Juneteenth highlights the gap between rhetoric and reality about who’s actually ‘free’ in America
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This story was originally published at Prism. For two and a half years, enslaved Black Americans in Galveston, Texas, were both free and not free. According to the soaring words of the Emancipation Proclamation, as of Jan. 1, 1863, they were “thencJuneteenth highlights the gap between rhetoric and reality about who’s actually ‘free’ in America
This story was originally published at Prism. For two and a half years, enslaved Black Americans in Galveston, Texas, were both free and not free. According to the soaring words of the Emancipation Proclamation, as of Jan. 1, 1863, they were “thenceforward, and forever free” with the full endorsement of the U.S. government. But until official word arrived in Galveston on June 19, 1865, along with Union soldiers, the lofty rhetoric handed down from on high proved no match for the local, lived experience of enslaved people. Instead, with no one yet enforcing the executive order, enslavers in Galveston maintained their grip on power and enslaved people toiled, lived, fought, hoped, despaired, and died because that years-long gap between freedom in name and freedom in reality was allowed to exist. It’s worth noting that the proclamation itself implicitly acknowledged that freedom on paper and freedom in reality were not the same thing, promising that federal forces wouldn’t get in the way of freed people who took action toward gaining their “actual freedom.” In other words, while President Abraham Lincoln could declare enslaved people in Confederate states to be free, whether Union forces could immediately enforce those words was a separate matter entirely. Thus, as ever, Black folks were on their own in the in-between. Read more