“T O D A Y,” S A I D G O V E R N O R C U O M O on Wednesday, June 16th, “I issued an Executive Order recognizing Juneteenth as a holiday for state employees. Juneteenth marks the day that enslaved African Americans in Texas finally learned they had been freed, over two years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. In addition to this Executive Order, I will advance legislation to make this important day celebrating freedom an official state holiday next year.”
Can you think of images so powerful that you’ll never forget them? I can think of three: 1. Tibetan monks creating a mandala out of colored sand to blow it off days later after completed; 2. Seventeen-year-old Malala Yousafzai receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 becoming the youngest laureate; 3. A 1785 engraving of a slave ship (above) showing 292 African natives of all ages laid out onto two rows of shelves on the deck, coffin-like, ready for a transatlantic trip that will seal their fate forever in the “. . . America Great.”
Slavery was abolished in the 1860s but then came lynchings, still occurring way into the 1960s. Only in 2018–2020 anti-lynching laws were promulgated by the Congress (*). Josephine Baker, who lived through the Ku Klux Klan golden era, reminisced later in life: “I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.” In the 1950s, she was denied reservations at 36 New York hotels because she was black. Let’s pause today to pray or reflect, in remembrance.
— Williamsburg, Friday, Juneteenth, 6/19/2020
(*) @SenKamalaHarris on Twitter, December, 19th, 2018: “The moment when the United States Senate agreed unanimously to make lynching a federal crime for the first time. History.”