We Can and Should Celebrate Slavery's End

www.civilrightsfortheunborn.org/cru/juneteenth

Happy Juneteenth everyone. My prayer today is that repentance, jubilee and Juneteenth will meet in a glorious trajectory of redemption.

Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when people held as slaves in Texas finally learned that the abhorrent practice had ended two years previously, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

The proclamation freed "all persons held as slaves" in the states that had rebelled against the Union, and Texas was one of them. To understand how it took more than two years for slaves in Texas to learn they were free, you have to know a little bit of history about the Lone Star State.

Before Texas was a state, it was ruled by Spain and later, Mexico.

Both governments encouraged the freeing of slaves, but in the 1820s, when slave owners from the Southern states began migrating to Texas to grow cotton, the number of slaves began to grow. When Texas won its independence from Mexico in 1836, slavery was written into the new republic’s constitution.

In 1845, when Texas was annexed to the U.S., there were some 30,000 slaves in the state.

By 1850, that number had jumped to more than 50,000.

Ten years later, the slave population numbered more than 180,000.

Texas seceded from the Union in 1861 and joined the southern confederacy. At that point, almost one-quarter of Texas families owned at least one slave. Following the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, southern slaveholders began moving their human captives into Texas, where few Union soldiers were stationed and the proclamation could be ignored.

That changed on June 19, 1865, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger and 2,000 Union soldiers arrived in Galveston and declared all slaves free by reading this proclamation:

“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 rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.”

A year later, Juneteenth celebrations began across Texas and eventually would pop up in other parts of the South. The Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s spread awareness of the holiday.

On April 4, 1968, my uncle, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in the midst of planning the Poor People’s Campaign, which was to culminate in a peaceful march in Washington, D.C. Its purposes was to call on the government to address the housing and employment needs of all indigent people in the nation.

The campaign ultimately continued and the Poor People’s March took place on Juneteenth.

People from all over the country gathered in our nation’s capital that day, and when they left, many of them took a newfound knowledge of and respect for the holiday with them.

Celebrations began springing up in other parts of the country.

My family has always celebrated Juneteenth.

Texas declared Juneteenth an official state holiday in 1980 and now, 46 states and the District of Columbia have some kind of observances.

But somehow, the holiday has remained a well-kept secret.

My colleague Janet Morana, executive director of Priests for Life, was a New York City public school teacher in an urban school, and even she had never heard of Juneteenth until I came to work for Priests for Life as director of Civil Rights for the Unborn in 2003.

This year, things have changed for the better for this holiday.

Amid the Black Lives Matter protests, President Trump’s campaign inadvertently scheduled his first post-pandemic rally on June 19. When some black leaders asked him to change the date, our president was happy to do so, and it was widely reported in the media.

Now Juneteenth is on the national radar, and that’s a good thing. All of us can stand to brush up on our history and this date is too important to be forgotten.

Some major companies, like the NFL and Nike, are making it a formal holiday.

I think it’s time to go further and make it a national holiday. While statues of Confederate generals and racist officials are being toppled all over the country, we can never erase our painful past with regard to slavery.

What we can and should do, as Americans of every color, is celebrate slavery's end.

“The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.” - Isaiah 9:2 KJV

Tomorrow I will join thousands in Tulsa, OK to pray for President Trump and our nation. My prayers continue to be for repentance, redemption, and unity. May Repentance, Jubilee, Revival and Restoration converge! Let us, as one blood, with eyes wide open, (not colorblind), press on to victory.

Dr. Alveda C. King grew up in the civil rights movement led by her uncle, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She is director of African-American outreach for Priests for Life and Gospel of Life Ministries. Her family home in Birmingham, Ala., was bombed, as was her father's church office in Louisville, Ky. Alveda herself was jailed during the open housing movement. Read Dr. Alveda C. King's Reports — More Here.