It's OK Not To Know Things

I’ll be the first to admit that I had never heard of Juneteenth until I taught summer school as a young educator. As students filtered into my too-warm classroom (ask any teacher who’s taught summer school if the building was too hot, and they will say yes), I asked one 16-year-old boy what his weekend plans were. “Well, it’s Juneteenth, so I am going to a festival at the park,” he told me.

“Say what now?” I said, thinking he was using adolescent slang with me. But he wasn’t — “Juneteenth” is a real portmanteau of the words “June” and “nineteenth,” like “brunch” is a portmanteau of “breakfast” and “lunch.”

I told him I had never heard of it, and he was kind about explaining what his family did to celebrate. I’ve never forgotten the profound realization I had about how little I actually knew about history, despite my college education. I’ve spent the last decades committed to learning more every day.

Here’s one of my takeaways from my interaction with my student TJ. It’s OK not to know things. There’s no harm in saying, “I haven’t heard of that, tell me more.” That’s very different from willful ignorance. So if your family did not grow up commemorating Juneteenth, this article is for you. Feel free to share it if you feel like it might help someone else.

First things first: Juneteenth is not “fake” or “woke.” It’s not what is meant by the pejorative version of “DEI.” It’s a real holiday that comes from a rich tradition.

On September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation, which was an executive order that wasn’t set to take effect until January 1, 1863. Unlike what you might have been taught in school, the proclamation did not free all of the people who were enslaved in the United States. It freed the enslaved in the Confederate states — those that were engaged in open rebellion against the Union.

But in states like Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia (shown here in gray) that were not a part of the Confederacy, four million people were still enslaved. The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply to them.

Enforcement of the proclamation largely depended on the advancement of the Union army — so the moment you might be imagining of a celebratory New Year’s Day 1863 where all the people who were enslaved were told they had been freed? That’s not real. The Confederacy felt they were a separate country and not subject to the orders of Abraham Lincoln, so they were not interested in letting what they believed to be their property go.

When the Civil War ended and the Confederacy was dismantled, news spread slowly in some communities. In fact, some enslaved people didn’t find out that they had been freed until June 1865.

It was illegal in many places to teach the enslaved how to read, so many enslavers intentionally kept the news of the end of the war and the passage of the 13th Amendment to themselves, intentionally keeping people in bondage. As you can imagine, word in the rural South spread more slowly, as many plantation workers may not have had much contact with people in the outside world who could let them know.

Texas had the lowest concentration of Union troops, which also contributed to the news creeping rather than leaping from community to community. It wasn’t until General Granger rode into Galveston that many people heard what had transpired.

Galveston is an island, and Granger arrived there to take control of the federal troops who had just arrived to enforce the federal laws that the former Confederacy didn’t want to follow. Granger read from an order that said: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with the Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” The date was June 19, 1865.

Juneteenth celebrations began the following year, in 1866. Celebrations spread across the country, particularly during the Great Migration, when more than six million Black Americans, many of whom were formerly enslaved or the direct descendants of enslaved people, moved north and west to places like New York, Chicago, and California.

I know some of y’all are going to ask: “Why don’t we make a holiday of the day the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, or the day the 13th Amendment was ratified?” The answer is that Juneteenth was an organic celebration, and the date has been special to members of the Black community since 1865.

The bill to make Juneteenth a federal holiday passed unanimously in the Senate. Nearly every person in the House of Representatives agreed. It was signed into law June 17, 2021, 154 years and 363 days after it was first celebrated on an island off the coast of Texas.

But Juneteenth might not have long as a federal holiday. While it takes an act of Congress to undo an act of Congress, there are a million ways in which the celebration of a holiday can be undermined. A new executive order could direct the federal government to stop devoting resources to it. Some event organizers say they couldn’t move forward with this year’s planned events because of grant cuts from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Major companies like Verizon have either stopped or scaled back their support for Juneteenth celebrations. Cities have been forced to move or cancel their events due to security concerns. The Department of Defense has paused recognizing “cultural celebrations,” and the ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in both government and the private sector indicates that when push comes to shove, either people have become scared to celebrate Juneteenth, or they never wanted to recognize it in the first place.

But make no mistake: even if the federal government fails to recognize it, it will still be celebrated. And if you didn’t know about Juneteenth before, now you do.

If you’d like to read more about this topic, you can check out: How Can We Celebrate Juneteenth When We Still Aren’t Free? by

Jemar Tisby, PhD

, or the book On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed.