave past could take.

With the 50th anniversary of Little Rock's Central High School integration crisis coming up later this year, an apology for slavery would certainly be the correct move for Arkansas.

Recent attempts by Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, to stymie an apology drive in Arkansas is virtually unfathomable.

Beebe is correct, as he told the Associated Press, that "race relations and the ability of people to get along is based upon deeds more than it is words," but that does not mean that the words should not be said.

The words should be said not only in slave states — including Texas — but nationally where chattel-like enslavement of men, women and children was commonplace for almost 150 years.

That history, as well as the rampant de jure segregation of "Jim Crow," is addressed in an apology resolution, H. Res. 194, that has been introduced by Rep. Stephen J. Cohen, D-Tenn.

The resolution speaks to the history of slavery and its lasting effects. It notes that while visiting the old slave-shipping port of Goree Island, Senegal, in 2003, President Bush correctly labeled the trade in humans as "one of the greatest crimes of history."

"A genuine apology," Cohen's resolution says, "is an important and necessary first step in the process of racial reconciliation."

When Bush visited the slave-shipping site off Dakar four years ago, he made an important point: "The spirit of Africans in America did not break. Yet the spirit of their captors was corrupted."

That corruption remains and can be heard loud and clear in the "get over it" sentiment that too many glibly express today.