Quote of the Day (Bruce Watson, on Juneteenth)

“The celebration has begun. Some shout and dance. Others fall to their knees and weep. A few freely enter former masters’ homes and put on their clothes. Song. Spirit. Jubilee. And the date goes down in history — June nineteenth, soon shortened to Juneteenth….

“For the rest of the [19^th] century, former slaves remembered. Each Juneteenth, they gathered to share stories, scripture, spirituals. Barbecue and baseball. And until Jim Crow laws arose, Juneteenth featured instructions on how to vote….

“Faced with myth and rising violence, Juneteenth laid low. Only in the 1940s did its embers stir.  Then came the Civil Rights Movement, too busy to celebrate. Finally, in the 1970s, Juneteenth came alive again.”— Editor and biographer Bruce Watson, “Juneteenth!”, American Heritage, June 2020

(The image accompanying this post shows Juneteenth--or, as it was called at this point, Emancipation Day--being celebrated in Richmond, Va., the capital of the former Confederacy.)

Photo of the Day: Juneteenth Festival, Englewood NJ

Today concluded a four-day festival in my hometown in Bergen County, NJ, that was devoted to Juneteenth—the federal holiday that takes its cue from the order from a Union general reading the order proclaiming freedom for slaves on June 19^th, 1865 in Texas—the westernmost, and most remote, state of the former Confederacy.

The Englewood event, held at Depot Square, included various rides and food sellers. Residents placed their chairs on the broad stretch of grass on the square, eating and enjoying the spectacle just before them, with summer only a mere couple of days away.

Photo of the Day: Juneteenth Celebration, Englewood NJ

My hometown, Englewood NJ, celebrated Juneteenth with not one but four days of a festival from this past Thursday through Sunday. I took this photo yesterday, as residents thronged Depot Square to eat, go on rides, and, as you see here, listen to the music.

For those who’d like to ponder the meaning of Juneteenth, when it began in 1865 in Texas (the last state in the Union to hear the proclamation that all slaves were free) and to our own time, I urge you to read this blog post from historian, literary critic, and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates connected to his PBS documentary series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

Quote of the Day (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, on a Slave Mother)

“She is a mother pale with fear,
   Her boy clings to her side,
And in her kirtle vainly tries
   His trembling form to hide.
  
“He is not hers, although she bore
   For him a mother's pains;
He is not hers, although her blood
   Is coursing through his veins!
  
“He is not hers, for cruel hands
   May rudely tear apart
The only wreath of household love
   That binds her breaking heart.”—African-American poet, abolitionist and temperance and women's suffrage activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), “The Slave Mother,” originally published in her Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), anthologized in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume Two: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals, edited by John Hollander (1993)
 
I am glad to see historians’ growing attention to Reconstruction and the far longer Jim Crow era of reaction to the political and economic gains of African-Americans. It’s important to realize how easily such advances can be reversed.
 
But with the federal holiday of Juneteenth occurring today, I think it’s also important to remember that emancipation—and the horrifying Civil War that made it possible—also ended practices that would never be repeated. One of these was the breakup of slave families by their owners, a dread evoked in the above verses.
 
I had never heard of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper before I began looking for a quote in observation of Juneteenth—she never came up in my college courses on American literature nor American history in the 19^th century—but I think her life and career are worth recalling.
 
Particularly in the antebellum era, this child of free blacks bore witness, through her writing and lectures, to the horrors of slavery—and implicitly refuted whites who perpetuated the myth of innate African-American intellectual inferiority.
 
For a deeper consideration of what Harper meant—for her time and ours—I recommend Eric Gardner’s 2015 post on OUPblog, Ohio University Press’s Website offering “Academic Insights for the Thinking World.”
 
The image accompanying this post, Kentucky painter Thomas Satterwhite Noble's The Modern Medea (1867), was inspired by Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who, after being recaptured in the North through the Fugitive Slave Act, killed her own daughter rather than allow her to be returned to slavery.
 
Garner’s case—an example of the plight faced by African-American women under slavery depicted by Harper—also gave rise, a century later, to Nobel Literature laureate Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), as well as her libretto for the opera Margaret Garner (2005).

Photo of the Day: Juneteenth Carnival, Englewood

My hometown, Englewood, NJ, held its Juneteenth Carnival and Festival this past weekend, from June 13 to 16. (Juneteenth combines June and 19—or June 9, 1865, when the abolition of slavery was announced in the state of Texas. This is now the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.) I took this particular photograph on Saturday in Depot Square, not far from where I live.