Speaking at a Juneteenth concert on the White House South Lawn last week, Vice President Harris said that “the slaves of Texas knew they were free” after Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865. On that day, “they claimed their freedom,” she said.
Standing next to President Biden as he spectacularly signed the bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday, Harris expressed a common simplification born of our tendency to compound historical complexity with these words: “While commemorating the end of slavery in America is a sign of progress, we must continue to emphasize that black freedom was restricted in many ways long after that first Juneteenth.”
First, there is some debate as to whether most of the estimated 250,000 slaves in Texas at the time knew about the Emancipation Proclamation. Speaking recently with well-known Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., he said, “I’ve never met a scholar who believes that it’s true.”
But more importantly, emancipation was not true freedom. Not in Texas, nor in most of the American South where the vast majority of black people lived. It was quasi-freedom. It was false freedom. It was freedom with more conditions attached than a puppet.
On June 19, 1865, most black people could not claim freedom because their bodies (and free will) were still policed ​​to nearly the same extent and with the same deep-seated racism that white Southerners had directed against black people during slavery.
Laws regulating former slaves “were very restrictive in terms of where they could go, what jobs they could get, where they could live in certain communities,” said Daina Ramey Berry, dean of the School of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of “The Price of Slavery: From the Womb to the Grave: The Value of Slavery in Nation-Building.”
“Most white Texans wanted to restore black people to as close to the status of former slaves as possible, and therefore vigorously resisted any action that might elevate black people to a competitive social, political, or economic position,” according to the National Archives’ Black History Rediscovery blog. This was true throughout much of the former Confederacy.
And it was clear: Upon arriving in Galveston, Union General Gordon Granger issued General Orders No. 3, which stated that the “previous connection” between “former master and slave” was now between “employer and hired laborer,” and that “the freedmen are advised to remain quietly in their present homes and work for wages.”
The order also contained the curious provision that freedmen “shall not lead an idle life.”
Of course, it is entirely understandable that after a lifetime of working for the profits of others, the first exercise of freedom one might choose would be to rest and then decide which family members should work outside the home and which should work inside. But that freedom was rarely afforded to black people.
A notice from Granger published in the Galveston Daily News a few days later informed the public that “no former slave shall be permitted to travel upon the public highways without a pass or permit from his employer.” In other words, whites still got to decide where blacks could be.
The notice further stated, “Idleness inevitably breeds vice. Humanity dictates that employment be provided to these people. At the same time, national interest also urgently demands it in order to secure the current harvest.”
In 1866, the Texas Constitutional Convention adopted the state’s Black Codes, enacting laws that severely restricted black people’s right to self-government. The Texas State Library and Archives Commission describes these laws as follows:
Unemployed African Americans were often forced to work for white guardians without pay. Penalties for quitting work often included imprisonment for breach of contract. Other laws prohibited freedmen from free use of public facilities. African Americans faced heavy fines for violating curfews, possessing firearms, or engaging in offensive behavior in public (harsh remarks or insulting gestures). They were not allowed to testify against whites, serve on juries or in the state militia, or vote.
Thus, the code “outlined a status for African Americans not very different from their previous enslavement.”
Moreover, for black people in the 1870s, becoming a prisoner in Texas essentially meant demotion to slavery, because that’s when the state’s convict leasing program began.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865, banned slavery and involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” but Southern states and corporations exploited this exception to routinely rent out prisoners, usually black prisoners, as unpaid labor, making huge profits in the process.
Douglas Blackmon, in his brilliant and scathing book about the convict leasing system, Slavery by Another Name, which won the Pulitzer Prize, writes: “The concept of reintroducing black forced labor as a means of financing government services was seen by whites as an essentially practical way to reduce the cost of prison construction and restore blacks to their proper place in society.”
And this labor was often brutal: slaveowners had a perverse economic incentive to keep their slaves alive and relatively healthy, but to them slaves were assets that could be sold, inherited, or mortgaged; those who exploited convict labor had no such incentive.
The question of labor is at the heart of how we should understand emancipation and reconstruction, because American slavery, the entire capitalist system that produced billions of dollars of wealth, was built on black free labor and had to be torn down and propped up: newly freed blacks were sent back into the machines to keep them running.
Remnants of the convict leasing system remain today, with prisoners still working for free or very little money to produce a wide range of products, some of which may be in your home right now.
According to an investigative report published by the Associated Press in January, “the goods these prisoners produce feed into the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ballpark hot dogs to Gold Medal Flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland Rice.”
Yes, some of the restrictions imposed on Black Americans during Emancipation and Reconstruction were addressed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, known as the Reconstruction Amendments, but not everything was addressed.
Perhaps the best way to think about Juneteenth is of The moment black people gained their freedom One This is a moment in the long struggle for freedom. As slavery was replaced by a succession of institutions — Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration — that, though less brutal, continued to oppress people according to the same principles, and true, comprehensive freedom remained elusive.
Corey Walker, director of the African American Studies Program at Wake Forest University, emphasizes that because the concept of freedom, especially for Black people, is constantly negotiated and contested in this country, “Juneteenth marks a critical moment in the constantly evolving and expanding project of American democracy.”
“This is a project that will never be finished,” he said, “not even at the moment of Juneteenth, and it’s a project that continues to evolve to this day.”
