June 19, 2024

The sacred lifework of racial healing is far from done and requires courage to foolishly live in the way of real Love that transforms, heals, reconciles, and brings peace. We are God’s partners and the time is now. Upon receiving the National Medal of Honor, Congressman John Lewis said “I want to see young people in America feel the spirit of the 1960s, and find a way to get in the way…To find a way to get into trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.” ~John Lewis

Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.

As the historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us:

“On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army, but it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico. 

Seventeen days later, Major General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Army arrived to take charge of the soldiers stationed there. On June 19, he issued General Order Number 3. It read:  

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

The order went on: “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

While the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing enslavement except as punishment for a crime had passed through Congress on January 31, 1865, and Lincoln had signed it on February 1, the states were still in the process of ratifying it. 

So Granger’s order referred not to the Thirteenth Amendment, but to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared that Americans enslaved in states that were in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” Granger was informing the people of Galveston that, Texas having been in rebellion on January 1, 1863, their world had changed. The federal government would see to it that, going forward, white people and Black people would be equal.

Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought for the United States and worked in the fields to grow cotton the government could sell. Those unable to leave their homes had hidden U.S. soldiers, while those who could leave indicated their hatred of the Confederacy and enslavement with their feet. They had demonstrated their equality and their importance to the postwar United States. 

The next year, after the Thirteenth Amendment had been added to the Constitution, Texas freedpeople gathered on June 19, 1866, to celebrate with prayers, speeches, food, and socializing the coming of their freedom. By the following year, the federal government encouraged “Juneteenth” celebrations, eager to explain to Black citizens the voting rights that had been put in place by the Military Reconstruction Act in early March 1867, and the tradition of Juneteenth began to spread to Black communities across the nation.

But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled. 

In summer 1865, as white legislators in the states of the former Confederacy grudgingly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, they also passed laws to keep freedpeople subservient to their white neighbors. These laws, known as the Black Codes, varied by state, but they generally bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working in the fields owned by white men; prohibited Black people from meeting in groups, owning guns or property, or testifying in court; outlawed interracial marriage; and permitted white men to buy out the jail terms of Black people convicted of a wide swath of petty crimes, and then to force those former prisoners into labor to pay off their debt.

In 1865, Congress refused to readmit the Southern states under the Black Codes, and in 1866, congressmen wrote and passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Its first section established that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It went on: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” 

That was the whole ball game. The federal government had declared that a state could not discriminate against any of its citizens or arbitrarily take away any of a citizen’s rights. Then, like the Thirteenth Amendment before it, the Fourteenth declared that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” strengthening the federal government.

The addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 remade the United States. But those determined to preserve a world that discriminated between Americans according to race, gender, ability, and so on, continued to find workarounds. “ (Heather Cox Richardson ~ Letters from an American)

Among those who worked tirelessly for justice was Rev. Dr. James Lawson, whom we lost last week. A faculty member at my alma mater of Vanderbilt Divinity School, Lawson was a mentor to John Lewis and Dr. King. As we mourn the immense loss of Reverend James M. Lawson Jr., we reflect on his life and legacy with deep gratitude.

May his vision of a world filled with nonviolence be a constant guide: James Lawson Institute | Vanderbilt University

Friends, in our Collect for Purity we pray: “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid…cleanse the thoughts of our hearts that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your Holy Name, through Christ our Lord…Amen.”

This is such a lovely prayer, in part because we know that secrets have the power to transmit grief, pain, and perpetuate toxic patterns in ourselves, families, and community. It’s a prayer about deeper self and other awareness, revealing our personal and cultural “shadow sides,” which, unless brought into the light, can control our actions in ways that are problematic precisely because of our unwillingness to name them. Racism remains too often in the shadows, and we need reminders of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments which are, after all, liberating for everyone.

(John Lewis ~ Nashville Tennessee)

And so we remember and honor those who have gone before us, and fellow members of the human family who live today, enslaved by one another or by injustice in systems that would keep them in bondage.

Thanking God for and deeply encouraged by all who commit to the life work of eradicating racism, and grateful for prayers like this one:

O God of liberty and justice: we live in a nation in which the institution of human bondage was once a legal and accepted practice. We give thanks for those who worked and fought, at great personal sacrifice, to bring about an end to that cruel and oppressive system in our own land, and we pray that governments and authorities everywhere in the world might be led to make a quick end to the enslavement of any human being, throughout the Earth. Amen.

~ Episcopal Diocese of West Virginia, Commission on Racism and Diversity

I’ll catch you later on down the trail, and I hope to see you in church!