As a Black American, here’s why I cannot celebrate Juneteenth

Here’s how Dibble transcribed this quote from Haywood: “The war (Civil War) weren’t so great as folks suppose. It was the ending of it that made the difference. That’s when we all wakes up that somethin’ had happened. Oh, we knowed what was goin’ on in it all the time. ... We had papers in them days jus’ like now.”

If the enslaved knew what was going on, then why was Gen. Granger in Galveston?

What Lincoln meant to do through the Emancipation Proclamation

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

White settlers in Texas, formerly Coahuila y Tejas, the most northern state of Mexico, fought a war of independence from Mexico (“Remember the Alamo”) so that Texas could enter the United States as a slave state in 1845. During the run-up to the Civil War, and during the war, white slaveholders throughout the South marched enslaved men and women to Texas, believing that whatever the outcome of the war, Texas would never submit to Union rule. Thus, after the war, they could return to Texas to reclaim their property and their Southern way of life.

Gen. Granger was in Galveston with 2,000 troops to back him up, to deliver a warning to white slaveowners that they needed to cease and desist holding and brutalizing enslaved people.

In issuing Special Orders No. 3, Granger stated that the Emancipation Proclamation freed “all slaves.” But that was patently untrue. Even the most cursory reading of the Emancipation Proclamation shows that Lincoln issued it to free enslaved men and women in the Confederate states only.

So, after the Emancipation went into effect, you could not hold slaves in Mississippi, but you could in Massachusetts. Or, as the London Spectator noted, “the principle asserted is not that a human being cannot justly own another but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”

Lincoln did not have the interests of the enslaved at heart. The Emancipation Proclamation was a “psy-ops” (psychological operations) document for winning the Civil War, and Lincoln admitted as such. Unsurprisingly, he had no plan for what to do with the millions freed by his proclamation. That task fell to Union Gen. William “Tecumseh” Sherman, who devised a plan, in consultation with southern Black ministers. Sherman’s plan became known as “40 acres and a mule,” was actually entitled, “Special Field Orders No. 15.” It took nearly 1 million acres of prime agricultural land along the southeast coast of the U.S. from slaveholders and granted that land to the men and women they’d enslaved.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Reversing course on ‘40 acres and a mule’ had lasting implications

By the time of Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, some 40,000 Black families had received these land grants. But within months of Andrew Johnson assuming the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, in fact, right around the time of the first Juneteenth, Johnson issued orders to return the land to the former slaveholders.

Had that land stayed in the hands of the formerly enslaved there would be no present-day “wealth gap” between Blacks and whites Americans, no political “power gap” and no need for reparations because that land grant was specifically a Republican Congress’ act of reparations for slavery.

So, what’s the basis for celebrating Juneteenth? Telling Black folks they were free when they already knew that? Telling white folks to stop killing and enslaving Black folks? Acknowledging an end to slavery when the document supposedly ending slavery did no such thing? Recognizing a time in American history when reparations for slavery were granted, then summarily stripped away?

I related this story to a Black woman who’d been deeply involved in securing Juneteenth as a national holiday. She touched my arm before I could finish and whispered, “Think I’ve heard enough.”

“But don’t you want to know the truth?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Not really. We got the holiday. That’s enough for me!”

Well, it’s not enough for me!

Clyde W. Ford is a historian, whose books include “A High Price for Freedom: Raising Hidden Voices from the African American Past” (HarperCollins Publishers, 2026) and “Of Blood and Sweat: Black Lives and the Making of White Power and Wealth” (HarperCollins Publishers, 2023).