Why Juneteenth's Not My Thing

Sure, black people need to celebrate winning their freedom, but is this really the right day for the picnic?

(Continued from Page 1)

Yet the black business was largely driven by blacks who had been freedmen long before Emancipation, and their descendants. Slaves, upon release, generally led lives of miserable sharecropping and other menial labor, and their descendants, as often as not, migrated north to end up penned into segregated slums.

So, they were "free"—okay. But I'm not sure I want to barbecue meat in celebration of the lives depicted in books like Richard Wright's Black Boy or Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land.

Again, however, a people need ways to celebrate. Martin Luther King Day is in the winter, right after the holidays, and is as much about his death as his accomplishments, and so that can't quite do the job. Kwanzaa is in the winter, too, and is more about the home than family reunions.

To me, the real day of celebration—one that I always think about as it passes—is not June 19 but July 2. That was the day the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed. The Civil Rights Act had as profound an impact on the fate of blacks in the United States as Emancipation. Say what you want about how far we have to go, but the official dismantling of Jim Crow was a watershed event in the history of human affairs.

Some seem not to think so: But I wonder if they would feel the same way after spending just three days in 1950 trying to do the things they consider ordinary like eating in good restaurants, trying on clothes at stores or seeking work at a mainstream law firm—and even in Pittsburgh or New Haven, not just the deep South.

Plus, July 2 was also the actual day that the American colonies declared independence from Great Britain (July 4 was a day of inconsequential business), such that the signing of the Civil Rights Act on that same day in 1964 could be seen as especially apt and commemorative, righting an evil that had besmirched the great experiment for two centuries.

I can even imagine July 2 becoming a kind of alternate Independence Day celebration for black Americans, occurring around the same time as everyone else's July 4, but with a special in-group meaning.

Juneteenth, on the other hand, has always struck me as celebrating the lives of characters in books like Beloved and Sounder.

Rather than lifting a glass to what America offered to my great-great-grandfather and his son—and all that was still denied them after that offering, I am more inclined to lift one to the America in which my father could become the student affairs coordinator of a mainstream university, which would have been unthinkable 10 years before it happened.

I am always more interested in what we did rather than what somebody did to us.