Juneteenth and the End of Slavery
June 19, 1865

All Out for People’s Empowerment!
End the Injustice Now!

– Dougal MacDonald –

June 19, 1865 or Juneteenth (also known as Freedom Day) is celebrated across the United States in appreciation of the vital contributions made by African Americans in emancipating the four million people enslaved by the system of slave labour and in carrying forward the fight for justice and equality before and since the U.S. Civil War.

June 19, 1865 was the day when all the people still enslaved at the end of the Civil War gained their freedom. While hundreds of thousands of those enslaved fought in the Civil War to end the system of slave labour, many remained in bondage even after the war ended, such as in Texas, until Union soldiers arrived in Galveston on June 19, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, to tell everyone that all those enslaved had won their freedom. Celebrations immediately broke out and Juneteenth has been celebrated in states south and north, east and west with a resurgence and broadening of events during the 1960s and since.

Black people played a decisive role in winning their emancipation and defeating the slave owners. They carried out numerous mass insurrectionary movements on the plantations before and during the war. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx long advocated bringing Black people south and north into the Army but President Lincoln initially refused. Those enslaved organized mass actions to escape the plantations and reach Union lines, joining the fight in various ways. In 1862, even before the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, Black people formed their own armed militias to battle enslavement in Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri and South Carolina – regiments later integrated into the Union Army. The “U.S. Coloured Troops” were officially formed in the spring of 1863 which brought more than 180,000 people freed from enslavement and northern Black people into the Army. Another 29,000 served in the Navy and many more joined the fight by securing supplies, undermining plantations, providing information and so forth. Black soldiers participated in about 200 battles of the war and were known for their courage and fighting abilities, their lives sacrificed at a rate 35 per cent higher than other troops.

107th Coloured Troops, Ft. Woodbury, Arlington County, Virginia, November 1, 1865.

The millions of people who won liberation from enslavement faced a huge social challenge. People literally had to rebuild their lives from the ground up, including rejecting names given by the slave masters and adopting new ones. They owned no property, no homes, no land, no farm animals, no implements and few clothes. They were largely illiterate as it was a crime to teach those enslaved to read and write. For many, their lives had been restricted to the plantations they worked on and perhaps to surrounding ones. They had been largely excluded from political life, but had organized resistance through churches, song and the Underground Railroad. Given this, their progress right after the war was extraordinary. They militantly faced the opposition of the still powerful former slave owners who wanted to keep them in bondage and exploit them. This included their resistance to white supremacist terrorist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan (1865), formed to split the working class, spread terror and maintain the people in thrall.

A school at the Freedmen’s Village in Arlington, Virginia, providing education for African American children and adults who escaped enslavement in Confederate states, 1862.

Liberation of the millions of enslaved people and defeat of the system of slave labour gave rise to major battles for democracy during the Reconstruction period of 1865-1877. People formerly enslaved alongside poor farmers, including many women, joined in demanding representation in their interests, the right to be equal members of the polity, including voting rights. Whole communities were built and debates on state constitutions raged as people came forward south and north to advance the fight for democracy unleashed by the defeat of the system of slave labour. A better future was fought for. But as W.E.B. Dubois put it, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

Former slave owners, commonly Democrats, gradually regained power in Southern legislatures with assistance from the federal government, the formation of the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans, and through terrorism, violence, disruption, outright voter fraud, and other forms of intimidation. In 1876, the presidential election was disputed and a compromise was necessary to preserve the union. Samuel Tilden had won the popular vote but Electoral College votes were in dispute. In 1877 Congress arranged the compromise, with troops withdrawn from the south and former slave owners permitted to regain their plantations while Rutherford B. Hayes was selected for president. White Democrats now held political power in every Southern state and they swiftly turned back the clock using the KKK, mass arrests and legislating “Jim Crow” and other laws, officially segregating Black people and forcing many back on the plantations as sharecroppers. By 1905, nearly all Black men were effectively disenfranchised by state legislatures in every Southern state, with federal government support.

March on Washington, August 28, 1963.

Almost 90 years later, Jim Crow laws, lynching and KKK terrorism remained widespread until the mass movements of the 1950s and ’60s which achieved desegregation in many respects and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But KKK violence remained and other forms of inequality and genocide took place, such as mass incarceration. From Jim Crow to the present day, Black people have continued to fight for their rights through their organizations, in the law courts, in legislatures and other government bodies, through the arts, socially active churches, mass protests and through armed self-defence against the racist violence of the state and its clandestine white supremacist organizations. To give one example, in June 1961 in Monroe, North Carolina, Black leader Robert F. Williams and his allies organized armed self-defence against the Ku Klux Klan who wanted to prevent desegregation of a swimming pool. Williams was forced into exile by the U.S. government until 1969. He later explained: “I advocated violent self-defence because I don’t really think you can have a defence against violent racists and against terrorists unless you are prepared to meet violence with violence, and my policy was to meet violence with violence.” The Black Panthers and Malcolm X also called for armed self-defence.

A key issue regarding the criminal legacy of slavery is the demand for reparations. Many recognize that the inequalities faced by Black people in the U.S. today are directly attributable to slavery and continued state-sanctioned discrimination. Some suggest history would have been different if the federal government had followed through on the legislation and promises of Reconstruction for land and defended the political power fought for by poor whites and Blacks, men and women alike. As it does today, at that time the federal government acted to block democracy by disempowering the people. This occurred in part by allowing former slave owners to reclaim their land, which was supposed to be given to people formerly enslaved and by organizing decades of state-sanctioned oppression and violence. While some cases for slavery reparations have been won at local levels, such as Georgetown University, the demand is for a federal reparations law addressing not only compensation for individuals but collectives and communities as well. Reparations and a formal apology for the perpetration of gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity on the African peoples who were enslaved and their descendants continues to be a just demand as the peoples of the United States face a brutal counter-revolution to deprive them of any rights whatsoever, with Black people once again bearing the brunt of the attack. The counter-revolution condones the use of extreme violence to obliterate even the conception that the people have rights by virtue of being human.

Sign at Juneteenth car caravan in Oakland, California, June 19, 2020, less than a month after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd.

Since 2020, increasing and blatant police brutality against African Americans, including outright killings such as that of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, have galvanized actions on Juneteenth. Resistance to police violence and racial discrimination as the legacy of slavery in the present initially took the form of stepped up efforts to tear down symbols and statues glorifying slavery and commemorating slave traders and owners. For example, the statue of slave owner Philip Schuyler was removed from outside Albany City Hall in 2023. Statues of various Confederate leaders have also been removed due to their connection with slavery, for example, a Confederate memorial statue was removed in Portsmouth, Virginia in 2020. Since then, many new statues and monuments honouring civil rights leaders, local heroes, cultural figures and others are being installed by the people to replace removed Confederate memorials.

Juneteenth this year, on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, sees meetings, discussions, rallies and gatherings held across the United States to decry the vacuous words in the Declaration according to which the United States recognizes that “all men are created equal.” Forces organizing Black People and Puerto Ricans are uniting with all others, demanding that all the continuing remnants of slavery, in the form of broad inequality faced by African Americans on all fronts, police violence and mass incarceration be eliminated. People of all nationalities and backgrounds together continue to affirm their convictions for new arrangements and their own empowerment, through protests as well as other forms of resistance.

(Photos: New York Public Library, U.S. National Archives)