Reply #17: I hope that at least a few DUers will take the time to learn actual history from this very rich post

[HamdenRice]

Very impressive collection.

I might add that there is a certain special poignancy and irony about this being emancipation day, which may have been overlooked in even your extensive collection of links.

Notice the date -- June 1865.

The Civil War had ended several months earlier, on April 9, 1865.

The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued over two years earlier, on September 22, 1862.

As the Union forces invaded and defeated the South, slaves had been progressively liberated. Moreover, as news of the emancipation and approaching northern armies spread through the south, and southern state enforcement of slavery collapsed, slaves had been escaping and deserting by the hundreds of thousands throughout the war.

The slaves in Texas who celebrated Juneteenth, therefore, were among the very last slaves to learn of the news.

It was as though they had been freed years earlier but were just learning about it. That's how long it took for news to get to rural Texas, which was still "frontier" country despite being a state.

That's really why it took off as a holiday.

It reminds me of two stories I heard about rural South Africa in the mid 1980s when I was living there in the late 1980s, from urban activists doing rural outreach work.

In one story, an activist goes to talk to some of the most exploited black farm tenants of a white farmer, living virtually as slaves, and is telling them about the "big picture" of the anti-apartheid movement, and the black farm workers ask, "but my child, what is this thing, 'apartheid'?" They had never heard the name of the system they were living under.

The other was a similar situation and the outreach worker was talking about government reforms including abolition of the pass laws which had taken place two years earlier. The farm worker didn't know that the pass laws had been abolished and that he was free to leave the white farm.